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The Republican Party has been in desperate need of a pragmatic leader who can gauge public opinion, shrewdly husband political capital, and advance the partys agenda in sustainable ways. That leader has materialized in the form of John Roberts. The chief justice of the United States is attempting to navigate the disjuncture between voters, who on the whole are sharply divided but have slightly favored Democrats, and the power Republicans have accumulated through the Supreme Court, which is quasi-permanent and unbounded by any other political branch.

In theory, Republicans could use their hammerlock on the high court to settle a long series of social and economic disputes in their partys favor. This is the course many conservatives hoped, and liberals feared, the conservative Court would take, especially after Donald Trump was able to seat three justices and pad its right-wing majority. Instead, Roberts has pursued a more cautious strategy, and the question is if this will be enough to shore up the Courts falling popularity and disarm Democratic threats to overhaul it.

While he has given conservatives high-profile victories on long-standing social divisions like abortion rights and affirmative action, he has also given victories to liberals. In the term that ended in late June, the Roberts Court definitively repudiated the independent state legislature theory, which Trumps supporters had pushed as his vehicle to attempt to overturn the 2020 election and with which other Republicans hoped to enable gerrymandered legislatures to entrench their power. Liberals, having fretted the case was a ticking time bomb for the Republic, exhaled in relief. Former federal judge J. Michael Luttig called the decision the single most important constitutional case for American Democracy since the Nations Founding almost 250 years ago. More surprisingly, the Court, which under Roberts in 2013 undid a crucial pillar of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, issued an expansive voting-rights ruling that will create more Black-majority legislative districts in southern states, which had previously been free to marginalize Black voters. Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh voted with the Courts three liberals in these recent cases, joined by Amy Coney Barrett in the independent state legislature case.

If you were to ask Roberts to explain this pattern, he would no doubt insist he is merely interpreting the law as written. As a nominee in 2005, he famously likened his role to an umpire calling balls and strikes, a conceit he has clung to even as the Courts reputation for above-the-fray independence has dwindled. We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges, he said in 2018 after Trump lashed out at a federal judge over an immigration ruling.

But very few people actually believe him. A decade ago, Roberts reportedly reversed himself in deliberations about a lawsuit to overturn the Affordable Care Act, ultimately crafting a compromise that left in place parts of the law. Last year, reporting indicated he was lobbying Kavanaugh to pull back from a full-scale repeal of Roe v. Wade. The Wall Street Journal ran an extraordinary editorial hinting at the Courts divisions and urging its conservatives to stand firm. (Shortly afterward, Politico obtained the preliminary draft of the courts Roe repeal, a leak that conservatives employed as an argument for forging ahead.) The chief justice may not be taking polls and holding focus groups, but he is acting like a man who is well aware that the popular legitimacy of the institution he leads is in danger.

The historical shadow looming over Robertss calculations is the confrontation between Franklin Roosevelt and the Supreme Court some 90 years ago. Roosevelt had found his economic reforms repeatedly overturned by a right-wing Supreme Court. After winning a landslide election, Roosevelt sought to take control of the Court by adding seats and appointing new and more liberal justices, only for the Courts majority to reverse itself in 1937 and cede economic policy to Congress and the president.

Liberals have long feared that once the new generation of conservatives had gained control of the Supreme Court, it would revert to something like its pre-37 stance. Perhaps the new right-wing jurisprudence would be less overbearing on economic policy, and more aggressive on social policy, than the version of a century ago, but the overall contours of the scenario that kept progressive legal analysts up at night was an unshackled Supreme Court throwing around its weight without fear of backlash.

Why would Roberts hesitate to seize the full range of power at his disposal to the extent that he appears to be going against his own predilections? One reason is that the Courts Republican majority is a historical accident. Unlike the Court that bedeviled FDR, which was the product of decades of Republican dominance that preceded him, the Roberts Court did not earn its majority as the result of Republicans winning a bunch of presidential elections. Democrats have won five of the last eight presidential elections and seven of the last eight popular votes.

The GOP majority on the Court is a combination of better actuarial luck and more selfless partisan teamwork by Republican justices and some ruthlessness by Senator Mitch McConnell. An aging Thurgood Marshall did not stay on the Court long enough for a Democrat to succeed him; McConnell used his Senate majority to prevent Obama from installing Antonin Scalias replacement; Ruth Bader Ginsburg simply refused to step down despite her cancer diagnoses, even while Democrats held the presidency and the Senate; then Anthony Kennedy, despite being a swing justice, stepped down under Trump. Those four events created the current right-wing majority. It is perfectly legal, but it hardly derives from anything like a mandate to reshape American law.

The rules of the Constitution make this result legitimate, too. But the Constitution also allows Democrats to either pack the Court or to reform it fundamentally in ways that would eliminate its Republican majority. They held off using this power when they controlled Congress and the presidency during Bidens first two years. But if the Court exerts its authority in an abusive or too nakedly partisan fashion, the next Democratic Partycontrolled government might decide it has to act. In the aftermath of the affirmative-action decision, President Biden ruled out packing the Court, though he told reporters, This is not a normal Court. This is the exact equilibrium Roberts wants: bad for Democrats, but not existentially bad.

The legitimacy of the conservative Court has been the thematic crux of its burgeoning ethics scandals. The conservative movement has rallied around Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito even as they accepted undisclosed patronage from billionaires, branding reporters uncovering these financial relationships as activists seeking to discredit its prized majority. Roberts took a more conciliatory line, conceding ethics was an issue of concern inside the Court. The respective styles of Roberts and the Courts right wing on ethics mirror their contrasting approach to jurisprudence: He seeks to conserve power by modulating it, and the right-wing justices seek to perpetuate their power by flaunting it.

Robertss strategy appears to be giving Democrats enough trust in the fairness of the Courts decisions, and hope that they can win some future cases, to keep them from flipping over the game board. By the same token, the threat of a Democratic Court-reforming response is a helpful one to keep the Republican judicial majority in check. It remains to be seen whether Roberts and his colleagues will take that bargain or continue a run of precedent smashing that causes Democrats to see the Republican Court as an existential threat.

The myth that judges make rulings completely abstracted from any earthly considerations is the foundation of judicial legitimacy. Roberts, ironically, recognizes that maintaining that legitimacy means acting like a politician while pretending hes just calling balls and strikes.

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John Roberts Is the Last Republican - New York Magazine

Republicans’ favorite word these days is “weaponization.” The “Biden regime’s weaponization of our system of justice is straight out of the Stalinist Russia horror show,” former president Donald Trump declared. “The weaponization of federal law enforcement,” according to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, “represents a mortal threat to a free society.” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has promised to “hold this brazen weaponization of power accountable.”

House Republicans have created a judiciary subcommittee, chaired by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), on “the weaponization of the federal government.” Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.), chair of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, has asserted that “the weaponization of the federal government against President Biden’s political rivals cannot go unchecked.”

In a reprise of their false claims about fraud in the 2020 presidential election, Republicans have kept Democratic “weaponization” on page one of their playbook, even though they have uncovered virtually no evidence of it. Moreover, in a classic example of the psychological concept of projection — attributing one’s own illicit motivations onto an opponent — Republicans turn out to be weaponization wannabes.

In May, Special Counsel John Durham, who was appointed by Attorney General Bill Barr to investigate possible wrongdoing by FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) officials in their probe of alleged Russian collusion with the Trump campaign in the 2016 election, released his long-awaited report. After acknowledging that the FBI’s preliminary investigation was appropriate, Durham sharply criticized the agency for “confirmation bias” and a “lack of analytical rigor” in authorizing a full-scale probe.

In their rush to prove Democratic weaponization, Republicans went well beyond his actual findings and results in court. Durham did obtain a guilty plea from an FBI lawyer who altered a document used in a request for renewal of a wiretap, but he was only sentenced to 12 months’ probation by a judge who concluded his action was not politically motivated. Durham’s only other two prosecutions, of a Clinton campaign attorney and a Russian analyst, for making false statements to the FBI, resulted in acquittals.

Durham did not allege a “Deep State” conspiracy to defeat Donald Trump. He found that Hillary Clinton committed “no provable criminal offense.” He did not charge any high-level FBI or intelligence agent with a crime or propose major changes in DOJ policies. The flaws in the FBI investigation highlighted by Durham, it’s also worth noting, had already been identified by DOJ Inspector General Michael Horowitz. Most important, Durham confirmed that Attorney General Merrick Garland played no role in his investigation and “never asked me not to indict anyone.”

None of this deterred Judiciary Committee Chairman Jordan from proclaiming, “Seven years of attacking Trump is scary enough. But what’s more frightening is any one of us could be next.”

Last month, David Weiss, the U.S. Attorney for Delaware, who had been appointed by Attorney General Barr to conduct an investigation of Hunter Biden, negotiated a guilty plea to two misdemeanor charges of willfully evading federal income taxes and settled a felony charge of lying on an application for a gun license. Since the case has not yet been fully resolved, Weiss declined to testify to the House Judiciary Committee, but affirmed in a letter that he had been “granted ultimate authority over the matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution.”

Nonetheless, Gov. DeSantis opined that “if Hunter were a Republican, he’d have been in jail years ago.” Speaker McCarthy shrugged off the multi-year probe conducted by a Trump-appointed prosecutor and made the GOP talking points comparison of the disposition of the Biden and Trump cases. Chairman Comer asserted that the plea deal came despite “growing evidence … that the Bidens engaged in a pattern of corruption, influence peddling, and possibly bribery.” Comer added that investigations of their “shady business dealings … that risk our national security” will continue.

Thus far, it should be noted, Comer’s committee has found no evidence of corrupt behavior by President Biden, any involvement by Biden in his son’s business ventures or any new and credible information about Hunter Biden. Nor has Comer expressed any interest in investigating Trump family members who allegedly monetized their access to the former president.

Trump has left no doubt that if he returns to the White House he will weaponize the Department of Justice and every other branch of government. His former chief of staff John Kelly recalls that Trump “was always telling me we need to use the FBI and IRS to go after people.” White House Counsel Don McGahn deflected Trump’s requests to order the DOJ to prosecute Hillary Clinton and James Comey. And in late 2020, Trump wanted Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen to send a letter to officials in swing states alleging election fraud, requesting they delay certification of the results and “leave the rest to me & the R. Congressmen.”

So no one should be surprised that this month, as House Republicans introduced a resolution to impeach President Biden and censured Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.),Trump, who had earlier announced a ten-point plan to “dismantle the ‘Deep State,’” promised that if reelected, he would appoint a special prosecutor “to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, and the entire Biden crime family.”

If they succeed in dismantling our democratic institutions and sidelining or silencing their critics, these weaponized autocrats will not make America great, good or better.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”

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Republicans are weaponization wannabes - The Hill

An intensive drive by right-wing Republicans in Congress to vilify the F.B.I. with charges of political bias has imperiled a program allowing spy agencies to conduct warrantless surveillance on foreign targets, sapping support for a premier intelligence tool and amplifying demands for stricter limits.

The once-secret program created after the 9/11 attacks and described by intelligence officials as crucial to stoppingoverseas hackers, spy services and terrorists has long faced resistance by Democrats concerned that it could trample on Americans civil liberties. But the law authorizing it isset to expire in December, andopposition among Republicans, who have historically championed it, has grown as the G.O.P. has stepped up its attacks on the F.B.I., taking a page from former President Donald J. Trump and his supporters.

Theres no way were going to be for reauthorizing that in its current form no possible way, said Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, a key ally of Mr. Trumps who is leading a special House investigation into the weaponization of government against conservatives. Were concerned about surveillance, period.

At issue is a program that allows the government to collect on domestic soil and without a warrant the communications of targeted foreigners abroad, including when those people are interacting with Americans. Leaders of both parties have warned the Biden administration that Congress will not renew the law that legalized it, known as Section 702, without changes to prevent federal agents from freely searching the email, phone and other electronic records of Americans in touch with surveilled foreigners.

Since the program was last extended in 2018, the G.O.P.s approach to law enforcement and data collection has undergone a dramatic transformation. Disdain for the agencies that benefit from the warrantless surveillance program has moved into the party mainstream, particularly in the House, where Republicans assert that the F.B.I.s investigations of Mr. Trump were biased and complain of a broader plot by the government to persecute conservatives including some of those charged for storming the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 for their political beliefs. They argue that federal law enforcement agencies cannot be trusted with Americans records, and should be prevented from accessing them.

You couldnt waterboard me into voting to reauthorize 702, said Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, who backed the program in 2018. These 702 authorities were abused against people in Washington on January 6 and they were abused against people who were affiliated with the B.L.M. movement, and Im equally aggrieved by both of those things.

Congress created Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 2008, and has renewed the program twice since, largely thanks to the overwhelming support of Republican lawmakers. But significant turnover on Capitol Hill has brought a new generation of Republicans less protective of Washingtons post-9/11 counterterrorism powers, and about half of House Republicans have never cast a vote on it.

This will be a first impression for many of them, said Representative Darin LaHood, Republican of Illinois, a supporter of the program who is part of the Intelligence Committees six-member working group trying to determine how Congress can restrict the program without hamstringing it. The thought that 702 and FISA just focused on terrorism I think that narrative has to be changed. We need to focus on China, we need to focus on Russia, we need to focus on Iran and North Korea.

The Biden administration has been making a similar case to lawmakers, appealing to them to renew the Section 702 program, which Jake Sullivan, the presidents national security adviser, has called crucial to heading off national security threats from China, Russia, cyberattacks and terrorist groups.

But far-right lawmakers have embarked on a louder and more politically loaded effort to fight the measure. They have seized on official determinations that federal agents botched a wiretap on a Trump campaign adviser and more recent disclosures that F.B.I. analysts improperly used Section 702 to search for information about hundreds of Americans who came under scrutiny in connection with the Jan. 6 attack and the Black Lives Matterprotests after the 2020 murder of George Floydby a police officer.

Justice Department and F.B.I. officials have attempted to defend themselves from lawmakers outrage over those revelations, pointing to steps they have taken to restrain the opportunities agents are permitted to examine the communications of Americans collected under Section 702. They credit those changes with reducing the number of such queries from about 3 million in 2021 to about 120,000 last year.

But their opening salvos have not swayed skeptical Democrats whose support the Biden administration is expected to need for an extension of the spying program.

In recent years, Capitol Hill has welcomed several new Democrats with backgrounds in national security who favor extending the program. But convincing others is a challenge, as most members of the party including Representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the minority leader have voted against extensions. Even President Biden voted against the law to legalize the program in 2008, when he was a senator.

Democratic supporters have been adamant that any reauthorization will have to include significant limitations on how and when agents may comb their databases for information on Americans, in the hopes that those safeguards will allay lawmakers longstanding concerns about the potential for abuses.

Weve been very clear with the administration that there is not going to be a clean reauthorization theres no path to that, said Representative Jason Crow, Democrat of Colorado, who is also part of the Intelligence Committees Section 702 working group.

He suggested that the restrictions would include limits on when agents could query their databases for information about Americans, and requirements that warrants be obtained in some circumstances.

Representative Chris Stewart, Republican of Utah, who is a member of the Intelligence Committees working group and the weaponization panel, said some members of his party might be persuaded to reauthorize the program with deep reforms.

But therell still be a number who are just never going to authorize this, Mr. Stewart added. Being on the weaponization committee, Ive seen insights into some of their thinking and there are a number of them who just wont ever come on board.

The administration has signaled it is open to discussing other changes in theory. But officials from the F.B.I. and Justice Department pushed back this month on specific proposals during their first public appearance on Capitol Hill to discuss the matter, rankling lawmakers.

I dont have any doubt about the foreign intelligence value of this, but the U.S. person aspect of this is really concerning to the Congress, Senator Jon Ossoff, Democrat of Georgia, told the officials during a hearing of the Judiciary Committee. I dont think youve effectively made the case that there shouldnt be a warrant requirement.

The committee chairman, Senator Richard Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, did not find the changes to be sufficient. If the reforms that youve mentioned in 2021 and 2022 are the only reforms that youre bringing to this committee as we discuss the future of Section 702, Ive got to see more, he told agency officials.

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G.O.P. Threatens Spy Agencies' Surveillance Tool - The New York Times

President Biden isnt the only one doing a full summer embrace of federal spending on infrastructure and semiconductor manufacturing so are some of the Republicans aiming to remove him from office next year.

The White House has labeled the presidents new economic campaign Bidenomics, a portmanteau that until now has been a pejorative used by Republicans and conservative news outlets primarily to underscore inflation.

But in a speech on Wednesday in Chicago about the economy, Mr. Biden latched on, with a renewed focus on the two most significant bipartisan legislative accomplishments of his term, the infrastructure bill and the CHIPS and Science Act. He hopes these measures will help brand him as the cross-aisle deal maker he sold to voters in 2020, appeal to political moderates who formed a core of his winning electoral coalition and impress upon tuned-out voters what he has done in office.

One significant benefit for Mr. Biden: Republicans helped pass those bills.

While G.O.P. presidential candidates and the Republican National Committee continue to paint Mr. Bidens economic stewardship as a rolling disaster, Republican senators who helped shape the legislation say they anticipated that those accomplishments would accrue to Mr. Bidens political advantage as well as to their own.

Senator Todd Young, an Indiana Republican who helped write the enormous bill aimed at revitalizing the domestic semiconductor industry, said the work on a law that he called off-the-charts popular had started with Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, during President Donald J. Trumps administration.

The Biden administration deserves credit for advancing the proposal and, irrespective of the timing of its origin, helping it become law, Mr. Young said.

Senator Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana, more grudgingly acknowledged the presidents role in securing a trillion-dollar infrastructure bill that had eluded the past two administrations.

When senators from different parties come together to work on solutions to our nations problems and then the president jumps in front of the parade, it does not mean hes the grand marshal, Mr. Cassidy said.

Mr. Bidens infrastructure bill won votes from 19 Republican senators and 13 Republican House members. Sixteen Senate Republicans and 24 Republicans in the House voted for the semiconductor legislation.

It will be difficult for Republicans to land criticism when they themselves are taking credit for the same achievements. The White House on Wednesday highlighted praise for the Biden administrations broadband spending from Representatives Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington and Gus Bilirakis of Florida, Republicans who both voted against the infrastructure legislation that funded it, along with Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

But perhaps no Republican acclaim for the infrastructure legislation brought Mr. Biden more joy than a tweet from Senator Tommy Tuberville of Alabama that said it was great to see Alabama receive crucial funds.

To no ones surprise, its bringing along some converts, Mr. Biden said on Wednesday of his bipartisan legislation. Theres a guy named Tuberville from Alabama, a senator from Alabama, who announced that he strongly opposed the legislation. Now hes hailing its passage. Mr. Biden then dryly drew the sign of the cross on his chest.

Steven Stafford, a spokesman for Mr. Tuberville, said that Mr. Biden and his allies had twisted the senators words. Now that the bill is law of the land, the people of Alabama deserve their fair share, he said.

And even as Mr. Biden on Monday played up the $42 billion of broadband spending in the infrastructure law, another Republican senator who did vote for it, Susan Collins of Maine, was trumpeting the $272 million from it that is going to her state.

Of course, the White Houses celebration of Republican plaudits for legislation Mr. Biden signed will matter little unless the president can persuade voters that these achievements are improving their material well-being.

Mr. Bidens defenders have long maintained that the economic policies he is highlighting in the Bidenomics rebrand are very popular with voters. The problem, these allies say, is that few people connect them with Mr. Biden.

And Wednesdays speech came at a moment when Mr. Bidens approval ratings on the economy are in dangerous territory.

An Associated Press/NORC poll released Wednesday found that just 34 percent of adults approved of Mr. Bidens handling of the economy. Among Democrats, only 60 percent and a mere 47 percent of those 45 years old or younger approved of his economic stewardship.

The millstone is inflation, which has tempered sharply from its peak last year but remains above the norm. Whether inflation is at 9 percent or 4 percent, prices remain high, which may be why the president speaks less about the $1.9 trillion pandemic relief plan, which passed early in his tenure and has been blamed even by the Federal Reserve for part of the surge of inflation. It is also why Republicans continue to mock what they call the inaptly named Inflation Reduction Act, which passed in 2022 on strictly Democratic votes.

It makes sense for him to emphasize the bipartisan bills that passed that should have economic impact as opposed to the totally partisan bills that drove inflation, said former Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, who voted for both the infrastructure and semiconductor bills before his retirement early this year.

Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, made clear that his party intended to lump all of the achievements being promoted by Mr. Biden into the inflationary maw, including the infrastructure and semiconductor legislation.

Both of those bills caused inflation, which is Bidens biggest albatross in the upcoming election, he said, so I dont think they did him any favors, referring to Republicans who helped pass the measures.

In his speech on Wednesday, Mr. Biden said that the pandemic relief plan had driven unemployment down from above 6 percent to below 4 percent. He suggested that his economic leadership would achieve an even broader goal he placed at the center of his 2020 campaign: restoring the soul of America.

Its going to help lessen the division in this country by bringing us back together, Mr. Biden said. It makes it awful hard to demagogue something when its working.

The Republicans aiming to unseat Mr. Biden werent buying the economic kumbaya. The Trump campaign on Wednesday said Bidenomics has created the worst economic decline since the Great Depression. Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, in a Fox News appearance, said Mr. Bidens policies mean everybody pays more for basic staples of life.

Republicans are loath to concede that the passage of two major bills makes Mr. Biden a bipartisan statesman. Those bills are not only not emblematic, its the exception, said Josh Holmes, a longtime political adviser to Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, who voted for the infrastructure bill.

In truth, more bills than those passed with bipartisan support in the last Congress. Mr. Biden enters the 2024 election cycle as the beneficiary of an extraordinary bout of productivity that included a modest gun control law, a legal codification of same-sex marriage, and a revamping of procedures for counting Electoral College votes after Mr. Trump tried to hijack that obscure process.

Senators from both parties put aside their tendency to push for only the legislation they want or pocket the issue for the next election.

We cant get in a place in the country where you dont vote for something you believe needs to pass because you think it might help the other side, Mr. Blunt said.

Democrats point to the circumstances that Mr. Biden inherited in 2021 the attack on the Capitol by a mob of Trump supporters determined to overturn the election results.

There was a sizable group of Senate Republicans who looked the death of democracy in the eye on Jan. 6 and decided to try to show people that democracy could still work, said Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut.

But Mr. Murphy also credited the legislative skills of Mr. Biden, honed over 36 years in the Senate.

A lot of my progressive friends were angry he wasnt punching Republicans in the mouth so much, Mr. Murphy said, but he kept the door open for Republicans to work with us on infrastructure, guns and industrial policy.

Cecilia Kang contributed reporting.

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Republicans' Problem in Attacking Biden: They Helped Pass His ... - The New York Times

Before the dust had cleared on the 2020 election, Republicans in statehouses across the country had already regrouped and coalesced around a core crusade revived and revitalized that was anti-woke and anti-vote.

Having lost control of the presidency and Congress, they funneled their quest for control into voting booths, bathrooms, locker rooms, classrooms and doctors offices.

If they couldnt control the highest rungs of power, they would look to exert control over Americans lives at the lower rungs. They would come to insert themselves into the most intimate of activities between voters and ballots, between families and doctors, between teachers and students.

The battle would move from an aerial assault to trench warfare.

In that fight, Arkansas passed the first-in-the-nation law outlawing gender-affirming care for transgender children.

In 2021, Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is no friend to the queer community, vetoed the bill, saying that it created new standards of legislative interference with physicians and parents as they deal with some of the most complex and sensitive matters concerning our youths. He said that the bill positioned the state as the definitive oracle of medical care, overriding parents, patients and health care experts, which he called a vast government overreach.

Hutchinson now a long-shot Republican presidential candidate seemingly understood that the effort was unconstitutional, and came between doctors, families and patients in the same way that Republicans once disingenuously claimed that Obamacare death panels would.

Nevertheless, the Arkansas legislature overrode the governors veto. The new law was quickly challenged, and last week a federal judge permanently enjoined it, writing that it is, in fact, unconstitutional.

Across states, were seeing promising signs that the judiciary may wind up serving as a check on the relentless Republican campaign to disempower and disenfranchise. G.O.P. attempts to impose a kind of semifascist federalism are being trumped by our own constitutional democracy.

This month, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction for three trans youths against provisions in a Florida law denying gender-affirming care to children, with the judge saying in a scathing opinion that their families are likely to prevail on their claim that the prohibition is unconstitutional.

Nearly 20 states have rushed to enact similar laws, seeing political advantage in inflaming culture wars, steamrollering the health and well-being of these children and their constitutional rights.

Last year, after Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas directed his states Department of Family and Protective Services to investigate cases of Texas children being subjected to abusive gender-transitioning procedures, a state judge issued a temporary injunction blocking some of the inquiries. The judge wrote that without the order, the families would suffer probable, imminent and irreparable injury in the interim.

On another note, last week a federal judge temporarily blocked a law that allowed Florida to penalize businesses that allowed children to attend drag performances. The law was written so loosely that some Pride parades in the state were either altered or canceled to avoid running afoul of the law.

This month, a federal judge ruled against a similar anti-drag law in Tennessee, saying the measure reeks with constitutional maladies of vagueness.

The same party that argues for parental rights when haranguing and harassing educators about what is being taught and read in the classroom couldnt care less about the parental rights of those trying to provide the best care for their children or who want their children to have an awareness and understanding of the broad spectrum of humanity and its expressions of love.

The Republican politicians pushing these un-American laws arent constitutional absolutists; theyre constitutional opportunists.

The same is true when it comes to elections, where the Republican strategy has become clear: Rather than change their party to appeal more broadly to the electorate, many Republican politicians are whittling away at the electorate and our election architecture, trying to remove or hamstring those aspects of the process that could lead to them losing.

They want to change the very meaning of democracy, shrinking to a government chosen by the chosen, a more originalist version of our system in which only certain people participate.

But again, the judiciary in this case, the Supreme Court has stepped in to stop them. The Supreme Court just ruled that a lower court should review Louisianas congressional map, which should result in it being redrawn to include an additional majority-Black district, and it has rejected the outrageous independent state legislature theory that would have left partisan state legislatures as the final word on federal election administration. Republicans were rebuffed on both turns. The Constitution prevailed.

This should sting for a party that has maintained for decades that it was led by the Constitution.

The Tea Party of the 2000s and early 2010s hailed itself as a constitutional movement, with many adherents professing constitutional originalism as one of its core tenets.

In 2012, the Republican Party platform asserted, We are the party of the Constitution, the solemn compact which confirms our God-given individual rights and assures that all Americans stand equal before the law.

The 2016 platform essentially repeated the line, but added, We reaffirm the Constitutions fundamental principles: limited government, separation of powers, individual liberty and the rule of law. (The party didnt even produce a new platform in 2020.)

Those declarations were never wholly true, but now theyre a mockery. That Republican Party has been swallowed whole the way a cobra swallows a lesser snake. MAGA is ascendant.

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Opinion | Republicans' Anti-Woke, Anti-Vote Crusade Has Crashed ... - The New York Times