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      Why Eli Crane Defied Kevin McCarthy

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      The freshman Republican from Arizona was the only newcomer to hold out against Speaker Kevin McCarthy until the very end.WASHINGTON — Representative Eli Crane, Republican of Arizona, was still weeks away from being sworn in to Congress for the first time when Donald J. Trump, the former president, called to try to persuade him to support Kevin McCarthy for speaker.Mr. Trump had endorsed Mr. Crane during his campaign, helping him emerge victorious in a crowded Republican primary. The Congressional Leadership Fund, a political action committee aligned with Mr. McCarthy, had donated to his campaign. The pressure to fall in line, Mr. Crane said, was immense.“That’s always a tough situation, when you have a lot of respect and admiration for somebody, and the commitments that you’ve made to your voters,” Mr. Crane recalled in an interview in his new office this week, just days after he voted against Mr. McCarthy 14 times in a row.Mr. Crane, 43, a former member of the Navy SEALs and a contender on “Shark Tank,” last week was the sole newly elected congressman to vote against Mr. McCarthy until the bitter, drawn-out end — typically a perilous position for a freshman who harbors any ambition to serve on a powerful committee or play a role in legislating.But Mr. Crane said his constituents viewed Mr. McCarthy as part of the establishment they had sent him to Washington to upend — and he was not about to disappoint them as his first official act on Capitol Hill.On the December call with Mr. Trump, Mr. Crane said he had told the former president, “Sir, I’m sorry, we love you out in Arizona, but I’ve been listening to my voters.”Over five days in which Mr. McCarthy suffered defeat after humiliating defeat, Mr. Crane said he had heard a lot of “What’s it going to take” from the speaker’s allies as they tried to pull together the necessary votes to win the race. He did not want a particular committee. There was no change in the rules that he was after. He said he was not seeking notoriety. He was simply there to vote against Mr. McCarthy.“I did not want to come up here and be a representative who heard what my voters said and came up here and caved to the pressure,” Mr. Crane said. “I didn’t want anything, other than to do what I was sent here to do.”Before entering politics, Mr. Crane served five wartime deployments and 13 years in the military.Samuel Corum/Sipa, via Associated PressHis rigid anti-McCarthy stance caught many Republicans by surprise. Mr. Crane had never made voting against Mr. McCarthy a campaign promise, as some far-right candidates in other districts had done. He was not even the most far-right candidate in his primary.In fact, Mr. Crane had been quiet about his position on the speaker’s race until he signed on to a Dec. 8 letter demanding concessions from the incoming speaker. Some McCarthy allies assumed he was under the sway of a fellow lawmaker from Arizona, Representative Andy Biggs, who was mounting a protest bid for speaker against Mr. McCarthy.A Divided CongressAfter a dayslong spectacle over the House speakership, the 118th Congress is underway, with Republicans controlling the House and Democrats holding the Senate.Abortion: As part of an anti-abortion rights effort, House Republicans pushed through a bill that could subject doctors who perform abortions to criminal penalties.I.R.S. Funds: Republicans in the House voted to cut funding for the Internal Revenue Service, as conservative lawmakers try to kneecap President Biden’s $80 billion overhaul of the agency.A Wide-Ranging Inquiry: The House approved the creation of a powerful new committee to scrutinize what Republicans say is the “weaponization” of government against conservatives.But Mr. Crane said his unshakable opposition was more reflective of his military background, which taught him to tough things out.“I’ve been through a ton of very difficult situations, and I’m very grateful for those,” he said.Still, it was a stunning way to enter Congress, where Mr. Crane was still getting lost in the hallways while also being one of a handful of holdouts who stood between Mr. McCarthy and the speakership..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-1hvpcve em{font-style:italic;}.css-1hvpcve strong{font-weight:bold;}.css-1hvpcve a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“Half the time, I’m trying to find where the bathroom is and where the gym is,” he said of his first days in Washington. “We finally found the gym.”It’s all a new world for Mr. Crane, who flipped his seat in November, defeating the Democratic incumbent, Tom O’Halleran, in a mostly rural district in northeastern Arizona whose lines had been redrawn to include more Republicans.During his campaign, Mr. Crane said he supported decertifying the 2020 election, a stance that did not appear to hurt him in the newly conservative district. He was by no means the furthest to the right in his primary; another candidate was Ron Watkins, a prominent conspiracy theorist suspected of being behind the QAnon conspiracy theory.Before entering politics, Mr. Crane served five wartime deployments and 13 years in the military. He then started Bottle Breacher, a company featured on the reality show “Shark Tank,” whose signature product was a .50-caliber bullet fashioned into a bottle opener and marketed as a gift for men and groomsmen. He became a brand ambassador for Sig Sauer, the firearms manufacturer.With tattooed arms and dark, slick-backed hair, Mr. Crane stands out in the sea of suits that is the Republican Conference, where he is now bent on disrupting the status quo simply for disruption’s sake.“He’s a new breed of MAGA,” said Stephen K. Bannon, the former adviser to Mr. Trump, who is close with Mr. Crane. “Smart, tough, lethal.”Late last Friday night after the 14th vote, the remaining holdouts were Mr. Biggs, Representatives Bob Good of Virginia and Matt Rosendale of Montana, and Mr. Crane. Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Matt Gaetz of Florida, two of the most vocal opponents in the final days, had finally relented and switched their votes to “present” on the second-to-last ballot.“Everybody was pressuring,” Mr. Crane said. As the group of defectors shrank from 20 to four, he said, “the pressure just kept escalating.”Mr. Crane was something of a wild card because he had said little, at all, throughout the process. And he was the sole freshman in the group.“The consensus between the group was: ‘We came this far together. If we go out, we’re going out together,’” he said. “When the suggestion was made to put this thing to bed when we knew we could not win, I wanted to make sure I did not leave those that had stood to the end.”At one point, he said, after the 13th failed vote, things became personal and heated. Mr. McCarthy, unable to spare a single supporter, had called a pair of Republican lawmakers back to Washington for the late-night vote, and a lawmaker approached Mr. Crane on the House floor to berate him for his intransigence.“No matter how this shakes out, make sure you go apologize to Wesley Hunt and all the other guys you’re screwing over this weekend who can’t be there for their families,” Mr. Crane said a colleague had told him.Mr. Hunt had left Washington to be with his wife, who had gone into labor earlier in the week and delivered their son prematurely, and returned to the hospital with postpartum complications.“I was very upset with him for saying that to me,” Mr. Crane said of the colleague, whom he did not know at the time and would not name. “I let him know that.”Mr. Crane said he has expressed interest in serving on the Natural Resources, Homeland Security and Foreign Affairs Committees, but is fully prepared to be punished for his vote.“I expect it,” Mr. Crane said, even though Mr. McCarthy assured some defectors last week that there would be no retribution against members who had voted against him. “We’ll see what happens. I might wind up in the broom closet.” More

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      The Coming Year of Republican Drama

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      G.O.P. infighting figures to be the political story line of 2023.A 2015 presidential primary debate included, from left, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz. The first Republican primary debate this cycle is expected to be in late spring or summer.Ruth Fremson/The New York TimesThe Coming Year of Republican DramaGood morning, everyone! I’m finally back from a few weeks abroad and excited to get back in the swing of things. I hope you had a great holiday season.The start of an odd-numbered year is always an odd period for political analysts. We’re still litigating what happened in the last election, and yet it’s already time to look ahead to the next campaign. This year, the pivot from one election to the next is going even more slowly than usual.The Republican primary campaign hasn’t really gotten underway. By the end of January in 2019, a half-dozen Democratic candidates had entered the fray. This time, only former President Donald J. Trump has formally announced, and I wouldn’t say he “entered the fray.” There isn’t a fray if you’re alone in the arena.We did at least get a bit of January drama in lieu of a presidential race: the most rounds of voting for House Speaker since before the Civil War.Kevin McCarthy’s slog to the speakership was a fitting enough way to start the year. No, it’s not a half-dozen entrants to a presidential primary. But it’s still Republican infighting — and Republican infighting promises to be the political story line of the year, whether it’s in Washington or on the presidential debate stage (assuming that President Biden seeks the Democratic nomination without a serious contest).It has been a few years since Republicans have held center stage in such drama. The last year might have been 2017, before Mr. Trump established his dominance over the Republican Party and inaugurated an era of relative peace and unity — something like a conservative Pax Romana or Pax Britannica.But Mr. Trump’s dominance appears to be waning, and the fault lines and fissures of a still deeply factionalized Republican Party are being gradually re-exposed.This year, one of our biggest tasks will be to survey the newly revealed Republican landscape. This is not necessarily an easy assignment. In some ways, Republicans are a tougher challenge for political analysts than Democrats, who can usually be analyzed on a simple ideological spectrum or with the readily available demographic traits of members or their supporters, like race and education.The same can’t always be said for Republicans, a majority of whom are white conservatives. I do think educational attainment will be a central dividing line in this year’s Republican primary electorate, but good luck capturing the difference between Mr. McCarthy and the Freedom Caucus leader, Scott Perry — two conservative, California-born white Christians from evangelical denominations, ages 57 and 60 — based on demographics or their positions on the issues. It’s not Joe Biden versus Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that’s for sure.The old ways of thinking about the Republican Party may not be so useful anymore. In that regard, this month’s fight for House Speaker — which was eerily reminiscent of Obama-era fights between House leadership and the Freedom Caucus — may prove to be somewhat misleading. The pre-Trump Republican Party will not be making a comeback in most other respects. Carthage didn’t make a comeback with the decline of Rome, and Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Paul Ryan, Liz Cheney and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants won’t be making a comeback in 2023, either.Instead, 2023 offers opportunities for new players — most obviously Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis. And those new players on the national stage will mean a new set of hard-to-predict issues and fault lines. After so many years when Republicans were allied with Mr. Trump or else cowered on the sidelines, it is not at all obvious how Republican Party politics will scramble and realign if and when a vigorous challenge to Mr. Trump emerges.It’s not obvious how a challenge to Mr. Trump will divide the Republican electorate, either. For all we know, Mr. DeSantis might run at Mr. Trump from his right and attack him for bringing Dr. Anthony Fauci into our lives and the vaccine into our bodies. Maybe he’ll blame Mr. Trump’s trillion dollar coronavirus spending packages for bringing about inflation. Exactly how Mr. Trump might go after Mr. DeSantis is a mystery in its own right.It may not all add up to a “new era” of American politics or anything quite so grandiose. Mr. Trump could still win the Republican nomination again. But this year could look pretty different than what we’ve gotten used to over the last half decade. We’ll have our work cut out for us in the new year. More

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      Giuliani Receives Grand Jury Subpoena for Records Related to Trump

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      The subpoena to Rudolph W. Giuliani in November came as prosecutors have been examining the workings of former President Donald J. Trump’s fund-raising vehicle.WASHINGTON — Rudolph W. Giuliani, the lawyer who oversaw former President Donald J. Trump’s legal challenges to the 2020 election, has received a grand jury subpoena for records related to his representation of Mr. Trump, including those that detailed any payments he received, a person familiar with the matter said on Monday.The subpoena, which was sent in November, bore the name of a prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington. It predated the appointment of Jack Smith, the special counsel chosen to take over the Justice Department’s investigation of the roles that Mr. Trump and several of his aides and lawyers played in seeking to overturn the results of the election. It remained unclear, however, if Mr. Smith and his team have assumed control of the part of the inquiry related to Mr. Giuliani.As part of its investigation, the special counsel’s office has been examining, among other things, the inner workings of Mr. Trump’s fund-raising vehicle, Save America PAC. The records subpoenaed from Mr. Giuliani could include some related to payments made by the PAC, according to the person familiar with the matter.Several subpoenas issued in the past several months have asked for records concerning Save America PAC. The House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol also looked into Mr. Trump’s fund-raising operation during its own separate inquiry, and raised questions about whether it had duped donors through misleading appeals about election fraud.A longtime ally of Mr. Trump, Mr. Giuliani effectively ran the former president’s attempts to overturn his defeat in the presidential race and has for months been a chief focus of the Justice Department’s broad investigation into the postelection period. His name has appeared on several subpoenas sent to former aides to Mr. Trump and to a host of Republican state officials involved in a plan to create fake slates of pro-Trump electors in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.In one of its final acts, the Jan. 6 committee referred Mr. Giuliani and others, including Mr. Trump, for prosecution by the Justice Department. Still, the emergence of the subpoena, which was reported earlier by CNN, was the first time evidence had surfaced suggesting that Mr. Giuliani had become directly embroiled in the inquiry into the part that Mr. Trump played in the events leading up to Jan. 6.Mr. Giuliani’s subpoena was issued about two months after prosecutors blanketed more than 40 other figures from Mr. Trump’s White House with subpoenas. In 2021, the Justice Department seized Mr. Giuliani’s cellphones and computers as part of a separate investigation into his efforts to dig up dirt on Mr. Biden in Ukraine.While acting as Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Mr. Giuliani undertook an array of efforts on his behalf.He promoted a baseless conspiracy theory that a cabal of international actors had hacked into voting machines produced by Dominion Voting Systems and used them to rig the election for Mr. Biden — despite the fact that an internal memo from the Trump campaign had determined earlier that many of the outlandish claims about Dominion were untrue.Mr. Giuliani also made persistent claims that the voting had been marred by widespread cheating and irregularities at a series of informal legislative hearings in key swing states around the country. But when he personally appeared in court in Philadelphia to defend a lawsuit challenging the election, he acknowledged to the judge in the case that the suit had not alleged that fraud had actually occurred.Before his subpoena was issued, Mr. Giuliani had confronted an array of setbacks related to his work for Mr. Trump.He is facing a defamation lawsuit from Dominion, alleging that he carried out “a viral disinformation campaign” about the company made up of “demonstrably false” allegations, in part to enrich himself through legal fees and his podcast.In June 2021, his law license was suspended after a New York court ruled he had made “demonstrably false and misleading statements” while fighting the results of the 2020 election.He is also facing similar disciplinary charges by local bar officials in Washington. More

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      Special Grand Jury in Georgia Trump Inquiry Concludes Its Investigation

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      A hearing will be held to determine whether the report will be made public. Any criminal charges would have to be brought by a regular grand jury.ATLANTA — Eight weeks into Donald J. Trump’s latest run for president, a special grand jury investigating Mr. Trump and his allies for possible election interference in 2020 concluded its work on Monday. But the panel’s findings remain private for now, including whether it recommended criminal charges against the former president.The special grand jury was dissolved days after producing a report that was reviewed by the 20 judges on the Superior Court of Fulton County, which encompasses most of Atlanta. Its members were sworn in last May.“The court thanks the grand jurors for their dedication, professionalism and significant commitment of time and attention to this important matter,” Judge Robert McBurney, who oversaw the panel, wrote in an order dissolving it.A hearing will be held on Jan. 24 to determine whether the report will be made public, as the special grand jury is recommending, according to the judge’s order. Special grand juries cannot issue indictments, so any criminal charges would have to be sought from one of the regular grand juries that consider criminal matters in the county.Regular grand jury terms last two months. Defendants who are indicted can request speedy trials that begin by the close of the term that follows the two-month period in which they are indicted. Because of those protocols, most charges would most likely be brought at the beginning of the next grand jury term in early March, or further down the road.Understand Georgia’s Investigation of Election InterferenceCard 1 of 5An immediate legal threat to Trump. More

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      Speaker, Speaker, What Do You See? I See MAGA Looking at Me.

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      Bret Stephens: Gail, remember “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” the unforgettable Lionel Shriver novel about a woman whose son murders his classmates? Maybe someone should write the sequel: “We Need to Talk About What They Did to Kevin.”Gail Collins: A book-length disquisition on Kevin McCarthy, Bret? I dunno. Always thought his strongest suit was that he was too boring to hate. But now that he’s apparently promised the Republican right wing everything but permission to bring pet ocelots to the House floor, I can see it.Bret: Too boring to hate or too pathetic to despise? I’ve begun to think of McCarthy almost as a literary archetype, like one of those figures in a Joseph Conrad novel whose follies make them weak and whose weakness leads them to folly.Gail: Love your literary allusions. But let’s pretend you’re in charge of the Republican Party — tell me what you think of him in general.Bret: A few honorable exceptions aside, the G.O.P. is basically split between reptiles and invertebrates. McCarthy is the ultimate invertebrate. He went to Mar-a-Lago just a short while after Jan. 6 to kiss the ring of the guy who incited the mob that, by McCarthy’s own admission, wanted to kill him. He hated Liz Cheney because of her backbone. But he quailed before Marjorie Taylor Greene because she has a forked tongue. He gave away the powers and prerogatives of the office of speaker in order to gain the office, which is like a slug abandoning its shell and thinking it won’t be stepped on. A better man would have told the Freedom Caucus holdouts to shove it. Instead, as a friend of mine put it, McCarthy decided to become the squeaker of the House.Gail: OK, Kevin is House squeaker forever.Bret: If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that the whole spectacle has shown voters what they get for voting for this Republican Party.Gail: Hey, you’re still in charge of Republicans. Now that they’re sort of in command, do you have hopes they’ll make progress on your priorities, like controlling government spending? Without, um, failing to make the nation’s debt payments ….Bret: Buried in the noise about McCarthy’s humiliation is that his opponents had some reasonable demands. One of them was to give members of Congress a minimum of 72 hours to read the legislation they were voting on. Another was to limit bills to a single subject. The idea is to do away with the everything-but-the-kitchen-sink spending packages that Congress has lately become way too fond of.Gail: Yeah, I can buy into that one.Bret: On the other hand, the idea that this Republican clown show is going to accomplish anything significant — particularly since doing so would require them to work with a Democratic president and Senate — is roughly the equivalent of Vladimir Putin leaving the vocation of vile despot to become a … cannabis entrepreneur. Not going to happen.So what do Democrats do?Gail: Well, one plus is that we don’t have to worry about the Republican House passing some terrible, nutty legislation since the Senate is there to put a halt to it. Interesting how much better obstruction looks when your party is doing the obstructing ….Bret: It’s almost — almost — enough to be grateful to people like Herschel Walker and Blake Masters for being such deliriously awful candidates.Gail: When it comes to positive action, like keeping the government running, I’d like to think the moderate Dems and the moderate Republicans could get together and come to some agreement on the basics. Do you think there’s a chance?Bret: What was the name of that Bret Easton Ellis novel? “Less Than Zero.” Bipartisanship became a four-letter word for most Republicans sometime around 2012. If we can avoid another useless government shutdown, I’ll consider it a minor miracle.On the other hand, all this is good for Democrats. In our last conversation, I predicted that McCarthy wouldn’t win the speakership and that Joe Biden would decide against a second term. I was wrong on the first. Now I’m beginning to think I was also wrong on the second, in part because Republicans are in such manifest disarray. What is your spidey sense telling you?Gail: Yeah, Biden knows 80 is old for another run, but the chance to take on Donald Trump again is probably going to be irresistible.Bret: Assuming it’s going to be Trump, which, increasingly, I doubt.Gail: You really think it’s going to be Ron DeSantis? My theory is that if the field opens up at all, there’ll be a swarm of Republican hopefuls, dividing the Trump opposition.Bret: It’ll be DeSantis or you can serve me a platter of crow. Never mind that Trump still managed to seal the deal for McCarthy’s speakership by winning over a few of the last holdouts. It still took him 15 ballots.Gail: But about Biden — if he did drop out, Democrats would have to figure out what to do about Kamala Harris. A woman, a minority, with the classic presidential training job. Yet a lot of people haven’t found her all that impressive as a potential leader.My vote would be for him to announce he’s not running instantly, and let all the other potential heirs go for it.Bret: How do you solve a problem like Kamala? My initial hope was that she’d grow into the job. That hasn’t seemed to happen. My second hope was that Biden would give her a task in which she’d shine. Didn’t happen either. My third hope was that Biden would ask her to fill Stephen Breyer’s seat on the Supreme Court and then nominate Gina Raimondo or Pete Buttigieg to the vice presidency, setting either of them up to be the front-runner in ’24 or ’28. Whoops again. Now Dems are saddled with their own version of Dan Quayle, minus the gravitas.Gail: Not fair to compare her to Dan Quayle. But otherwise OK with your plan. Go on.Bret: I also think Biden should announce he isn’t going to run, both on account of his age and the prospect of running against someone like DeSantis. But the argument is harder to make given the midterm results, Republican chaos, the sense that he’s defied the skeptics to pass a lot of legislation and the increasingly likely prospect that Ukraine will prevail over Russia this year and give him a truly historic geopolitical win.I just hope that if he does run, he switches veeps. It would … reassure the nation.Gail: So happy to hear you’re on a Biden fan track. Does that apply to his new plan for the Mexican border, too?Bret: Not a Biden fan, exactly, though I do root for a successful presidency on general principle. As for the border plan, the good news is that he finally seems to be recognizing the scale of the problem and promising tougher enforcement. It’s also good that he’s doing more for political refugees from oppressive countries like Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela.Gail: And next …Bret: The right step now is to start pushing for realistic bipartisan immigration reform that gives Republicans more money for border wall construction and security in exchange for automatic citizenship for Dreamers, an expanded and renewable guest-worker visa that helps bring undocumented workers out of the shadows and a big increase in the “extraordinary ability” EB-1 visas for our future Andy Groves and Albert Einsteins. What do you think?Gail: I was waiting for you to get to the border wall itself, which we disagree about. Terrible symbol, awful to try to maintain and not always effective.Bret: All true, except that it paves the way for a good legislative compromise and can save lives if it deters dangerous border crossings.Gail: Moneywise, the border states deserve increased federal aid to handle their challenges. A good chunk should go to early childhood education, which would not only help the new arrivals but also local children born into non-English-speaking families.The aid should also go to states like New York that are getting busloads of new immigrants — some from those Arizona and Texas busing plots, but a good number just because they’re the newcomers’ choice destination.I believe there was a bipartisan plan hatched in the House that included citizenship for Dreamers — an obvious reform that, amazingly, we haven’t yet achieved. But bipartisan plans aren’t doing real well right now.Bret: It’s still worth a shot. I’m sorry Biden didn’t invest the kind of political capital into immigration reform that he did into the infrastructure and climate change bills. And if Republicans wind up voting down funding for a border wall out of spite for Dreamers, I can’t see how that helps Republicans or hurts Democrats. Supporting them seems like smart politics at the very minimum.Before we go, Gail, one more point of note: We just passed the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. I was happy to see Biden honor the heroes of that day at a White House ceremony. Also happy to see the Justice Department continue to prosecute hundreds of cases. And appalled to watch Brazil’s right-wing loons try to imitate the Jan. 6 insurrectionists by storming their own parliament. Any suggestions for going forward?Gail: Well, what we really need to see is an effort by Republicans, some of whom were endangered themselves during the attack, but virtually none of whom have shown any interest in revisiting that awful moment — only one member of the party showed up for that ceremony.Now that Kevin McCarthy has his job in hand, let’s see him call for a bipartisan committee to come up with some suggestions. Ha ha ha.Sorry — don’t want to end on a snippy note.Bret: Not snippy at all. Truthful. We could start by requiring a civics course for all incoming members of Congress. Maybe some of them might learn that their first duty is to the Constitution, not to themselves.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Ron DeSantis Could Decide Republicans’ Foreign Policy

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      Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is widely considered the strongest potential primary challenger to former President Donald Trump’s third campaign in 2024. His national profile, developed during the Covid-19 pandemic and in battles over public education, is by definition domestic, and yet his experience as governor is an obvious precursor to the highest office. Especially if Mr. DeSantis runs in 2024, there is the real possibility that he will emerge as the new leader of the G.O.P.But there’s one major presidential responsibility in which governors’ records are often lacking, or at least little-known: foreign policy. Were he elected president, Mr. DeSantis would become America’s top diplomat, commander in chief and maybe the Republican Party’s direction-setter on foreign policy for years to come in Ukraine, Taiwan, Iran and beyond.How a prospective Republican presidential candidate views foreign policy feels like a question from a different era. For several years, the party’s politics and understanding of its role at home and abroad have revolved first and foremost around Mr. Trump. But in the years since Mr. Trump became president, the G.O.P. coalition has split over America’s role in the world, the causes and conflicts which deserve U.S. intervention and the value of international alliances.Before his current office, Mr. DeSantis represented Florida in the House of Representatives. There he served on the Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired the Subcommittee on National Security, and built a foreign policy record. In many regards, it’s a standard Republican record: critical of Pentagon waste but uninterested in reducing military spending, even to balance the budget; skeptical of unchecked foreign aid; reflexively supportive of Israel; willing to subvert civil liberties in the name of fighting terror; critical of U.S. military intervention in Syria under the Obama administration but supportive of it in the Trump years; and prone to framing relations with unreformed Soviet Bloc nations — Cuba, North Korea, and especially China — in absolutist, ideological terms.On three key issues, however, Mr. DeSantis stands apart: his distance from Mr. Trump on Russia, his noticeable quiet on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq compared to Mr. Trump and other potential 2024 presidential candidates, and his fixation on Iran as a major threat to the United States.The aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine highlighted the first contrast with Mr. Trump. Where Mr. Trump responded by calling Russian President Vladimir Putin a “genius” for invading, Mr. DeSantis decried the invasion as a Russian strategic blunder. Where Mr. Trump has long admired Mr. Putin as powerful and intelligent, Mr. DeSantis has dubbed him “an authoritarian gas station attendant.” And where Mr. Trump notoriously accepted Mr. Putin’s denial of Russian meddling in the 2016 election, Mr. DeSantis in 2013 saw “Putin as somebody who’s trying to confront the United States” and last year included Russia on a short list of countries with “nefarious intentions … to engage in espionage or influence operations” in Florida.In 2015, Mr. DeSantis denounced President Barack Obama for “promoting foreign policy based on principle of leaving no dictator behind.” Squint just a little and it’s possible to see him finding his way to a similar line in a close primary race against Mr. Trump, though whether that could resonate with the MAGA base remains to be seen. (G.O.P. figures including the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, and Senator J.D. Vance have said the U.S. should curtail aid to Ukraine, and prominent right-wing commentators met the Washington visit of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine with vitriol.)On Afghanistan and Iraq, Mr. DeSantis’s position is murkier. His 78 statements in the congressional record over three terms in office are not especially enlightening on how he views the two biggest wars of the post-9/11 era. In one statement about the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, Mr. DeSantis, who himself was deployed to Iraq as a legal adviser in 2007, sidestepped debate about the war itself, and instead praised the troops. Discussing Syria in 2014, Mr. DeSantis said he disagreed with the idea that “Americans are war weary,” and instead argued they were “weary of missions launched without a coherent strategy and are sick of seeing engagements that produce inconclusive results rather than clear-cut victory.”He has dropped a few hints of skepticism toward the conflicts started in the 2000s. Most explicitly, while criticizing President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan last year, he acknowledged that “the whole Afghanistan thing — we needed to find a way to kind of dial that down, and I’m in favor of that generally.”Perhaps Mr. DeSantis’s thin and even ambiguous record is the new norm for a Gen X candidate whose political career began well after the 2001 and 2003 invasions and whose presidential run would begin well after the wars’ ends. But it raises the troubling possibility that Mr. DeSantis lacks wariness of military intervention and nation-building projects, which U.S. failures in Afghanistan and especially Iraq normalized even among Republicans in recent years. Determining that those generational wars weren’t worth fighting was a formative political experience for many Americans, ordinary voters and politicians alike. Did Mr. DeSantis share in that lesson?That’s not a purely academic question for a potential president, particularly one with Mr. DeSantis’s record of hostility toward Iran. A frequent subject of his legislative sponsorships, Iran was one of his most favored topics in the congressional record, where he characterized Tehran as “an enemy of our country” with whom we do not share any national interests. He made opposition to diplomacy with Iran a priority while in Congress, even urging Mr. Trump to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal a year before the president did so.Mr. DeSantis’s anti-Iran talk is within the normal range of Republican presidential candidates from the last two decades. Yet in concert with his record on Russia (Iran’s partner in Syria, Ukraine and beyond) and with the open question of how he views the lessons of the post-9/11 wars, a President DeSantis might reprise that old G.O.P. ditty about bombing Iran.And beyond specific policy decisions, Mr. DeSantis would assume Republican leadership at an inflection point for the party’s foreign policy. Iraq, Afghanistan and Mr. Trump’s transformation of the G.O.P. — his repudiation of Bush-era neoconservatism and governance by golf buddy and inchoate Jacksonian impulses — left undone the Republican consensus on foreign affairs. The war in Ukraine has scrambled it further. Will the next Republican president be more or less likely than a Democratic rival to fight China over Taiwan? Would he or she withdraw the United States from NATO or settle in for a long-term proxy war with Russia? How will the post-Trump G.O.P. handle shifting relationships in the Middle East, international trade disputes and rising focus on the Indo-Pacific region?While most domestic policy battles are still drawn along familiar lines, the G.O.P.’s foreign policy is in many senses a true unknown. Where the party lands in future decades could well be determined by its first effective post-Trump leader. That’s a title Mr. DeSantis is presently favored to claim.Bonnie Kristian (@bonniekristian) is the author of “Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community.” She is a columnist at Christianity Today and a fellow at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Many Republicans Against McCarthy Sought to Overturn 2020 Election

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      WASHINGTON — They helped lead the efforts to keep former President Donald J. Trump in power after he lost the 2020 election. They refused to certify that President Biden was the rightful winner. They spread lies that helped ignite a mob of Trump supporters to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. On Friday, the two-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, many of the same hard-right lawmakers who served as top lieutenants to Mr. Trump during the buildup to the assault spent the day blocking the bid of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California to be speaker and extracting major concessions from him. While some had received subpoenas in the Jan. 6 investigations and were later referred to the House Ethics Committee, their power showed they were far from outcasts and had paid little price for their actions. Among the ringleaders in both the effort to block Mr. McCarthy and the push to overturn the 2020 election were Representative Scott Perry, the leader of the far-right Freedom Caucus, and Representatives Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar of Arizona. (On Friday, Mr. Gosar and Mr. Perry swung behind Mr. McCarthy after he caved to their demands to dilute the power of the post he is seeking and to give their faction more sway in the House.)Other hard-right holdouts who for days have refused to vote for Mr. McCarthy were Representatives Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado and Andy Harris of Maryland. All three met with Mr. Trump or White House officials as they discussed how to fight the election results, according to evidence gathered by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack. Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.(Mr. Harris flipped his vote to support Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon, but Ms. Boebert and Mr. Gaetz remained against him.) Democrats made sure to single out the group.“This January 6th anniversary should serve as a wake-up call to the G.O.P. to reject M.A.G.A. radicalism — which keeps leading to G.O.P. failures,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, wrote on Twitter. “But the pandemonium wrought by House Republicans this week is one more example of how M.A.G.A. radicalism is making it impossible for them to govern.” No one in the hard-right group attended what was billed as a bipartisan ceremony on Capitol Hill to mark the anniversary. Only one Republican of any stripe turned up: Representative Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania, a former F.B.I. agent who is the co-chairman of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus. The ceremony opened with a moment of silence for House members on the steps of the Capitol to honor the Capitol Police officers who died in the year after the attack.“We stand here with our democracy intact because of those officers,” said Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the top Democrat in the House, as tears welled up in some House members’ eyes. Witnesses who testified before the House investigative committee, including police officers who defended the Capitol, were honored at the White House, including Michael Fanone and Daniel Hodges of Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department, and Harry Dunn, Caroline Edwards, Aquilino Gonell, and Eugene Goodman of the U.S. Capitol Police. Mr. Perry, who was one of the main architects behind a plan to install Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official, as the acting attorney general after he appeared sympathetic to Mr. Trump’s false allegations of widespread voter fraud, said Friday that he fought Mr. McCarthy’s nomination for speaker until he could extract concessions from him to give the House Freedom Caucus and rank-and-file Republicans more influence over leadership. “This place is broken,” Mr. Perry said. “We weren’t going to move from that position until the change is made.” Mr. Biggs, who was still holding out against Mr. McCarthy on Friday afternoon, was involved in a range of organizational efforts in 2020, including meetings aimed at attracting protesters to Washington on Jan. 6, according to the House Jan. 6 committee. Mr. Gosar, who voted against Mr. McCarthy on multiple ballots but changed his vote to support him on Friday, spread numerous lies about the 2020 election and spoke at “Stop the Steal” rallies arranged by Ali Alexander, a prominent organizer. The House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack has referred Mr. Perry and Mr. Biggs to the Ethics Committee for refusing to comply with its subpoenas. Not every Republican involved in blocking Mr. McCarthy’s ascension was among those who voted against certifying Mr. Biden’s victory.Representative Chip Roy of Texas started out as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Trump’s claims of a stolen election but gradually grew alarmed about the push to invalidate the results and ultimately opposed Mr. Trump’s bid to get Congress to overturn them on Jan. 6, 2021.Mr. Roy, an initial holdout against Mr. McCarthy, led negotiations to try to bring about a deal that would make Mr. McCarthy the speaker in exchange for changes to House rules.“We believe that there ought to be fundamental changes about and limits on spending after the massive bloated omnibus spending bill in December,” Mr. Roy said, referring to the $1.7 trillion government funding package passed by Congress last month. “And so we’ve talked about those. We’ve put a lot of those things in place.” More

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      Biden Marks 2nd Anniversary of Jan. 6 By Awarding 14 Presidential Medals

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      President Biden marked the second anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack by awarding the Presidential Citizens Medal to 14 people.Fourteen people who fought the violent mob at the Capitol two years ago and stood against election denialism in 2020 were awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal.Pete Marovich for The New York TimesWASHINGTON — President Biden on Friday honored 14 people who stood against election denialism in 2020 and fought the violent mob at the Capitol two years ago, telling them in a White House ceremony that history “will remember your names, remember your courage, remember your bravery.”Speaking from the East Room, he awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to nine police officers — three of whom died after protecting the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and five local officials who were subjected to personal violence but resisted pressure to undermine the election in 2020.Together, Mr. Biden said, the individuals he honored represented the “extraordinary Americans” whose service to the country helped thwart the efforts of former President Donald J. Trump and his allies as they sought to keep Mr. Trump in power.“A violent mob of insurrectionists assaulted law enforcement, vandalized sacred halls, hunted down elected officials, all for the purpose of attempting to overthrow the will of the people and usurp the peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Biden said. “All of it — all of it — was fueled by lies about the 2020 election. But on this day, two years ago, our democracy held because we the people, as the Constitution refers to us, we the people did not flinch.”A year ago, on the first anniversary of the attack on the Capitol, Mr. Biden rejected the idea that Americans are “too bogged down by division to succeed,” though he added a grim, cautionary note: “Believe me, I know how difficult democracy is.”On Friday, as the president marked the second anniversary, those divisions were on full display in Washington.Twenty Republican lawmakers, most of them eager participants in the election lies that gave rise to the Jan. 6 attack, have repeatedly failed this week to elect a speaker, bringing the proceedings of democracy to a halt in the House.Understand the Events on Jan. 6Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, 64 days after Election Day 2020, a mob of supporters of President Donald J. Trump raided the Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, that date wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.Democracy, it seems, is as difficult as Mr. Biden predicted a year ago.Mr. Biden’s first speech about Jan. 6 was also more focused on Mr. Trump and his actions. Speaking from Statuary Hall in the Capitol in 2022, the president issued a scathing takedown of his predecessor and vowed to “stand in this breach” to ensure that no one places “a dagger at the throat of our democracy.”This time, Mr. Biden sought to draw attention not to Mr. Trump, but to the people who stood against the former president.He began by honoring nine police officers, all of whom fought against the surge of violence on Jan. 6 as lawmakers met to certify Mr. Biden’s victory over Mr. Trump.He praised Daniel Hodges, a Washington police officer who was injured during his first visit to the Capitol, for his bravery amid the chaos.“Sprayed with poison, pinned and crushed, eye almost gouged out — he didn’t break,” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Hodges.Mr. Biden honored Michael Fanone, a Capitol Police officer who he said was “beaten, beaten, not pushed around, beaten” and yet “defended our democracy with absolute courage.” And Mr. Biden also paid tribute to Caroline Edwards, the first law enforcement officer injured by the rioters, saying she was knocked unconscious by rioters but “got back up to help hold the line.”Mr. Biden also awarded the medal to Harry Dunn, a Capitol Police officer who faced racial slurs and harassment on Jan. 6; Aquilino Gonell, a sergeant with the Capitol Police who was injured in the attack; and Eugene Goodman, a Capitol Police officer who led a pro-Trump mob away from the entrance to the Senate chamber.Three officers Mr. Biden honored on Friday died after the Jan. 6 attacks: Brian Sicknick, a Capitol Police officer who died of a stroke a day after the attacks; Howard C. Liebengood, who died by suicide three days after the attack; and Jeffrey L. Smith, a Metropolitan Police officer who also died by suicide after helping to protect the Capitol.Speaking to the family members of the honorees, who accepted the medals on the men’s behalf, Mr. Biden offered condolences and a sense of understanding about the grief they are still struggling to deal with.“Boy is it hard,” he said. “I know how proud I am when my son Beau is honored on the anniversary of his death as a consequence of burn pits in Iraq. But it brings everything back like it happened that moment.“I want to thank you for having the courage to be here today,” he added.In addition to the police officers, Mr. Biden awarded the medals to five local officials, each of whom refused to do the bidding of those who insisted that the election had been rigged.Two of them — Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, who is her daughter — received the awards for serving as poll workers in Atlanta, where they were subjected to abuse by Trump supporters who falsely accused them of participating in election fraud.“Both of them were just doing their jobs, and they were targeted and threatened by the same peddlers of a lie that was fueling the insurrection,” Mr. Biden said. “They were literally forced from their homes and faced despicable racist taunts.”Mr. Biden also praised Al Schmidt, who was a city commissioner on the Philadelphia County Board of Elections in 2020, noting that he “did not bend, he did not bow, he did not yield to the political threats and pressure.” And he hailed Jocelyn Benson, who served as the Secretary of State of Michigan during the 2020 election, and Rusty Bowers, the Republican House speaker in Arizona. All three resisted pressure from those seeking to overturn the results in 2020.Mr. Biden called Ms. Benson “a true leader in our nation” and said Mr. Bowers shows people “what integrity is all about.”A year ago, with the events of Jan. 6 looming in the more recent past, Mr. Biden expressed greater worry about the future of the country, saying that “as we stand here today — one year since Jan. 6, 2021 — the lies that drove the anger and madness we saw in this place, they have not abated.”But on Friday, he returned to the optimism that has often characterized his speeches.“We’re not a land of kings and dictators, autocrats and extremists,” he said. “As we see in today’s honorees, we’re a nation and we the people that toughen our fiber, renew our faith and strengthen our cause. There’s nothing beyond our capacity, if we act together.” More