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      The Supreme Court Fails Black Voters in Alabama

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      You know the Rubicon has been crossed when the Supreme Court issues a conservative voting rights order so at odds with settled precedent and without any sense of the moment that Chief Justice John Roberts feels constrained to dissent.This is the same John Roberts who in 1982, as a young lawyer in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, fought a crucial amendment to the Voting Rights Act of 1965; whose majority opinion in 2013 gutted one-half of the Voting Rights Act and who joined an ahistoric opinion last summer that took aim at the other half; and who famously complained in dissent from a 2006 decision in favor of Latino voters in South Texas that “it is a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”Yes, that Chief Justice Roberts. What the 5-to-4 majority did was that far out of line.The unsigned order that drew the chief justice’s dissent Monday night blocked the decision by a special three-judge Federal District Court ordering the Alabama Legislature to draw a second congressional district in which Black residents constitute a majority. Alabama’s population is 27 percent Black. The state has seven congressional districts. The lower court held that by packing some Black voters into one district and spreading others out over three other districts, the state diluted the Black vote in violation of the Voting Rights Act.The Supreme Court will hear Alabama’s appeal of the district court order in its next term, so the stay it granted will mean that the 2022 elections will take place with district lines that the lower court unanimously, with two of the three judges appointed by President Donald Trump, found to be illegal.Chief Justice Roberts objected that the ordinary standards under which the Supreme Court grants a stay of a lower court opinion had not been met. “The district court properly applied existing law in an extensive opinion with no apparent errors for our correction,” he wrote. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor, also dissented in a more extensive opinion that accused the majority of using the court’s emergency “shadow docket” not only to intervene improperly on behalf of the state but also to change voting rights law in the process.This is no mere squabble over procedure. What happened Monday night was a raw power play by a runaway majority that seems to recognize no stopping point. It bears emphasizing that the majority’s agenda of cutting back on the scope of the Voting Rights Act is Chief Justice Roberts’s agenda too. He made that abundantly clear in the past and suggested it in a kind of code on Monday with his bland observation that the court’s Voting Rights Act precedents “have engendered considerable disagreement and uncertainty regarding the nature and contours of a vote dilution claim.” But in his view, that was an argument to be conducted in the next Supreme Court term while permitting the district court’s decision to take effect now.While the majority as a whole said nothing, Justice Brett Kavanaugh took it upon himself to offer a kind of defense. Only Justice Samuel Alito joined him. Perhaps the others — Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — chose not to sign onto his rude reference to Justice Kagan’s “catchy but worn-out rhetoric about the ‘shadow docket.’ ” Or perhaps his “To reiterate: The court’s stay order is not a decision on the merits” rang a little hollow when, as Justice Kagan pointed out, “the district court here did everything right under the law existing today” and “staying its decision forces Black Alabamians to suffer what under that law is clear vote dilution.”In other words, when it comes to the 2022 elections, for Black voters in Alabama the Supreme Court’s procedural intervention is the equivalent of a ruling on the merits.Or maybe the others couldn’t indulge in the hypocrisy of Justice Kavanaugh’s description of the standards for granting a stay. The party asking for a stay, he wrote, “ordinarily must show (i) a reasonable probability that this court would eventually grant review and a fair prospect that the court would reverse, and (ii) that the applicant would likely suffer irreparable harm absent the stay.”But wait a minute. Weren’t those conditions clearly met back in September when abortion providers in Texas came to the court seeking a stay of the Texas vigilante law, S.B. 8, which was about to go into effect? That law, outlawing abortion after six weeks of pregnancy and authorizing anyone anywhere in the country to sue a Texas abortion provider for damages, was flagrantly unconstitutional, and the law was about to destroy the state’s abortion infrastructure. But did Justice Kavanaugh or any of the others in Monday’s majority vote to grant the requested stay? They did not. Chief Justice Roberts did.It’s impossible not to conclude that what we see at work is not some neutral principle guiding the Supreme Court’s intervention but simply whether a majority likes or doesn’t like what a lower court has done. In his opinion, Justice Kavanaugh sought to avoid that conclusion by arguing that when it comes to election cases, the Supreme Court will more readily grant a stay to counteract “late judicial tinkering with election laws.” But there was no late “tinkering” here. The legislature approved the disputed plan in November, after six days of consideration, and the governor signed it. The district court conducted a seven-day trial in early January and on Jan. 24 issued its 225-page opinion. The election is months away — plenty of time for the legislature to comply with the decision.Disturbing as this development is, it is even more alarming in context. Last July, in a case from Arizona, the court took a very narrow view of the Voting Rights Act as a weapon against vote denial measures, policies that have a discriminatory effect on nonwhite voters’ access to the polls. That case, Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee, was brought under the act’s Section 2, which prohibits voting procedures that give members of racial minorities “less opportunity than other members of the electorate to participate in the political process and to elect representatives of their choice.” Justice Alito’s opinion for a 6-to-3 majority set a high bar for showing that any disputed measure is more than just an ordinary burden that comes with turning out to vote.It was an unusual case, in that Section 2 has much more typically been used as it was in Alabama, to challenge district lines as causing vote dilution. Obviously, at the heart of any Section 2 case is the question of how to evaluate the role of race. In its request for a stay, Alabama characterized the district court of having improperly “prioritized” race, as opposed to other districting factors, in ordering a second majority Black district. In response, the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, representing the Alabama plaintiffs, called this a mischaracterization of what the district court had actually done when it took account of the compactness and cohesion of the Black community and the history of white Alabama voters refusing to support Black candidates.Stripped to its core, Alabama is essentially arguing that a law enacted to protect the interests of Black citizens bars courts from considering race in evaluating a redistricting plan. Justice Kagan’s dissenting opinion contained a warning that granting the stay amounted to a tacit acceptance of that startling proposition. She said the stay reflected “a hastily made and wholly unexplained prejudgment” that the court was “ready to change the law.”The battle over what Section 2 means has been building for years, largely under the radar, and now it is front and center. The current Supreme Court term is all about abortion and guns. The next one will be all about race. Along with the Alabama case, Merrill v. Milligan, the Harvard and University of North Carolina admissions cases are also on the docket — to be heard by a Supreme Court that, presumably, for the first time in history, will have two Black justices, and all in the shadow of the midterm elections. The fire next time.Linda Greenhouse, the winner of a 1998 Pulitzer Prize, reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008. She is the author of “Justice on the Brink: The Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the Rise of Amy Coney Barrett, and Twelve Months That Transformed the Supreme Court.”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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      Where’s Liz Cheney? The Republican’s Exile From Wyoming Republicans

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      The congresswoman hasn’t attended Republican Party events in person in her state in years, amid a wave of local conservative hostility. “I’m not going to convince the crazies,” she said.ROCK SPRINGS, Wyo. — The women arrived in red formal gowns, the men in suits and tuxedos. They posed in a photo booth with a cardboard cutout of former President Donald J. Trump and bid on auction items including a Glock pistol in a gift basket.Saturday was the biggest night of the year for Republicans in southwest Wyoming — a prom-themed fund-raiser at a Holiday Inn that drew 150 of the most active conservatives in Carbon, Sweetwater and Uinta counties.But Representative Liz Cheney, the Republican who has represented Wyoming since 2017, was nowhere to be found. She spent Saturday night 230 miles away with a group certain to give her a friendlier reception: reporters and media executives at the annual gathering of the Wyoming Press Association.The wrath that national Republicans have unleashed on Ms. Cheney — the Republican National Committee voted to censure her the day before the Rock Springs gala — is nothing compared to the fury she is encountering from Wyoming Republicans. The state party not only censured her but adopted a resolution to effectively disown her.The biggest night of the year for Republicans in southwest Wyoming was the Conservatives in Crimson Gala on Feb. 5.Kim Raff for The New York TimesYet her response has been to become strangely invisible in her home state.Ms. Cheney hasn’t appeared at a state Republican Party function in more than two years and hasn’t been to an in-person event for any of the party’s 23 county chapters since 2020. Her vote to impeach Mr. Trump last January and her decision to take part in the House investigation of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 have forced her into a kind of exile from Wyoming’s Republican Party apparatus, in a state where Mr. Trump won 70 percent of the vote in 2020, the highest percentage in the country.“She speaks about her conscience, but you weren’t elected to do what you think is right, you were elected to do what the people want you do to,” said Sam Eliopoulos, a Cheyenne businessman and Republican who is running for a seat in the State House. “She didn’t do what the people want her to do. At the end of the day, that’s it.”Ms. Cheney’s focus on events in Washington rather than Wyoming is all the more striking given that she faces a well-known primary opponent who has been endorsed by Mr. Trump and the state Republican Party. And it is raising questions in Wyoming about whether she is counting on Democrats to bail her out in the August primary — or even whether she really is battling to hold on to her office.In an interview on Saturday in Cheyenne, Ms. Cheney tried to put to rest those questions and resisted the suggestion that she cared more about the fight with Mr. Trump than about running for re-election.“I’m not going to convince the crazies and I reject the crazies,” Ms. Cheney said of Wyoming’s Republican leadership. “I reject the notion that somehow we don’t have to abide by the rule of law. And the people right now who are in the leadership of our state party, I’m not trying to get their support because they’ve abandoned the Constitution.”On Saturday, Ms. Cheney skipped the conservative gala in Rock Springs, Wyo., and went to the annual gathering of the Wyoming Press Association in Casper.Stephen Speranza for The New York TimesThe heated Trump antagonism and Ms. Cheney’s light public schedule — she skipped the state fair and has appeared at just one in-person Wyoming event between Veterans Day and the press association gathering, according to a calendar provided by her office — has prompted an open discussion in the state about the possibility that she might abandon her seat and instead mount a run for the White House in 2024.Bill Sniffin, a longtime Wyoming newspaper executive who is now the publisher of the news website Cowboy State Daily, said he’s bet five cigars that Ms. Cheney will eventually drop out of the House contest.A Look Ahead to the 2022 U.S. Midterm ElectionsIn the Senate: Democrats have a razor-thin margin that could be upended with a single loss. Here are 10 races to watch.In the House: Republicans and Democrats are seeking to gain an edge through redistricting and gerrymandering.Governors’ Races: Georgia’s contest will be at the center of the political universe, but there are several important races across the country.Campaign Financing: With both parties awash in political money, billionaires and big checks are shaping the midterm elections.Key Issues: Democrats and Republicans are preparing for abortion and voting rights to be defining topics.“She understands she has to campaign and earn the trust of voters — I would certainly like to see her here more,” said Landon Brown, a Wyoming state representative from Cheyenne who is the only Republican in the Wyoming State House publicly supporting Ms. Cheney. For that, he has been denied funding by the state party and expects his own primary challenge for the first time since he took office in 2017.Ms. Cheney insisted she would be on the ballot in August and dismissed a question about pivoting to a 2024 primary contest against Mr. Trump. She’s held dozens of meetings with Wyomingites via videoconference and said she planned to attend a Lincoln Day dinner later this month in Natrona County, which includes Casper and is home to her strongest base of support. And she described a silent majority of Wyoming Republicans who she said do not embrace Mr. Trump’s lies about the election.Speaking to the Wyoming Press Association in Casper, Ms. Cheney joked in response to a question about her political headwinds (“There’s a backlash against me? Wait, what?”) while trying to stress that her post-Jan. 6 opposition to Mr. Trump is not akin to endorsing Democratic policies.“I was pro-Trump, and I am proud of the policies of the Trump administration,” she told the crowd of journalists. “But he crossed a line you can never cross. Some people, I think, interpreted my vote to impeach him as a vote in favor of Biden or Biden’s policies, which it wasn’t.”Last summer, Mr. Trump and his allies recruited and vetted candidates to oppose Ms. Cheney. They ended up choosing Harriet Hageman, a Cheyenne land-use attorney and former Cheney adviser who was then a member of the Republican National Committee. Ms. Hageman had plotted against Mr. Trump during the 2016 election, but after Mr. Trump endorsed her she declared him the best president in her lifetime.Over a sausage quiche breakfast she cooked at her home near the State Capitol in Cheyenne, Ms. Hageman said in an interview that she could not name any issue on which she differs from the former president. And she said that Ms. Cheney’s break with Mr. Trump has left her incapable of being an effective advocate for Wyoming in Washington.“She’s using her seat as Wyoming’s representative to pursue her own agenda,” Ms. Hageman said. “That’s not our agenda. We don’t agree with what Liz Cheney is doing.”“We don’t agree with what Liz Cheney is doing,” said Harriet Hageman, left. She is Ms. Cheney’s Republican opponent in an August primary.Kim Raff for The New York TimesMs. Hageman’s campaign sponsored the dessert table, which offered brownies, cheesecake and pie at the gala in Rock Springs, Wyo.Kim Raff for The New York TimesMs. Hageman said she didn’t know who the legitimate winner of the 2020 election was (“I don’t know the answer”) and couldn’t say if former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to block congressional certification of President Biden’s election (“I’m not an elections attorney”).“I wasn’t there on Jan. 6,” she said. “I can’t tell you everything Pence did or didn’t do. What you need to understand is that, for most people out in the real world, none of us really care that much about what happened on Jan. 6.”Ms. Hageman has taken full advantage of Ms. Cheney’s diminished profile in the state. While Ms. Cheney’s movements are complicated by the presence of a Capitol Police detail she was assigned since she began receiving threats after joining the Jan. 6 committee, Ms. Hageman has clocked more than 11,000 miles driving to Wyoming events since she entered the race in September. And she was a star of the Rock Springs conservative prom, where her campaign sponsored the dessert table of brownies, cheesecake and pie.At the gala, the master of ceremonies was Joey Correnti IV, chairman of the Carbon County Republican Party, which censured Ms. Cheney four days after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump last January. Mr. Correnti pushed the state party to issue a similar censure weeks later and, in November, to adopt a resolution to no longer recognize Ms. Cheney as a Republican.Mr. Correnti wore a bright red tuxedo jacket and a gold lapel pin with the “Let’s Go Brandon” phrase that has become a stand-in for an insult against Mr. Biden. He celebrated from the stage the Republican National Committee’s censure of Ms. Cheney, which described the attack on the Capitol and events that led up to it as “legitimate political discourse.”Many Republicans in attendance agreed.Anita Vonder Embse had just finished taking a picture with her husband and the cardboard cutout of Mr. Trump — all three of them flashing the signature thumbs-up — when she said there was “nothing wrong” with the rioters’ attempt to block Congress from certifying Mr. Biden’s victory.“People had every right to go in there,” said Ms. Vonder Embse, a retiree from nearby Green River. “Push came to shove and they shoved. It went to an extreme because it had to.”Private polling in January found just 31 percent of Wyoming Republican primary voters had a favorable view of Ms. Cheney, compared to 60 percent who saw her unfavorably. More than half the state’s Republican primary electorate described themselves as strong supporters of Mr. Trump who would not vote for a candidate he opposes.Ms. Cheney told journalists in Casper that some people interpreted her vote to impeach Mr. Trump “as a vote in favor of Biden or Biden’s policies, which it wasn’t.”Stephen Speranza for The New York TimesThe state Republican Party chairman, Frank Eathorne, announced at a meeting in November that Mr. Trump plans to hold a rally in Wyoming with Ms. Hageman on May 28, according to WyoFile, a political news website in Wyoming. Mr. Eathorne did not respond to messages, nor did Mr. Trump’s spokeswoman.Ms. Cheney’s hope for political survival may rest in Wyoming’s lenient rules for primary elections. Democrats and independents can change their party affiliation at the polls, then switch back the next day.Four years ago, more than 10,000 Wyomingites switched their party registration to Republican to vote in a contested governor’s primary, according to data from the Wyoming secretary of state. Mark Gordon beat a field of more conservative candidates, including Ms. Hageman, by about 9,000 votes.Ms. Cheney said she will not organize “Democrats for Cheney” groups, encourage party switching or bless a political action committee to encourage Democrats to vote in the Republican primary. She did have a one-on-one meeting last summer with Jeffrey Katzenberg, the billionaire Hollywood mogul and Democratic megadonor. After the meeting, Mr. Katzenberg and his wife each made maximum contributions to Ms. Cheney’s campaign.There are no declared Democratic candidates for Ms. Cheney’s seat or for governor, limiting the appeal of participating in a Democratic primary.Teresa and Island Richards were named “Republi-Queen” and “Republi-King” of 2022 at the fundraiser in Rock Springs, Wyo.Kim Raff for The New York TimesMs. Richards was the only gala participant, among more than three dozen interviewed, who admitted being a Cheney supporter.Kim Raff for The New York TimesToward the end of the gala in Rock Springs, five nominees each for “Republi-King” and “Republi-Queen” gathered on the dance floor for the announcement of the winners. Throughout the night, attendees had signaled their preferred candidates by placing cash into bags.Mr. Correnti announced the winners: Island and Teresa Richards. Mr. Richards, a former Sweetwater County Republican chairman, wouldn’t reveal his position on Ms. Cheney. Ms. Richards, as it turned out, was the only admitted Cheney supporter among more than three dozen people interviewed at the gala.“This whole crowd is not representative of what’s going on with Liz Cheney,” Ms. Richards said. “She does have support.”Katie Klingsporn contributed reporting from Casper, Wyo. More

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      Censuring Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger Sets Off Republican Food Fight

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      Punishing Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger was a blunder, many in the party say.Republicans had Democrats right where they wanted them: on the ropes.Then on Friday, the Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two House Republicans on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The text of the resolution made no distinction between peaceful protesters and those who stormed the Capitol, referring to that day’s events simply as “legitimate political discourse.” The R.N.C. also backed a primary challenge against Cheney, whose high-profile criticism of Donald Trump has made her a top target on the right.It was one of those polarizing moments that forced other Republicans to react, with some — notably, a bunch of sitting U.S. senators — denouncing the national committee’s move as “wrong” and “absurd.”In the view of many Republicans, censuring two of their own was much like that old saw attributed to Charles Maurice de Tallyrand-Périgord, the 19th-century French diplomat: Worse than a crime, it was also a mistake.As President Biden grapples with soaring inflation, a pandemic that isn’t yet over and general public malaise over the two, why change the subject?“Certainly it wasn’t the right thing to do, and certainly it wasn’t the politically smart thing to do,” said Josh Venable, a former deputy finance director for the R.N.C. “It doesn’t take David Axelrod or Karl Rove to figure that out.”Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican and a man who chooses his words carefully, rejected the R.N.C.’s decision on Tuesday.“We saw what happened,” he said. “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”‘When we became the news’This is the kind of intramural food fight that the press loves — and political operatives despise when their own party is on the proverbial menu.“When I was at the R.N.C. in 2010, our worst days were when we became the news,” said Doug Heye, a Republican communications consultant. “G.O.P. senators and members know this, and it’s why you’re seeing them speak out.”But while Cheney has Republican friends in the Senate, she has few, if any, in the House. Allies of Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, see her as a political opportunist who has made their lives more difficult — a thoughtless colleague who failed to appreciate his attempts after the 2020 election to shield her from the wrath of her colleagues on the right.Fielding a question on the controversy on Tuesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, who replaced Cheney as the third-ranking House Republican last year, offered a curt response. “My reaction is the R.N.C. has every right to take any action,” she said, “and the position I have is that you’re ultimately held accountable to voters in your district.”Translation: Cheney deserves to lose her seat, and if the Republican Party wants to aid in the process, so be it.The Trump questionThere’s a lot going on here worth unpacking.One obvious motive behind censuring Cheney and Kinzinger was to place them outside the bounds of respectable Republican Party company. Their presence on the Jan. 6 committee is a constant source of irritation for the party, giving Democrats bipartisan cover for an investigation that Republicans have sought to cast as a partisan vendetta.But the larger point of tension is the same existential question that the Republican Party has been wrestling with since 2015, when a certain New York real estate mogul glided down that golden escalator: What to do about Donald Trump? And whose view of the party should prevail — his, or those of establishment leaders like McConnell?Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as former communications director in Trump’s White House before quitting over his stolen election claims, said the R.N.C.’s censure of Cheney and Kinzinger would “damage the Republican Party more broadly and going into 2024.”She’s among around 150 Republicans who signed a statement this week condemning the move as a betrayal of the party’s “founding principles” and a signal that it “no longer welcomes people of conscience.”‘An opportunity lost’Then there are Republicans who express a more parochial concern — a party consumed with internal strife will have a harder time defeating Democrats in the upcoming midterms.“Americans are scared of the future because of inflation, because of crime, and what do we talk about? A stolen election,” said Dick Wadhams, a Republican strategist in Colorado.As Matt Continetti, the former editor of the Free Beacon, a conservative website, put it, “Any minute Republicans spend re-litigating 2020 or downplaying the events of Jan. 6, 2021, is an opportunity lost.”Chris Stirewalt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the censure could be a sign that Republicans are getting too confident about the prospects of a “red wave” election in the fall.“Democrats are certainly still in line for a serious thumping this year, but it is now possible to see how — if the economy and virus keep moving in the right direction — divisions of this kind of ugliness could screw up Republicans’ chances at a big win,” he said.What to read tonightNate Cohn analyzes recent polling that found that “the desire to return to normalcy has approached or even overtaken alarm about” Covid-19 itself.Prosecutors released a “revealing glimpse of their strategy” for the first trial stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Alan Feuer reports. Their evidence includes surveillance videos and text messages.The Secret Service escorted Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, out of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., because of a bomb threat. The school was also evacuated.LISTENING POSTA protest in Brooklyn on Monday showed solidarity with Canadian truckers.Justin Lane/EPA, via ShutterstockTruckin’Fox News was of one mind on Monday evening: America needs a movement of disaffected truckers just like the one in Canada.Tucker Carlson used his monologue to celebrate the Canadian truckers, whose protests against vaccine mandates have paralyzed Ottawa and threatened the flow of trade with the United States. Tech companies, Carlson complained, are censoring their online organizing efforts while mainstream media outlets are supposedly ignoring the story.“Instead, everyone in New York and D.C. and Los Angeles is cheering on the national security state and its alliance with Silicon Valley as they come together to crush a human rights movement,” he said.Laura Ingraham used the truckers mainly to criticize CNN for its coverage of what she lauded as “Canada’s expanding freedom convoy.”“The regime media knows exactly what’s happening in Canada and it scares the heck out of them,” Ingraham said. “Just think: Honking, really loud honking, may keep Joe from his 12 hours of sleep a night.”It’s hard to say how many people are ready to take up the cause.One of the main groups calling for a truckers’ protest in Washington, which calls itself “The People’s Convoy,” has nearly 50,000 followers on Facebook and another 40,000 on Telegram. Another group, “Convoy to D.C. 2022,” had more than 130,000 members before Facebook shut it down for violating the site’s policies on vaccine misinformation. Several truckers’ groups have announced plans to drive to Washington to protest vaccine mandates on March 1.Canadian researchers have linked the truckers to conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists, and have noted how much of the support for their sit-in has come from the United States.Jared Holt, a researcher who studies extremist movements, said the online activity appeared to be aimed at “manufacturing sentiment” that wasn’t fully organic. It reminded him of the recent demonstration by anti-vaccine advocates on the National Mall, which drew a modest crowd in late January.“They’re hoping they can animate the imagination of similarly minded people here,” Holt said.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Older Americans Fight to Make America Better

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      Neil Young and Joni Mitchell did more than go after Spotify for spreading Covid disinformation last week. They also, inadvertently, signaled what could turn out to be an extraordinarily important revival: of an older generation fully rejoining the fight for a working future.You could call it (with a wink!) codger power.We’ve seen this close up: over the last few months we’ve worked with others of our generation to start the group Third Act, which organizes people over the age of 60 for progressive change. That’s no easy task. The baby boomers and the Silent Generation before them make up a huge share of the population — more nearly 75 million people, a larger population than France. And conventional wisdom (and a certain amount of data) holds that people become more conservative as they age, perhaps because they have more to protect.But as those musicians reminded us, these are no “normal” generations. We’re both in our 60s; in the 1960s and ’70s, our generation either bore witness to or participated in truly profound cultural, social and political transformations. Think of Neil Young singing “four dead in O-hi-o” in the weeks after Kent State, or Joni Mitchell singing “they paved paradise” after the first Earth Day. Perhaps we thought we’d won those fights. But now we emerge into older age with skills, resources, grandchildren — and a growing fear that we’re about to leave the world a worse place than we found it. So some of us are more than ready to turn things around.It’s not that there aren’t plenty of older Americans involved in the business of politics: We’ve perhaps never had more aged people in positions of power, with most of the highest offices in the nation occupied by septuagenarians and up, yet even with all their skills they can’t get anything done because of the country’s political divisions.But the daily business of politics — the inside game — is very different from the sort of political movements that helped change the world in the ’60s. Those we traditionally leave to the young, and indeed at the moment it’s young people who are making most of the difference, from the new civil rights movement exemplified by Black Lives Matter to the teenage ranks of the climate strikers. But we can’t assign tasks this large to high school students as extra homework; that’s neither fair nor practical.Instead, we need older people returning to the movement politics they helped invent. It’s true that the effort to embarrass Spotify over its contributions to the stupidification of our body politic hasn’t managed yet to make it change its policies yet. But the users of that streaming service skew young: slightly more than half are below the age of 35, and just under a fifth are 55 or older.Other important pressure points may play out differently. One of Third Act’s first campaigns, for instance, aims to take on the biggest banks in America for their continued funding of the fossil fuel industry even as the global temperature keeps climbing. Chase, Citi, Bank of America and Wells Fargo might want to take note, because (fairly or not) 70 percent of the country’s financial assets are in the hands of boomers and the Silent Generation, compared with just about 5 percent for millennials. More

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      Overhaul of Electoral Count Act Will Pass, Manchin Says

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      Senators working to overhaul the law said recent revelations about former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election made their work even more crucial.WASHINGTON — Two senators working on an overhaul of the little-known law that former President Donald J. Trump and his allies tried to use to overturn the 2020 election pledged on Sunday that their legislation would pass the Senate, saying that recent revelations about the plot made their work even more important.In a joint interview on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Senators Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, and Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, said their efforts to rewrite the Electoral Count Act of 1887 were gaining broader support in the Senate, with as many as 20 senators taking part in the discussions.“Absolutely, it will pass,” Mr. Manchin said of an overhaul of the law, which dictates how Congress formalizes elections.He said efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to exploit “ambiguity” in the law were “what caused the insurrection” — the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. That misreading of the statute led to a plan by Mr. Trump and his allies to amass a crowd outside the Capitol to try to pressure Congress and Vice President Mike Pence, who presided over Congress’s official count of electoral votes, to overturn the results of the election.Ms. Murkowski said the rewrite could be expanded to include other protections for democracy, such as a crackdown on threats and harassment against election workers.“We want to make sure that if you are going to be an election worker,” Ms. Murkowski said, “you don’t feel intimidated or threatened or harassed.”A bipartisan group of at least 15 senators — which includes Mr. Manchin and Ms. Murkowski and is led by Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine — recently began discussions with another group that features top Democrats who have studied the issue for months. That group includes Senator Angus King, independent of Maine; Senator Amy Klobuchar, Democrat of Minnesota; and Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois.Mr. King’s group last week released draft legislative text for a rewrite of the Electoral Count Act that would address deficiencies exposed by Mr. Trump’s plan. The bill would clarify that the vice president has no power to reject a state’s electors and ensure that state legislatures cannot appoint electors after Election Day in an effort to overturn their state’s election results.It would also give states additional time to complete legitimate recounts and litigation; provide limited judicial review to ensure that the electors appointed by a state reflect the popular vote results in the state; enumerate specific and narrow grounds for objections to electors or electoral votes; raise the thresholds for Congress to consider objections; and make it harder to sustain objections without broad support by both chambers of Congress.In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. King called his group’s draft “very nonpartisan” and said it included the input of conservative and liberal legal scholars.“Hopefully we can join forces and get a good bill,” Mr. King said of Ms. Collins’s group.The latest push to clarify the law follows a series of revelations about a campaign by Mr. Trump and his allies to try to overturn the 2020 election, including the surfacing of memos that show the roots of the attempts to use so-called alternate electors to keep Mr. Trump in power and the former president’s exploration of proposals to seize voting machines.On Friday, Mr. Pence offered his most forceful rebuke of Mr. Trump’s plan, saying the former president was “wrong” to insist that Mr. Pence had the legal authority to overturn the results of the election. Those comments came on the same day the Republican National Committee voted to censure two members of the party, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, in a resolution that described the events of Jan. 6 as “legitimate political discourse.”Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger are the only Republican members of the special House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, which left more than 150 police officers injured and resulted in several deaths.The resolution drew criticism from some congressional Republicans on Sunday.Representative Michael McCaul, Republican of Texas, said on ABC’s “This Week” that he did “not agree with that statement — if it’s applying to those who committed criminal offenses and violence to overtake our shrine of democracy.”In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Marc Short, Mr. Pence’s former chief of staff, said that “from my front-row seat, I did not see a lot of legitimate political discourse.”Mr. Short blamed Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election on “many bad advisers who were basically snake-oil salesmen, giving him really random and novel ideas as to what the vice president could do.”He described being taken to a secure room in the Capitol with Mr. Pence on Jan. 6 as rioters stormed the building, some chanting, “Hang Mike Pence.” He said Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence did not talk that day.Mr. Short and another top Pence aide, Greg Jacob, recently testified before the committee, a step Mr. Pence’s advisers have hoped would stop the committee from issuing a subpoena for Mr. Pence. Representatives of Mr. Pence have been negotiating with the committee’s lawyers for months.“That would be a pretty unprecedented step for the committee to take,” Mr. Short said of a subpoena for the former vice president, adding that it would be “very difficult for me to see that scenario unfolding.”Emily Cochrane More

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      Where Fox News and Donald Trump Took Us

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      Roger Ailes understood the appeal Mr. Trump had for Fox viewers. He didn’t foresee how together they would redefine the limits of political discourse.When Roger Ailes ran CNBC in the mid-1990s, he gave himself a talk show called “Straight Forward.” It long ago vanished into the void of canceled cable programs and never received much attention after the network boss moved on to produce more provocative and polarizing content as chairman of Fox News. But “Straight Forward” was a fascinating window into what kind of people Mr. Ailes considered stars.Donald Trump was one of them. In late 1995, Mr. Ailes invited Mr. Trump, then a 49-year-old developer of condos and casinos, on the show and sounded a bit star-struck as he asked his guest to explain how a Manhattan multimillionaire could be so popular with blue-collar Americans.“The guy on the street, the cabdrivers, the guys working on the road crews go, ‘Hey, Donald! How’s it going?’” Mr. Ailes observed while the two men sat in front of a wood-paneled set piece that gave the studio the appearance of an elegant den in an Upper East Side apartment. “It’s almost like they feel very comfortable with you, like you’re one of them. And I’ve never quite figured out how you bridge that.”Mr. Trump answered by flipping his host’s assertion around. It was because of who hated him: other people with money. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people. It’s a funny thing. They can’t stand me,” Mr. Trump said, adding, “I sort of love it.”What Mr. Ailes sensed about Mr. Trump’s popularity with middle- and working-class Americans in the 1990s would stay with him, because he identified with it. “A lot of what we do at Fox is blue collar stuff,” he said in 2011.His understanding of those dynamics helped shape the coverage he directed for decades and led to an embrace of grievance-oriented political rhetoric that the Republican Party, and a further fragmented right-wing media landscape, is grappling with as it looks toward elections this fall and the possibility of Mr. Trump returning to politics.Roger Ailes interviewing Mr. Trump in 1995. “The people that don’t like me are the rich people,” Mr. Trump said.CNBCMr. Ailes was eventually ousted from Fox after several women at the network came forward to say he had sexually harassed them. But before that, his intuition about what audiences wanted — and what advertisers would pay for — helped Fox News smash ratings records for cable news. He could rouse the viewer’s patriotic impulses, mine their darkest fears and confirm their wildest delusions. Its coverage of then-Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, often laced with baseless speculation about his past, helped propel the network in 2008 to the highest ratings it had ever recorded in its 12 years of existence. Mr. Ailes earned $19 million that year.As he looked to assemble a dynamic cast of right-wing media stars to channel the rage and resentment of the budding Tea Party insurgency, Mr. Ailes’s instincts pushed Fox News ratings even higher.Three personalities he put on the air at Fox during that period stood out for the way they gave voice to a particular kind of American grievance. There was Glenn Beck, whose show debuted the day before the Obama inauguration in 2009. There was also Sarah Palin, who joined as a paid contributor earning $1 million a year in 2010.And of course there was Donald Trump. He was “relatable rich,” Mr. Ailes told his staff, betting that viewers would see something aspirational in him, when he decided to give Mr. Trump a weekly morning slot in early 2011.But it was what Mr. Ailes did not see about Mr. Trump — how his popularity was a double-edged sword — that led him to the same flawed assumption that the leaders of the Republican Party would eventually make. What neither they nor Mr. Ailes considered fully as they opened their arms to these insurgent forces was what would happen if encouraging and empowering them meant redefining the limits of acceptable political discourse, dropping the bar ever lower, and then discovering that they were helpless to reel it back in.That’s how Fox News landed in a once-unthinkable position behind CNN and MSNBC in the ratings in the weeks after Election Day in 2020, losing viewers to outlets like Newsmax and One America News eager to revel in — and profit from — the kind of misinformation that Fox rejected when it told its audience the truth about Mr. Trump’s defeat in Arizona.In reporting this book on the Republican Party, I spoke with the former president several times, and we discussed media coverage that debunked his unfounded claims about the 2020 election.“A lot of people don’t want that,” Mr. Trump told me in an interview about a month after President Biden’s inauguration, referring to critical — if accurate — news reports about his behavior. “They don’t want to hear negativity toward me.”Trump as a manageable riskAt his core, Mr. Ailes was two things that made him think someone like Mr. Trump was a manageable risk: deeply motivated by growing the size of the Fox audience and the attendant profits that would fatten his annual bonus; and an establishment Republican who, as G.O.P. strategist, had helped elect Nixon, Reagan and George H.W. Bush.He was no different from the transactionally minded Republican leaders in Congress who looked at the energized group of voters in the Tea Party and thought: This is going to be good for business. Christopher Ruddy, the chief executive of Newsmax, recalled speaking with Mr. Ailes about the budding new political movement on the right — which would be good for both men’s bottom lines — and said that while Mr. Ailes liked the movement’s use of patriotic language and its rebellious spirit, he ultimately “saw them as a convenient grass-roots group.”Mr. Trump, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin — three new Fox stars — initially delivered what Mr. Ailes was looking for: compelling television, good ratings and content viewers could find nowhere else. All three also ended up growing into big enough political celebrities in their own right — one more popular and entitled than the next — that Mr. Ailes eventually lost his ability to control them. (Through representatives, Mr. Beck and Ms. Palin declined to be interviewed.)One outburst from Mr. Beck in the summer of 2009 in particular demonstrated the extent to which norms were being stretched. That July, the raw, racialized anti-Obama anger of Tea Party sympathizers collided head-on with the country’s fraught history of systemic racial discrimination in Cambridge, Mass., when the noted Black scholar and Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home after a neighbor assumed he was a burglar and called the police. The president defended Mr. Gates and criticized the police who had “acted stupidly,” in his view.Glenn Beck, here rehearsing his Fox News Channel show in 2009, was a Fox star but eventually fell out of Mr. Ailes’s favor.Nicholas Roberts for The New York TimesMr. Beck responded during an interview on “Fox & Friends,” saying that Mr. Obama had revealed his “deep-seated hatred for white people.” Then he added, matter of factly, “This guy is, I believe, a racist.” When a public outcry ensued, the response from the network was to defend their host. Bill Shine, head of programming, released a statement that called Mr. Beck’s comment a “personal opinion” and not reflective of the network’s views over all. “And as with all commentators in the cable news arena, he is given the freedom to express his opinions,” Mr. Shine added.The significance was hard to overstate. One of the biggest stars on the most-watched cable news network in the country said the country’s first Black president hated white people. And the response from Fox News was to say it was all perfectly defensible.But Mr. Beck would be out at Fox soon enough, as Mr. Ailes became convinced antics like these were too much of a distraction. According to a former senior on-air personality, Mr. Ailes told other people at the network that Mr. Beck was “insane” and had complained to him about various physical ailments that seemed fake, including fretting once that he might be going blind. The network announced Mr. Beck’s departure in the spring of 2011.A Fox News snubThe network’s relationship with another one of its stars was also changing: Mr. Ailes expressed concern about some of Ms. Palin’s public statements, including engagement with critics.Ms. Palin appeared to have reservations of her own. And the tension with Mr. Ailes, which was more nuanced than known publicly, would help open the door at the network for Mr. Trump.She told people close to her at the time that Mr. Ailes made her uncomfortable, especially the way he commented on her looks. “He’s always telling me to eat more cheeseburgers,” she told one member of her staff.Once, after a private meeting in Mr. Ailes’s office at the network’s headquarters in Midtown Manhattan in 2010, she came out looking white as a ghost.Sarah Palin on “The Sean Hannity Show” during the Iowa State Fair in Des Moines in 2011.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesMr. Ailes’s assistant had asked that the aides and family members traveling with her wait outside so the two of them could meet alone. And when she emerged, according to the former staff member who was there, she said, “I’m never meeting with him alone again.”She was the biggest star in Republican politics at the time. The former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice-presidential nominee had come as close as anyone ever had to leading the leaderless Tea Party movement. And even without Fox, the media was tracking her every move.Over Memorial Day weekend in 2011, a caravan of journalists chased her up the East Coast during a six-day trip from Washington to New Hampshire, believing she might use the occasion to announce that she would run against Mr. Obama. The trip also included a dinnertime stop at Trump Tower, where she and its most famous resident stepped out in front of the paparazzi on their way to get pizza.She wouldn’t reveal her intentions until later that year, in October. And when she did, she broke the news on Mark Levin’s radio show — not on Fox News. It was a slight that infuriated Mr. Ailes, who had been paying her $1 million a year with the expectation that it would pay off with the buzz and big ratings that kind of announcement could generate.The Void Trump FilledThere were signs at the time that Mr. Trump was starting to fill the void in Fox’s coverage — and in conservative politics — that would exist without Ms. Palin center stage. He had been getting a considerable amount of coverage from the network lately for his fixation on wild rumors about Mr. Obama’s background.One interview in March 2011 on “Fox & Friends” — the show known inside the network to be such a close reflection of Mr. Ailes’s favorite story lines that staff called it “Roger’s daybook” — was typical of how Mr. Trump used his media platform to endear himself to the hard right. He spent an entire segment that morning talking about ways that the president could be lying about being born in the United States. “It’s turning out to be a very big deal because people now are calling me from all over saying, ‘Please don’t give up on this issue,’” Mr. Trump boasted.Three days after that interview, the network announced a new segment on “Fox & Friends”: “Mondays With Trump.” A promo teased that it would be “Bold, brash and never bashful.” And it was on “Fox & Friends” where Mr. Trump appeared after his pizza outing with Ms. Palin in the spring, talking up his prospects as a contender for the White House over hers. Mr. Trump and Mr. Ailes were, at first, seemingly well matched.Though he had financial motivations for promoting sensational but misleading stories, Mr. Ailes also seemed to be a true believer in some of the darkest and most bizarre political conspiracy theories.In 2013, Mr. Obama himself raised the issue with Michael Clemente, the Fox News executive vice president for news, asking him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner whether Mr. Ailes was fully bought-in on the conspiracies over the president’s birthplace. “Does Roger really believe this stuff?” Mr. Obama asked. Mr. Clemente answered, “He does.”The network boss and the celebrity developer also shared a dim view of the man who would win the 2012 Republican nomination, Mitt Romney. On election night, Mr. Ailes had already left the office by the time his network’s decision desk called the race for the president. Shortly after the election, he visited Mr. Romney at the Essex House, a posh hotel on Central Park South, to pay his respects. He also offered the candidate his unvarnished paranoia about the outcome.The Democrats had pulled a fast one, Mr. Ailes said, just as they always do. “They make promises they can’t keep. And they’re dirty. They cheat,” he said.Mr. Ailes, with his wife, Elizabeth, leaving the News Corp building in 2016.Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesMr. Ailes did not live to see Mr. Trump’s second, unsuccessful presidential campaign. A hemophiliac, he died after a bad fall in 2017. As confident as he was in his instincts that Mr. Trump would deliver good ratings, he wasn’t oblivious to the downside of emboldening him. At one point in 2016, he complained to a colleague, the former Fox News chief legal analyst Andrew Napolitano, that he dreaded hearing from Mr. Trump.“I hate it when he calls me. He talks to me like I talk to you. He cuts me off. He doesn’t let me finish my sentences. He constantly interrupts me,” the network chief grumbled to his subordinate, Mr. Napolitano recalled.But there is no doubt that in his chase for ratings and revenue, Mr. Ailes ultimately made his network the subordinate in its relationship with Mr. Trump. And for all his paranoia, Mr. Ailes failed to see how that might happen.Mr. Trump is still embittered by Fox’s decision on the night of the election to project that he had lost Arizona, and therefore most likely the White House. In an interview late last summer, he boasted about their ratings slide. “They’re doing poorly now, which is nice to watch,” he said.Fox News lost its crown as the most-watched cable news outlet in the weeks after the 2020 election, but it quickly regained it. It remains dominant today. Questions about its future in a Republican political environment still dominated by the former president abound. Will Mr. Trump grow irritated enough with the network to lash out and urge his followers to change the channel, tanking ratings again? Will its decision desk still feel empowered to make bold calls like the Arizona one after facing such an intense backlash?“Roger wasn’t the easiest guy to deal with,” Mr. Trump said in our interview, nodding to the rupture in their relationship toward the end. “But he was great at what he did. And he built a behemoth.”Then he offered a warning: “And that behemoth can evaporate very quickly if they’re not careful.”Jeremy W. Peters, a reporter for The New York Times, is the author of “Insurgency: How Republicans Lost Their Party and Got Everything They Ever Wanted,” from which this article is adapted. He is also an MSNBC contributor. More

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      Jan. 6 Was a Warning. Will Lawmakers Do Anything to Protect the 2024 Election?

      by

      The transfer of political power is perhaps the most delicate moment in the life of a democracy. It follows an election which the party in power lost and its opponents won. Inevitably, feelings are raw, tempers are short, and mistrust can run high … all as control of the nation is changing hands.Because politics is how a self-governing society resolves its differences peacefully, it is essential that the rules of this transfer are as clear as they can be. If they are not, they can be exploited to create confusion and discord. In the extreme, as the world saw on Jan. 6, 2021, ambiguity on the page opens the door to bloodshed in the streets — exactly what the rules aim to avoid.This is why Republicans and Democrats in Congress are right to train their sights on fixing, at long last, the 135-year-old federal law that sets out the process for tabulating the electoral votes that decide who becomes president, known as the Electoral Count Act.Legal experts have been raising the alarm over the act for years. Its most consequential provision, dealing with Congress’s counting of electoral votes, is “a virtually impenetrable maze,” one scholar wrote in 2019. This was the provision that President Donald Trump, assisted by a posse of partisan lawyers, zeroed in on to encourage arguably unconstitutional behavior by Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress, potentially criminal behavior by Rudy Giuliani and his dozens of fake electors, and obviously criminal behavior by hundreds of rioters who laid siege to the Capitol.It doesn’t matter whether any of these people actually believed the wild claims about how the Electoral Count Act works, if they had heard of it at all. The law’s confounding language created the space for a seductive narrative about a stolen election, and a legal path to take it back.More than a year later, Mr. Trump continues to lie about the law, revealing in the process his utter contempt for the most basic democratic principles. “Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away,” Mr. Trump said late last month in a statement opposing E.C.A. reform. “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power — he could have overturned the election!”No, he could not. Mr. Pence acknowledged as much on Friday. “I had no right to overturn the election,” he said. Yet that much should have been crystal-clear even before 2020. Since it wasn’t, and since Mr. Trump shows every indication of planning to run again in 2024, it is imperative that Congress clarifies the law now — before anyone casts a ballot in that election, and before knowing which party will be in charge of the Senate or the House of Representatives. It’s not hyperbole to say that American democracy is at stake.To understand the mess of the Electoral Count Act requires a brief history lesson. The law arose out of one of the most controversial elections in American history, the 1876 presidential race, a nail-biter with disputes over electoral votes in several states, leading to an ad hoc congressional commission that haggled for months and did not settle on a clear winner until days before the inauguration. Rutherford B. Hayes, who in the end was awarded the presidency over the Democrat, Samuel Tilden, wrote that “radical change” was needed immediately to prevent a similar battle from tearing the nation apart. Still a decade went by before Congress took action, and the law it ultimately passed confused more than it clarified.Today, three reforms matter above all: clearly defining the role and powers of the vice president, of Congress and of the states in electing the president. All three are central to achieving the fundamental goal, which is to ensure that voters, and not partisan political officials, get to choose their leader.Let’s take each of the players in turn.First, the vice president. Contrary to the self-serving fantasies of Mr. Trump and the lawyers who schemed with him, like John Eastman, the vice president’s role on Jan. 6 is a straightforward one. Starting at 1 p.m., the job is to open the envelopes and announce the electoral-vote counts from each state, in alphabetical order, then call for any objections. That’s it.She or he has no authority to unilaterally reject electors from the states. The law already lays out this process, but its outdated language is vague and should be clarified in a way that leaves no room for mischief.Next, Congress. The national legislature has many responsibilities, but sitting as a presidential-recount board is not one of them. Whenever a state submits a single, uncontested slate of electors, as all 50 states did in 2020, Congress’s job is to accept it. The problem is that the Electoral Count Act makes it easy to throw a wrench in the works by allowing objections to a state’s submission if only a single senator and a single representative sign on. This sets off hours of debate and delay — a recipe for chaos, as Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley demonstrated with their grandstanding around baseless allegations about voting irregularities that had been rejected by every court to consider them.To avoid a repeat of this shameful and reckless behavior, Congress should raise the bar significantly — by requiring the assent of one-quarter or even one-third of both houses to lodge an objection, and a supermajority to sustain one. It should also strictly limit the grounds for raising an objection in the first place.What if a state submits two conflicting slates of electors? And what if the two houses of Congress disagree over which slate is valid? That’s a different sort of problem, and while it didn’t happen in 2020, it did in 1876 and could cause a major crisis again in 2024 — if, say, a Trump-aligned governor who believes that election was stolen refuses to certify a valid popular-vote count that favors the Democratic nominee, and instead authorizes his state’s Republican electors to cast their ballots for Mr. Trump. (Think that sounds crazy? Then you haven’t been listening to David Perdue, the former senator running for governor of Georgia.) In such a scenario, the Electoral Count Act needs to make it clear that Congress should accept the electors who were chosen in accordance with state law.This is where the courts, and especially the federal courts, play an essential role. The law should leave no doubt that judges — and not political actors — have the last word in resolving any vote-counting disputes that arise between Election Day and mid-December, when electors meet in state capitals to cast their ballots.Last, but far from least, are the states themselves. Under the Constitution, state legislatures have the authority to appoint their electors however they choose. They can let the voters do it, as all 50 states do today, or they can do it themselves, as many states did in the early years of the Republic. The key point is, there are no backsies. Once a legislature has settled on a method, it may not change its mind because it’s not happy with the results on Election Day. If a state uses the popular vote to appoint electors, it is required to count those votes fairly and accurately, and to appoint electors in line with the outcome. As the speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives said last week in rejecting a bill that would have given the legislature the power to overturn the popular vote, “We gave the authority to the people. And I’m not going to go back and kick them in the teeth.’’Yet there is a glaring loophole in the federal law: If a state fails to make a choice by its prescribed method on Election Day, the legislature may step in and do as it pleases. This provision, even older than the Electoral Count Act, was written to address a narrow set of scenarios specific to the mid-19th century. Today it only invites abuse, as state legislatures can try to spin any outcome they don’t like as a “failed” election.Congress needs to limit this provision to real “failures” — a major natural disaster, terrorist attack or some other catastrophe, and even then only if it is impossible to arrange for a popular election afterward.Electoral Count Act reform is not the voting issue Democrats were hoping to push through Congress. They are rightly furious with Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, along with every Senate Republican, for thwarting two badly needed bills that would have attacked many forms of voter suppression and partisan gerrymandering. Still, the current push to reform the act, whose proponents include Senators Angus King, Amy Klobuchar, Susan Collins and Mitt Romney, is worth the effort — not only because it will help protect the integrity of the presidential election, but because it may well be the only reform with enough bipartisan support to pass in this polarized moment.If its essential components do pass, Democrats can take comfort in knowing that politicians and lawmakers will have a much harder time undermining a valid vote. Republicans, who like to talk about the importance of states’ rights in our federalist system, can be reassured that Congress will stay in its lane and leave the power to appoint electors with the states, where it belongs.None of this would be an issue, of course, if the United States simply counted up all the votes and saw who won. In 2020, over seven million more Americans chose Joe Biden than chose Mr. Trump, a resounding victory that would have been impervious to all the legally dubious shenanigans Mr. Trump and his allies tried to pull. Even in the closest election of the last half century, in 2000, the national popular-vote margin was more than half a million — far more than the margins of victory in all the disputed states of 2000 and 2020 combined.But as long as we have the Electoral College, the process needs to be as clear and as foolproof as possible. Making it so will not guarantee that things run perfectly. After all, a political movement that is categorically unwilling to accept electoral defeat can do a lot of damage. But just because we can’t plan for everything is not an excuse to do nothing. When you make the perfect the enemy of the good, you get neither.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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      I’ll Bet on Susan Collins Over the Resistance

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      Here are two anecdotes from the still-unspooling saga of Jeff Zucker, no longer the head of CNN. First, from the aftermath: According to The Los Angeles Times, in a meeting between some of the network’s staffers and its corporate leadership, the CNN correspondent Jamie Gangel shared that four members of the congressional committee investigating Jan. 6 had called to say that Zucker’s exit left them “devastated for our democracy.”Second, from the background to Zucker’s departure: We already knew that he blessed the wild prime-time lovefest between the brothers Cuomo, the CNN anchor and the New York governor. But now it’s being reported by The New York Post that Zucker helped arrange the absurd interviews, sometimes through the influence of his paramour, a former Andrew Cuomo communications director, and even allegedly gave the New York governor advice on how to swat at Donald Trump during his famous Covid-19 briefings.You can put these anecdotes together and get a decent understanding of what went wrong in important parts of American media during the Trump presidency. The powerful belief that only CNN — indeed, only Jeff Zucker — stood between democracy and authoritarianism encouraged the abandonment of normal journalistic standards, the sacrifice of sobriety and neutrality to what Armin Rosen, writing for UnHerd, dubs the “centrist-branded panic industry.”Undergirding this shift, at CNN and elsewhere, was a theory that the way to blunt Trump’s demagogic power was to assemble the broadest possible coalition of elites in media and politics, to establish moral clarity and create an effective cordon sanitaire.In 2016, I believed in this strategy, urged it on Republicans during the primaries and participated in it — along with most conservative commentators I respected — by opposing Trump’s election in the fall.But then Trump won — with a minority of the vote, yes, but all that elite opposition couldn’t even get Hillary Clinton to 49 percent, and the Republicans won more votes nationally than Democrats in House elections, paying no obvious price for having nominated Trump. The American people listened to the Never Trump alliance, fanned out across our newspapers and magazines and networks, and delivered their verdict: For every Republican we persuaded, a different sort of swing voter seemed to discover that maybe there were good reasons to take a chance on Trump.What followed in Trump’s presidency was a doubling down on the elite-opposition strategy — but increasingly I doubted its approach. In its most sincere form the anti-Trump front became paranoid and credulous, addled by the Steele dossier and lost in Twitter doomscrolling. In its more careerist form, it became a racket for former Republican consultants. And in general it became its own ideological echo chamber, a circle of clarity closed to anyone with doubts.In detaching somewhat, I remained an anti-Trump conservative; after the 2020 election’s aftermath, it’s safe to say that I’m forever Never Trump. But I decided that fundamentally the elite-consolidation strategy was a failure — that it succeeded in 2020 only because of the pandemic and that it may fail in 2024 — and that if Trump were to be permanently defeated, one of two things needed to happen: Either some adaptation from Republicans, one that might seem ugly or compromised in its own way (as you see now, say, in Ron DeSantis’s winks and nods to anti-vaxxers), or some shift that made the leftward-lurching Democrats seem less dangerous to cross-pressured Americans.So those are the two questions that this column takes up regularly: Can there be Trumpism without Trump, and what’s so unappealing or frightening about progressivism and the Democratic Party? And the consistency of those themes clearly sometimes exasperates people who think they amount to moral equivalence or denial about how awful the Republican Party has become.I don’t mind those critiques, but I will close this exercise in navel-gazing with a concrete example of where I think that they go wrong. For the united front of Never Trump, there’s no greater heroine at the moment than Liz Cheney, and no clearer embodiment of Republican cowardice than Susan Collins, the Maine moderate who even now won’t say definitively that she’ll oppose Trump if he’s the 2024 nominee.I also admire Cheney’s direct anti-Trumpism, as I’ve admired it from Mitt Romney, and now even a little from Mike Pence. (Yes, it’s a low bar.) But if you believe, reasonably, that the immediate danger posed by Trump’s demagogy involves an attempted Electoral College theft in 2024, then Cheney’s work is a lot less important than the bipartisan effort underway in the Senate to reform the Electoral Count Act. And that effort is being steered, with some success so far, by Collins.Maybe the effort will ultimately fail. But it’s quite possible that the most important response to the events of Jan. 6 will be shepherded by Republicans playing a careful inside game, with the cautious navigation of the senior senator from Maine more essential than a thousand essays about never giving Trumpism an inch.That’s not a heroic view of how democracies are stabilized and demagogues finally retired. But if the choice is between this unheroism and the mentality that gave us Jeff Zucker and the brothers Cuomo, for now I’m inclined to bet on Susan Collins.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