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      Tell Me the One About the Presidential Candidate Who Ran for Mayor

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      Or the mayor who ran for president.Bret Stephens: Gail, you’re a New Yorker and I’m now a former New Yorker, albeit one who is often in town. How are you feeling about the city these days? And do you have any preferences in the race to succeed Bill de Blasio?Gail Collins: Bret, my city (and yours — if you work here you at least have rooting rights) tends to switch back and forth between regular party Democrats and feisty independents. De Blasio, a deep, dull Democrat, was preceded by Rudy Giuliani and Mike Bloomberg, who were very, very different versions of the political outsider.Bret: Some might even call them Republicans. Go on …Gail: And before that David Dinkins, who was the city’s first Black mayor. But also a clubhouse politician.If it’s time for a new outsider, it does sort of seem that Andrew Yang ought to fit the bill. Yet he’s run a rather strange campaign — lots of interesting ideas but often the kind you hear from a guy who’s on a six-month internship at City Hall before being posted someplace else.Bret: I’m generally sympathetic to Yang because — math! New York got a bailout this year from President Biden’s Covid relief bill, but the city is still going to need a mayor who can balance its books and create a business-friendly climate, especially if the financial industry deserts it and the M.T.A. continues to lose riders and revenue. I’m less thrilled about Yang’s $2,000 a year cash-relief plan for New York’s poorest, but post-pandemic I can at least see the case for it.Also, who else has been supported by Anthony Scaramucci and Whoopi Goldberg?Gail: OK, that’s definitely a dynamic duo. Meanwhile, I hear Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew, is thinking about running for governor. You’ll be voting in that race — how would you rate him versus Andrew Cuomo?Bret: Hemlock or cyanide? Devoured by a saltwater crocodile versus bitten by a venomous sea snake? A year of solitary confinement in a supermax prison or an all-expenses paid trip to Cancún in the company of Ted Cruz? I’m trying to think of equivalently horrible alternatives.Gail: Wow, that was quite a mountain of metaphors.Bret: OK, I confess I don’t know a thing about Rudy’s son. And I try to subscribe to the words from Ezekiel: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son.” So I’ll, um, keep an open mind.Gail: Well, Andrew G. was introduced to the New York public on the day his father was sworn in as mayor. The little kid took over the ceremony, blowing kisses to the cameras while Rudy was trying to deliver his serious speech.Bret: Now I remember …Gail: Dad held up pretty well. I remember, at the time, saying that Rudy obviously had the right temperament for politics, since he could maintain such a show of good humor while losing the crowd’s attention to a cavorting child. So much for my talents at political analysis.Bret: Your talents were just fine. Rudy proved to be a mostly terrific mayor who restored the city to glory and led us through 9/11. However, sometime later, on a fishing trip in the Catskills, he was captured by a race of dyspeptic, prank-playing space aliens who removed his brain and replaced it with Roy Cohn’s, which they had been keeping in a jar of formaldehyde.That’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.Gail: Not sure the real Rudy of 9/11 lived up to the later legend. But I do like that idea about Roy Cohn’s brain.Anyhow, I think Andrew’s high jinks back at the 1994 inauguration rank, so far, as the political peak of his life. More recently, during the Trump era, he did a great deal of golfing with the president. It was his job, more or less.Bret: Not what I would consider a qualification for high office. I definitely would like to see a sane Republican as governor. One-party rule is never a good thing, and a liberal state like New York could use a socially moderate, business-friendly chief executive like Maryland’s Larry Hogan or Massachusetts’s Charlie Baker.Gail: And New York has had some. But except for Nelson Rockefeller our gubernatorial Republicans weren’t very exciting. Have we ever discussed the George Pataki years? No? At least with Andrew G. we’d have a Republican who knows how to putt …Bret: I’ll take the Pataki years over the Spitzer-Paterson-Cuomo years!Gail: Because …Bret: Because Pataki-Not-Wacky? Because he never did what Cuomo is doing now, which is jacking up state taxes on the rich to some of the highest rates in the country. That’s just going to accelerate the exodus of people to income-tax free states like Florida. The large homeless population and rise in shootings isn’t exactly helping to keep people in New York, either.Speaking of shootings, we have another nightmare in Indianapolis.Gail: It breaks my heart because it feels so hopeless. We have a president who’s a champion of sane gun regulation, but lately there’s been a mass killing every week. Meanwhile, the House has passed a very, very, very modest reform to the background check system, which is in danger of dying in the Senate.And remember the El Paso massacre? Apparently the Texas House doesn’t, since it just voted to eliminate the requirement that people get permits to carry handguns.Why can’t we ever manage to get this dragon under control?Bret: You know, after 9/11 the country collectively accepted that we needed far tougher security at airports and on airplanes. And most of us, conservatives included, were OK with all of it — standing in lines; taking off our shoes; removing electronic devices from our bags; throwing away large bottles; all the rest of it — because we understood there was a national emergency and a common-sense need to improve security.Gail: While retaining the right to sigh deeply when those lines stretched on forever …The FedEx facility in Indianapolis where a former employee killed eight people last Thursday night.Maddie McGarvey for The New York TimesBret: And aside from the ordinary griping, few Americans really considered it an infringement on our basic constitutional rights because we understood that personal safety is also a civil right and that a duty of government is to “insure domestic tranquillity.”But we’ve had more than 45 mass shootings in the United States just since the Atlanta killings last month. Many of which we haven’t even heard of because there were more injuries than deaths.Gail: True, a mass wounding doesn’t get as much attention as a road closing.Bret: And yet we won’t even undertake the kind of basic precautions that we accept as normal and logical when it comes to boarding airplanes. The killer in Indianapolis had his shotgun taken away from him last year because of mental-health concerns, but he was still able to buy two rifles after that.I wish I could convince my fellow conservatives of this. But noooooo. It’s like trying to talk someone out of an article of religious faith that seems preposterous to those outside the faith but fundamental to those within it. I’d offer an example of what I have in mind but I’d hate to insult anyone who believes in Immaculate Conception.Gail: Speaking as the product of 14 years of Catholic education, I’m gonna bet you don’t know that Immaculate Conception refers to the belief that Mary was born free of original sin.Bret: I stand chastened and corrected. To make amends, I hasten to note that Yiddish has at least 20 different words to describe useless Jewish men, of which I’m clearly a yutz, a putz, a schmendrick, a schlemiel, a schlimazel, or something else beginning with “sch.”Gail: Hey, never heard of a schmendrick before. I believe this conversation is going to provide one great step forward in cultural understanding.Bret: Or at least some mutual kvetching.Gail: Which I hope we can continue soon over drinks or dinner. Do you feel as if we’re actually being sprung from pandemic purgatory?Bret: It may be my congenital contrarianism, Gail, but after spending the better part of the pandemic feeling optimistic about the future, I’ve now sunk into deep fatalism. Cases are edging up again, driven by the new virus variants, and the steep decline in Covid deaths since January also seems to have bottomed out at an average rate of around 700 a day, which is just horrific.Gail: Yeah, never going to accept the idea that 700 daily fatalities is good news.Bret: The idea that we may all need boosters in six months or a year doesn’t faze me, and neither do the (very rare) instances of people reacting badly to the vaccines. But it also likely means continued social distancing, continued working from home, continued masking, continued nonsocializing, continued all-purpose nervousness.Gail: Have you noticed that the most faithful mask wearers seem to be blue staters? I guess accessorizing only counts in some places when it involves carrying weapons.Bret: I observe that Covid deaths in Texas have fallen by about 70 percent since the state dropped its mask mandate in early March. But I don’t draw any conclusions, since I really don’t know what to think anymore. Our colleague David Brooks wrote the other week that living through the last year has felt like one long Groundhog Day. Except that, unlike Bill Murray’s character, I’ve mostly been getting worse at everything.Gail: Maybe we’ve gotten better at personal interaction that doesn’t actually involve being face to face. It’s been even more fun conversing with you than prepandemic.Bret: Still miss the old kind of interaction. I’m getting my second shot in two weeks. Let’s get together for cocktails once I’m fully vaccinated — and not on Zoom.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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      The Painful History of the Georgia Voting Law

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      Republicans today know that blocking access to the ballot has always relied on legal maneuvering and political schemes.Seventy-five years ago this July, a World War II veteran named Maceo Snipes reportedly became the first Black man to cast a ballot in his rural Georgia county. The next day, a white man shot him in his front yard, and Mr. Snipes would soon afterward die from those wounds.Fortunately, three generations removed from the political reign of terror that claimed Mr. Snipes’s life, voter suppression seems much less likely to arrive by bullet. But we may not be as distant in our political moment from theirs as we might think: The long struggle to block access to the ballot has always relied on legal maneuvering and political schemes to achieve what bullets and bombs alone could not.What legislators in Georgia and across the country have reminded us is that backlash to expanded voting rights has often arrived by a method that our eras share in common: by laws, like Georgia’s Senate Bill 202, passed by elected politicians.Opponents of the new Georgia law denounce the legislation as “Jim Crow 2.0” precisely because they recognize the continuities between past and present. The bill’s most ardent supporters, who lined up in front of a painting of a building on the site of an antebellum plantation to watch Gov. Brian Kemp sign it into law, seem less interested in distancing themselves from that past and more eager for Americans to forget it.“Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John Roberts explained in 2013 in defending the Supreme Court’s gutting a key provision of the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder, a decision that helped clear the way for the current voter suppression campaigns. Yet the riot at the U.S. Capitol makes clear that concerted efforts to sow seeds of distrust in the democratic process can still stoke violent reaction.The methods in the fight against voting rights have a common objective — an electorate narrowed along predictable and demonstrable fault lines. Many present-day proponents of voting restrictions are quick to distance themselves from the racist aims and attitudes of their forebears, but the most durable and enduring attacks on voting rights have long cloaked their goals in race-neutral language — at least in writing.Historians like Carol Anderson demonstrate that attempts to limit ballot access have followed in the wake of mass political mobilization and in response to federal efforts to protect or expand voting rights. At the time Mr. Snipes was killed, the U.S. Supreme Court had recently invalidated the white primary, a disenfranchisement tactic that locked Black voters out of the only election that really mattered because of one-party rule in the “Solid South.” The N.A.A.C.P., which grew from 50,000 to approximately half a million members during World War II, spearheaded the legal challenge to the white primary and grass-roots voter registration drives across the South. Anticipating that Black voters would flood the polls in 1946, Eugene Talmadge, the ex-governor running for the office again, mobilized supporters to ward off threats from local activists and federal action alike.Mr. Talmadge egged on supporters who intimidated and attacked Black voters, but his most enduring and effective tactics look much more like present-day voter suppression tactics. As the Emory researcher Hannah Charak has documented, Mr. Talmadge quietly collaborated with sympathetic local officials on illegal registration purges and blanketed the state with “challenge forms” that white residents could use to dispute Black votes.Voter suppression tactics like literacy tests and Georgia’s infamous county unit system delivered racist leadership like Mr. Talmadge (and his son) while withstanding legal challenges and Supreme Court rulings for decades in part because such measures commonly avoided mention of race.If we remember Georgia’s extremist enemies of democracy for the violence they inspired, then today’s advocates of voter suppression may well expect history to reflect favorably on their relative restraint. Yet even as many supporters of Georgia’s new voting restrictions seek to distance themselves from the violence at the Capitol, they invoke unproven claims of voter fraud and the passions they provoke as a pretext for their legislative actions — political cover for those who claim the high ground of “electoral reform.”Georgia is now a far cry from the one-party politics of Jim Crow, and its increasingly diverse population challenges the power of the overwhelmingly white and disproportionately rural ruling class that has held sway for nearly all of the state’s history — thanks in large part to an unending stream of voter suppression schemes.The ruling logic that drives those efforts, spanning generations and a dramatic shift in party affiliation, is the conviction that America would be better off if fewer Americans voted. Perhaps it is time not only to focus on those who say the quiet parts out loud but to remember that the quiet parts have been there all along.Jason Morgan Ward, a professor of history at Emory University, is the author of “Defending White Democracy: The Making of a Segregationist Movement and the Remaking of Racial Politics, 1936-1965” and, most recently, “Hanging Bridge: Racial Violence and America’s Civil Rights Century.”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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      Can Anything End the Voting Wars?

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyCan Anything End the Voting Wars?As battles over voting rules burn hotter, the stakes are still lower than both sides seem to think.Opinion ColumnistMarch 16, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Illustration by Arsh Raziuddin, Photos, via Getty More

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      Justice Breyer Should Retire Right Now

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyJustice Breyer Should Retire Right NowIf he doesn’t, Democrats run the very real risk that they would be unable to replace him.Mr. Campos is a law professor who writes extensively about politics and the Constitution.March 15, 2021, 5:00 a.m. ETCredit…Simone NoronhaJustice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was widely, and deservedly, criticized for her refusal to retire from the Supreme Court at a time when a Democratic president could have chosen her replacement.Justice Stephen Breyer is making a similar and arguably even more egregious mistake.The evident indifference on the part of Democrats regarding the failure of Justice Breyer, 82, to announce his retirement is apparently a product of the assumption that he will do so at some point during the current Congress and that therefore whether he does so anytime soon is not particularly important.This is a grave mistake.Consider that because of the extremely thin nature of their Democratic Senate control, the shift of a single seat from the Democrats to the Republicans or even one vacancy in the 50 seats now controlled by the Democratic caucus would probably result in the swift reinstallation of Mitch McConnell as the majority leader.What are the odds that something like this — a senator’s death, disabling health crisis or departure from office for other reasons — will happen sometime in this Congress’s remaining 22 months?Alarmingly for Democrats, if history is any guide, the odds are quite high. Since the end of World War II, 27 of the 38 Congresses have featured a change in the party composition of the Senate during a session.The probability that such a shift may occur during this particular Congress may well be even higher than that. At the moment, no fewer than six Democratic senators over the age of 70 represent states where a Republican governor would be free to replace them with a Republican, should a vacancy occur.Five other Democratic senators represent states for which a vacancy would go unfilled for months, until a special election to fill the seat was held — which would hand the G.O.P. control of the Senate at least until that election and likely for the rest of the current Congress if a Republican wins that contest. (In the case of Wisconsin, such a vacancy might not be filled until 2023.)All things considered, the odds that Democrats will lose control of the Senate in the next 22 months are probably close to a coin flip.Under the circumstances, for Democrats to run the very real risk that they would be unable to replace Justice Breyer is unacceptable. Of course, the only person who is in a position to ensure that this does not happen is Justice Breyer himself.It is true that, under normal circumstances, a Supreme Court justice planning to retire generally waits until the end of a court term to do so. But these are not normal circumstances.Nothing illustrates the anti-democratic dysfunction of our political system more clearly than the current makeup of the Supreme Court. Two-thirds of the sitting justices were nominated by Republican presidents, even though Republican presidential candidates have lost the popular vote in seven of the nine elections, which determined who nominated these justices.And these justices were confirmed by a Senate that has become skewed so radically in favor of electing Republicans that the 50 senators who caucus with the Democrats represent about 41.5 million more Americans than the 50 Republican senators do.Under the circumstances, it would be a travesty if the Supreme Court seat occupied by Justice Breyer was not filled by a replacement chosen by Democrats.He should announce his retirement immediately, effective upon the confirmation of his successor. For him to continue to make the same gamble that Justice Ginsburg made and lost runs the risk of tainting his legacy as a justice and has the potential to be an anti-democratic disaster for the nation as a whole.Paul F. Campos is a law professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and writes about law and politics at Lawyers, Guns & Money.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.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More