More stories

  • in

    Republican Presidential Primary: 7 Numbers That Tell the Story

    There’s $46,499,124.63. There’s 3 percent. Here are five other figures that shed light on the dynamics at play before Monday’s caucuses.The only numbers that will truly matter in the Iowa caucuses on Monday will be the number of votes tallied for Donald J. Trump, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.But there are a number of, well, numbers that help explain the Republican nominating contest. In most polls, Mr. Trump holds a solid lead, while Ms. Haley and Mr. DeSantis are battling it out far behind in a fight for second place.Here are seven numbers that show how we got here — and what comes next.28 percentage pointsMr. Trump’s lead in the Iowa Poll The bar has been set.In the Iowa Poll released on Saturday evening by The Des Moines Register, NBC News and Mediacom, Mr. Trump was winning 48 percent of likely caucusgoers. It’s a dominant showing that’s more than the total support measured for Ms. Haley (20 percent) and Mr. DeSantis (16 percent) combined.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    How College-Educated Republicans Learned to Love Trump Again

    Blue-collar white voters make up Donald Trump’s base. But his political resurgence has been fueled largely by Republicans from the other end of the socioeconomic scale.Working-class voters delivered the Republican Party to Donald J. Trump. College-educated conservatives may ensure that he keeps it.Often overlooked in an increasingly blue-collar party, voters with a college degree remain at the heart of the lingering Republican cold war over abortion, foreign policy and cultural issues.These voters, who have long been more skeptical of Mr. Trump, have quietly powered his remarkable political recovery inside the party — a turnaround over the past year that has notably coincided with a cascade of 91 felony charges in four criminal cases.Even as Mr. Trump dominates Republican primary polls ahead of the Iowa caucuses on Monday, it was only a year ago that he trailed Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida in some surveys — a deficit due largely to the former president’s weakness among college-educated voters. Mr. DeSantis’s advisers viewed the party’s educational divide as a potential launching point to overtake Mr. Trump for the nomination.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    ‘Would a Call From Tammy Help?’ Pressure Grows in Race to Oust Menendez

    In a series of calls, a person in contact with the Senate campaign of Gov. Philip Murphy’s wife pressured a student Democratic group not to endorse her chief rival in the New Jersey race.The College Democrats of New Jersey were preparing to make an endorsement in one of the country’s most closely watched U.S. Senate primaries when calls began to come in from someone in touch with the campaign of Tammy Murphy, the presumptive front-runner and the wife of the state’s governor.The caller, a female college student who works as a youth coordinator for the Democratic State Committee, wanted to know what Ms. Murphy’s campaign could do to block the group from endorsing Ms. Murphy’s main rival, Representative Andy Kim.“Would a call from Tammy help?” the woman said she asked, while indicating she was relaying a message from the Murphy campaign.Then, in a series of calls over the next two hours, the pressure from the caller, Keely Magee, escalated to warnings — about funding and future job prospects for leaders of the College Democrats, according to several people involved in the discussions and a recording of one call.In an interview, Ms. Magee said the Murphy campaign had not asked her to pressure the group on its behalf. But she acknowledged being aware that members of Ms. Murphy’s campaign staff “wanted to do something to prevent the endorsement,” and said she was receiving text messages from a Murphy campaign consultant, Dave Parano.On the recorded call, Ms. Magee described Mr. Parano as a co-worker who had “talked directly” to the campaign manager and was “very, very close with the Murphys.” Mr. Parano did not respond to messages seeking comment.The effort to stop the endorsement failed. On Wednesday, both the College Democrats of America and the New Jersey chapter issued full-throated endorsements of Mr. Kim, a South Jersey Democrat running against Ms. Murphy for the chance to oust Senator Bob Menendez.The episode offered a rare, behind-the-scenes look at the high-stakes political battle playing out as New Jersey’s first lady, a first-time candidate, struggles to gain grass-roots traction in her bid to unseat Mr. Menendez, who faces federal bribery charges.With support from her husband, Gov. Philip D. Murphy, a second-term Democrat, Ms. Murphy has been endorsed by many of the state’s most powerful Democrats and has raised a record amount of contributions in her campaign’s first six weeks. Yet several polls suggest that she continues to trail Mr. Kim by a wide margin.Ms. Murphy and Representative Andy Kim are the front-runners in the race to unseat Senator Robert Menendez, who is facing criminal charges.Maansi Srivastava/The New York TimesAlex Altman, a spokeswoman for Ms. Murphy’s campaign, said Ms. Magee’s comments were “totally and completely inappropriate, and they in no way represent this campaign or what we stand for.”“They were made by a young person with no connection to our campaign, one who seemed eager to help, albeit in a misguided manner,” Ms. Altman added.Ms. Magee, a 21-year-old Rutgers University junior, has worked part time as a paid youth coordinator for the Democratic State Committee for several years.Ms. Magee said her main objective had been to persuade members of the College Democrats’ executive board to halt an online endorsement vote that was underway and remain neutral instead. She said she believed that statewide Democratic organizations should not pick sides before a primary and was worried that a group she was responsible for guiding might face repercussions for doing so.“It wasn’t coming from a place of threatening at all,” she said.But students on the other end of the calls said they had felt threatened, so much so that they recorded the final call to have proof of the exchange if they were penalized later. The students then gave Mr. Kim’s campaign access to the recording, which was also shared with The New York Times.“I felt a mix of shock and fear,” said Nate Howard, 20, a Princeton University junior who is vice president of the New Jersey chapter of the College Democrats and participated in the call with Ms. Magee that was recorded. “Shock because: Why are these people threatening us? Are we really that important?”According to the recording, Ms. Magee warned the students that an early endorsement of Mr. Kim could harm their future job prospects, deprive their organization of as much as $2,000 in funding and hurt their odds of being selected as delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.“If Tammy Murphy does somehow win being senator, I’d be careful about ever getting a job in that office or anything like that,” Ms. Magee said. “At least for the first few years of her term until her staff turns over.”Mr. Kim won the endorsement of the College Democrats.Bryan Anselm for The New York TimesMr. Howard said Ms. Murphy called him on Friday to apologize. Ms. Magee said Mr. Parano, a political field consultant who also does work for the state committee, had also apologized to her for involving her in the process in the first place.Ms. Murphy’s campaign said that all of the students involved in this “unfortunate situation” should be afforded the “grace, allowance and forgiveness that we all deserve at that age.”In the 2020 election, 67 percent of New Jersey voters between the ages of 18 and 29 cast ballots, the highest rate in the country.A spokeswoman for the Kim campaign said it was excited to receive the college groups’ endorsements, but had no comment about the recording.Mr. Howard said the experience had underscored what he believes is wrong with politics.“For things to get better,” Mr. Howard said, “I believe that it will require courageous people to tell the truth about the inappropriate and frankly gross behaviors of the status quo.” More

  • in

    In Race to Replace George Santos, Financial Questions Re-emerge

    Mazi Pilip, the Republican candidate running in New York’s Third District, drew scrutiny after her initial financial disclosure was missing required information.The Republican nominee in a special House election to replace George Santos in New York provided a hazy glimpse into her personal finances this week, submitting a sworn financial statement to Congress that prompted questions and led her to amend the filing.The little-known candidate, Mazi Pilip, reported between $1 million and $5.2 million in assets, largely comprising her husband’s medical practice and Bitcoin investments. In an unusual disclosure, she said the couple owed and later repaid as much as $250,000 to the I.R.S. last year.But the initial financial report Ms. Pilip filed with the House Ethics Committee on Wednesday appeared to be missing other important required information, including whether the assets were owned solely by herself or her husband, Dr. Adalbert Pilip, or whether they were owned jointly.And despite making past statements that she stopped working there in 2021 when she ran for the Nassau County Legislature, Ms. Pilip reported receiving a $50,000 salary from the family medical practice in 2022 and 2023.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    Nikki Haley Is Tougher Than the Rest

    Politics is a tough business, so you’d think most politicians would be tough people. In fact, in my experience they’re often not. A lot of people go into politics because they want to be universally liked, and from Abraham Lincoln on down, many of them have detested personal confrontation. Several years ago it occurred to me that in every administration I had covered to that point — from Reagan through Obama — the White House staff seemed to fear the first lady more than they feared the commander in chief.This has obviously changed in recent times. Donald Trump was tough, mean and self-pitying (a nifty combination). President Biden is tougher than he looks. And the woman who is now Trump’s chief challenger, Nikki Haley, is one of the toughest politicians in America — by which I mean confrontational, willing to hammer her foes.When you read accounts of her days in South Carolina, her bellicosity fairly ripples off the pages. In a fantastic 2021 profile in Politico Magazine, Tim Alberta quotes a former South Carolina Republican Party chair: “Listen, man. She will cut you to pieces. Nikki Haley has a memory. She has a memory. She will remember who was with her and who was against her. And she won’t give a second chance to anyone who she thinks did her wrong.”But the most telling quotation is the one Haley gave to Alberta herself: “I don’t trust, because I’ve never been given a reason to trust.”She grew up in the only Indian American family in a small working-class South Carolina town. The stories she tells about her girlhood are often about exclusion: being disqualified from a beauty pageant because it was set up to allow for only one Black and one white winner (though some locals dispute this); a fruit-stand vendor calling the cops because her father was a brown-skinned man wearing a turban. She once described her childhood as “survival mode.”Today, many people think of Haley as part of the older Republican establishment, a political descendant of the Bushes and Mitt Romney who suddenly finds herself trying to thrive in a party dominated by Trumpian populists. This is not quite right. Haley entered politics as a Tea Party maverick. As Hanna Rosin noted in The Atlantic in 2011, the Tea Party was female-led, and most of its supporters were right-wing women who, among other things, wanted to take on the Republican old boys network. Women like Haley and Sarah Palin presented themselves as whistle-blowers, taking down corruption.Haley ran her first campaign, for state legislature, against a 30-year Republican incumbent. What ensued was classic South Carolina politics. A mailer went out attacking her and referring to her by her birth name, Nimrata Randhawa. A whisper campaign suggested she was Buddhist or Hindu. (In fact, she is a Christian who attends a Methodist church). When she got to the legislature, she didn’t fit in with the old guard. “I’m telling you, nobody liked her. Nobody wanted to work with her. They hated her,” another state representative, who became a close friend, told Alberta.Alberta captured this period of her career this way: “She came to be loathed by many of her fellow Republicans for not being a team player, for going rogue on certain votes and procedures that made them look slimy or stupid to her benefit.”In 2010, she was given little shot at winning the governor’s race until Palin visited the state to enthusiastically endorse her. Once again the rough rules of South Carolina politics prevailed. Two men surfaced at the height of the campaign, including a lobbyist who had worked for one of her rivals, claiming to have had affairs with her, while lacking evidence. A fellow lawmaker called her a “raghead.”After his own political career imploded, Gov. Mark Sanford gave Haley a $400,000 donation at a crucial moment in the campaign. “And then she cut me off,” Sanford recalled to Alberta. “This is systematic with Nikki: She cuts off people who have contributed to her success. It’s almost like there’s some weird psychological thing where she needs to pretend it’s self-made.”As governor it was more of the same. She frequently went to war with lawmakers to get her agenda passed. “I have called out legislators from Year 1,” she once declared. “I go to their districts and call them out. I mean, it’s what I’m known for. I put their votes up on Facebook.” One of her great successes as governor was relentlessly lobbying corporations to build their plants in South Carolina. When she left office, the state had 400,000 more jobs than when she entered.She brought the same pummeling manner to her job as U.N. ambassador. All U.S. ambassadors to the United Nations defend Israel, but Haley made it the centerpiece of her job. She waded into a famously anti-Israel institution with fists raised. She was one of the people who made the Trump administration so supportive of the Jewish state. When close allies like Britain and France voted for a resolution condemning the U.S. decision to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, she did not invite their representatives to a U.S. Mission reception, which is practically war in U.N. terms.Seen through one lens, she is a ruthlessly ambitious person who is happy to bruise people to succeed. Seen from another perspective, she is a brave renegade who fights the old guard to get things done. Seen through a third lens, she is a needlessly competitive personality who makes enemies in profusion. All three viewpoints seem to contain a piece of the truth.A few things need to be said to complicate this picture. First, though she knows how to play hardball, her heart has not been callused over. When nine parishioners at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston were gunned down by a white supremacist in 2015, she was vulnerable and grieving in public and private. She went to all of the funerals. Her friends worried she was losing a dangerous amount of weight. Mobilized by sadness and anger, she helped persuade more than two-thirds of both houses of the legislature to remove the Confederate flag from the State Capitol grounds, which was an astounding act of political craftsmanship and moral fortitude that even her detractors admire.Second, if she’s often tough as nails, she has generally been tough as tulips about Donald Trump. As The Times’ Sharon LaFraniere has reported, she was not one of the Trump officials who would stand up to try to prevent him from carrying out his more crackpot ideas. “Every time she criticizes me, she uncriticizes me about 15 minutes later,” Trump told Vanity Fair in 2021, which is pretty accurate.I wonder if Haley would be seen as tougher if she were a man. I also wonder if her toughness was forged by being a woman in a conservative, male-dominated state. Maya Angelou offered some wisdom on female toughness in her 1993 book, “Wouldn’t Take Nothing for My Journey Now.” She wrote, “The woman who survives intact and happy must be at once tender and tough. She must have convinced herself, or be in the unending process of convincing herself, that she, her values and her choices are important. In a time and world where males hold sway and control, the pressure upon women to yield their rights of way is tremendous. And it is under those very circumstances that the woman’s toughness must be in evidence.”By this measure, Haley has succeeded amazingly well. But then Angelou added a wrinkle: A woman “will need to prize her tenderness and be able to display it at appropriate times in order to prevent toughness from gaining total authority and to avoid becoming a mirror image of those men who value power above life, and control over love.”There’s often been a wariness around Haley, people worrying she’s mostly about herself. Donald Trump, who really is all about himself, has somehow made himself into the much-beloved tribune of the working class in a way his opponents just haven’t.The Republican Party has come a long way in the last few decades. The party is no longer in the mood for compassionate conservatism or even Ronald Reagan’s sunny optimism. Republicans feel besieged and want a bruiser type who will defend them. In their different ways, Trump and Haley are both products of and architects of the current G.O.P. vibe. Neither Trump nor Haley sits around reading Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. Neither Trump nor Haley has what you would call fully developed philosophies. Neither is conventionally partisan; both made their bones attacking the G.O.P. establishment, not working their way up within it.Mike Pence was too boring to match the party’s current mood. Tim Scott was too nice. Trump and the woman who is now his leading challenger are different versions of a bare-knuckled ethos, and if you look at their records, it’s pretty clear that Haley is actually more effectively tough than Trump. She’s confrontational in pursuit of policy, whereas he is confrontational in pursuit of ratings. She’s a doer; his attention span isn’t long enough to make him an effective executive. If Republicans want someone who will execute their agenda, they should go with her.Unfortunately, Haley’s support in the G.O.P. seems to have a low ceiling. This campaign is about toughness and finding someone who can defend a party that feels under siege, but it’s also about identity and class. Haley is surging, but she is surging mostly among college-educated voters. In general, Haley does better among more educated voters than less, slightly better among men than women, and she does poorly among evangelicals, which these days is as much a nationalist identity category as a religious one.Trump also has an advantage that Haley can’t match. He is reviled by the coastal professional classes. That’s a sacred bond with working-class and rural voters who feel similarly slighted and unseen. The connection between working-class voters and a shady real estate billionaire is a complex psychological phenomenon that historians will have to unpack. But it’s a bond no amount of Nikki Haley toughness can break.Source photograph by Christian Monterrosa, via Getty Images.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, Instagram, TikTok, X and Threads. More

  • in

    Proud Boys Member Who Threatened Police With Ax Handle on Jan. 6 Is Sentenced

    William Chrestman of Olathe, Kan., a Proud Boys member, was sentenced to 55 months for breaching the U.S. Capitol and threatening officers, prosecutors said.A member of the Proud Boys extremist group who threatened police officers with an ax handle and breached the U.S. Capitol during the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, was sentenced on Friday to nearly five years in prison, federal prosecutors said.Judge Timothy J. Kelly of U.S. District Court in Washington sentenced the man, William Chrestman, 51, of Olathe, Kan., to 55 months in prison. Mr. Chrestman pleaded guilty in October to felony charges of obstruction of an official proceeding and threatening a federal officer.The judge also ordered Mr. Chrestman to pay $2,000 in restitution, and his prison sentence will be followed by three years of supervised release, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in a statement on Friday.Mr. Chrestman was sentenced to less time in prison than the 63 months that prosecutors had recommended in a sentencing memo. They argued that Mr. Chrestman had “played a significant role during the riot due to his presence and conduct at pivotal moments during the day.”Lawyers for Mr. Chrestman did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Friday. Prosecutors declined to comment.Mr. Chrestman has been in jail since he was arrested in February 2021, and he will get credit for time served, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.The Jan. 6 Riot Inquiry So Far: Three Years, Hundreds of Prison SentencesMore than 1,200 people have now been arrested in connection with the attack on the Capitol, and more than 450 sentenced to periods of incarceration. The investigation is far from over.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

  • in

    Manchin Stirs Chatter of 2024 Third-Party Bid in New Hampshire

    The attention-seeking West Virginia senator, who has teased a late third-party presidential bid, tried to keep up the suspense at a Friday appearance in the state.During an eyebrow-raising visit to New Hampshire on Friday, Senator Joe Manchin III of West Virginia name-checked friends who are elected officials in the Granite State and complimented the discerning nature of its voters.He paid homage to the state’s first-in-the-nation primary tradition and swiped at President Biden’s decision to undercut New Hampshire’s power in this year’s Democratic contest.And when pressed on his own ambitions, the conservative Democratic senator offered a message that would-be candidates have often deployed as they flirt with this historically influential early-voting state: He declined to rule anything out.“How would you feel if a bunch of Democrats in New Hampshire wrote in ‘Joe’ — not Biden — but wrote in ‘Joe Manchin’?” an attendee asked as Mr. Manchin kicked off a “listening tour” at Politics and Eggs, an event series at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics that has long hosted presidential candidates and potential contenders.“I cannot prevent whatever you want to do,” Mr. Manchin replied to applause from the audience in Manchester, N.H., before insisting that he was “not here campaigning.”The question of what Mr. Manchin wants to do has long infuriated and confounded many of his Democratic colleagues in Washington, who have often seen him as a roadblock to their legislative agenda, even as he has played a pivotal role in eventually passing key priorities.Now, Mr. Manchin — known for a love of the spotlight that stands out even among U.S. senators — is stoking new questions about his next steps.Speculation has grown about whether he might embark on a late, long-shot presidential bid this year, and he has attracted interest from No Labels, a centrist group that is searching for a “unity ticket” to mount a potential third-party bid. Democratic allies of Mr. Biden are trying to stave off such efforts.Mr. Manchin, who announced in November that he would not seek re-election in his deep-red state in 2024, has teased a potential third-party run for the presidency.Charles Krupa/Associated Press“He really deserves most serious consideration from No Labels because he is part of our movement” if he is interested in a third-party bid, said former Senator Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut, the founding chairman of the group. He said he had spoken with Mr. Manchin after the senator announced in November that he would not seek re-election. “He’s walked the centrist, bipartisan, problem-solving walk.”(Mr. Lieberman has also talked up a run by former Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, who dropped out of the Republican presidential race this week. But he said on Thursday that while Mr. Christie had many fans at No Labels, the last time he had personally spoken to him was probably “at a Mets game last summer.”)Mr. Manchin did not offer a ringing endorsement of the group’s plans when asked on Friday about the electoral potential of such a bid.“It’s admirable what they’re trying to do to provide an option — OK, they’re working very hard towards that, and their best intentions are to bring people together,” he said, noting his longtime involvement with the group. Pressed again on the question of viability, he replied: “I don’t know. I mean, you have to — the people decide that. I think by Super Tuesday, you’ll know what’s going on.”Mr. Manchin, with his daughter, has started an organization called Americans Together, designed to elevate moderate voices — the “responsible, sensible, common-sense middle,” he said on Friday — whom he casts as often politically homeless. The New Hampshire swing was the first stop on what his team has called a listening tour, but he emphasized that his group was “completely different” from No Labels.Throughout his appearances — at the breakfast, in speaking with reporters and at a diner where he was trailed by climate-focused protesters — Mr. Manchin denounced the far right and the far left (though any notion that Mr. Biden falls close to that category is risible to his many left-wing detractors). And at times, Mr. Manchin seemed to slip into overt campaign mode, even as he insisted at other points that he had made no decisions about a run.“Everyone says, ‘Well, are you running for this, or running for that?’” he said on Friday morning, adding that, no, he was “running” to “bring the country together.”“I want you to know there’s hope,” he continued. “Nobody can win up here unless they get the independent vote. Nobody can win unless they get the center left and center right.”He also repeatedly declined to say whether he would support Mr. Biden over former President Donald J. Trump in a November matchup, though he has said in the past that he will not back Mr. Trump.“I’m not picking anything right now until we see what we have,” he said, though he later allowed in an interview that he was “absolutely comfortable with Biden’s character.” He added: “Do I agree with the politics? Not all of the time.”He also nodded to recent polls that have shown Mr. Biden struggling, calling them “alarming,” adding, “The whole thing is alarming, from a standpoint, how close it can be again, how it might even flip to a different direction.”Democrats worry that third-party bids could siphon votes from Mr. Biden and hand the election to Mr. Trump if he is the Republican nominee. Matt Bennett, a founder of the center-left group Third Way, who has been engaged in efforts to block third-party and independent candidates, expressed optimism that Mr. Manchin would not go that route. Mr. Manchin, for his part, has insisted that he has no interest in being a “spoiler.”“Joe Manchin is on a listening tour to talk to voters about the value of moderate ideas, and we think that’s fantastic,” Mr. Bennett said in a text message. “We think it’s smart for him to have started in N.H. and get the attention from the giant political press corps there. We know he hasn’t made a final decision on running for president, but we’re confident that he won’t.”Mr. Manchin suggested on Friday that the country was interested in more options, but he seemed uncomfortable directly engaging in talk of a third-party bid himself, saying vaguely at one point: “There might be more choices. There might be different choices. We just don’t know yet.”In an interview, he said: “I’m looking for, how do you bring the country together, how do we get people involved? And if that’s a decision to make, I’ll live with whatever decision.”As he wrapped up glad-handing at the diner in Derry, where he told a Republican fan that he did not know if he would run, a reporter asked if he could name one thing that appealed to him about a third-party bid and one thing that would give him pause.The usually voluble senator smiled, declared that he was there to bring Americans together and walked away. More

  • in

    Why Jan. 6 Wasn’t an Insurrection

    I’ve written several times about the case for disqualifying Donald Trump via the 14th Amendment, arguing that it fails tests of political prudence and constitutional plausibility alike. But the debate keeps going, and the proponents of disqualification have dug into the position that whatever the prudential concerns about the amendment’s application, the events of Jan. 6, 2021, obviously amounted to an insurrection in the sense intended by the Constitution, and saying otherwise is just evasion or denial.From their vantage point, any definition of “insurrection” that limits the amendment’s application to the kind of broad political-military rebellion that occasioned its original passage — to the hypothetical raising of a Trumpist Army of Northern Virginia, say, or the seizure of the U.S. Capitol by a Confederate States of Trumpist America — is an abuse of the natural meaning of the word. Such a limitation, they say, ignores all the obvious ways that lesser, less comprehensive forms of resistance to lawful authority clearly qualify as insurrectionary.Here are a couple of examples of this argument: The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, arguing with me and New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait; and the constitutional law professor Ilya Somin, going back and forth with his fellow legal scholar Steven Calabresi in Reason magazine.I have a basic sympathy with Calabresi’s suggestion that the “paradigmatic example” that the drafters of the 14th Amendment had in mind should guide our understanding of its ambiguities, and since the paradigmatic example is the Civil War, in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed, a five-hour riot probably doesn’t clear the bar. (For related arguments about the perils of applying precedents from specific crises to radically different situations, see this essay from Samuel Issacharoff as well.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More