Category: US

After decades of working together as House colleagues and ultimately ascending to powerful committee leadership posts, Representatives Jerrold Nadler and Carolyn Maloney took the stage on Tuesday night as reluctant foes in a three-way Democratic debate.

If fireworks were expected, then the debate was something of a washout: The two longtime Democrats stood and sat side by side, each collegially allowing the other to recite decades of accomplishments and showing an unusual degree of deference.

It fell to the third candidate, Suraj Patel, a lawyer who has never held an elected office, to play the energetic aggressor, criticizing the records of the New York political fixtures and suggesting that voters would be better served by a younger representative, and perhaps House term limits, too.

The debate, hosted by NY1 and WNYC, offered the broadest opportunity for the three leading Democratic candidates seeking to represent New York’s newly drawn 12th Congressional District to distinguish themselves ahead of the Aug. 23 primary. (A fourth candidate, Ashmi Sheth, will appear on the ballot but did not meet the fund-raising requirement to appear onstage.)

In a debate with few standout moments, the most notable exchange had little to do with the primary contest itself.

Errol Louis, one of the moderators, asked the three candidates whether they believed President Biden should run for re-election in 2024.

Mr. Patel, who is running on the importance of generational change, was the only candidate to respond in the affirmative. Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney, who are running on the argument that seniority brings clout and expertise, both dodged the question.

“Too early to say,” Mr. Nadler said.

“I don’t believe he’s running for re-election,” Ms. Maloney said.

It seemed like a rare break from Democratic solidarity for Mr. Nadler, 75, and Ms. Maloney, 76, who were elected to office in 1992 and have often worked together as they climbed the ranks of Congress.

About halfway through the 90-minute debate, Mr. Nadler was asked to expound on the differences between himself and Ms. Maloney. “Carolyn and I have worked together on a lot of things,” he said, stumbling a bit. “We’ve worked together on many, many different things.”

“There are some differences,” he added, stumbling a bit more before going on to name three votes in particular.

But even as the two essentially made cases for their political survival, Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney largely refrained from attacking each other or offering strong reasons for voters to choose one of them over the other. When given the opportunity to cross-examine an opponent, both chose to question Mr. Patel.

Ms. Maloney even admitted she “didn’t want to run” against Mr. Nadler, her “good friend” and ally.

Mr. Nadler pointed to three key votes that set him apart from Ms. Maloney — he opposed the Iraq War and the Patriot Act, which expanded government surveillance powers after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, while she voted for them; he supported the Iran nuclear deal, which she opposed. But he refrained from criticizing her votes outright. Mr. Patel was more forceful, at one point calling Ms. Maloney’s vote on Iraq his “single biggest issue of her with her voting record of her.”

Mr. Patel, 38, who has twice unsuccessfully attempted to defeat Ms. Maloney, at times tried to use their friendship to his advantage. At one point, Mr. Patel questioned why Mr. Nadler had previously endorsed Ms. Maloney despite her past support of her for legislation that would have mandated that the government study a discredited link between vaccines and autism.

“In the contest between you and her, I thought she was the better candidate,” Mr. Nadler said.

“What about now?” Mr Patel shot back.

“I still think so,” Mr. Nadler replied.

With three weeks until the primary contest and no clear front-runner, Mr. Patel sought to draw a sharp contrast with his two opponents. He pointed to their corporate donors and their adherence to party orthodoxy and tried to like himself to younger, rising party stars like Representatives Hakeem Jeffries and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“It’s 2022,” he said in his opening statement. “It is time to turn the page on 1992.”

Mr. Patel’s performance seemed energetic, in starkest contrast to that of Mr. Nadler, who gave a halting opening statement in which he misspoke and said that he had “impeached Bush twice” when he meant to refer to former President Donald J. Trump.

“I thought Suraj performed well,” said Chris Coffey, a Democratic strategist who is unaffiliated in the race. “I thought Carolyn did fine. And I thought Nadler struggled at times.”

It was only toward the end of Tuesday’s debate that Ms. Maloney seemed to set her sights on Mr. Nadler. In a conversation about infrastructure, she argued that she had wrongfully taken credit for helping fund the Second Avenue Subway, a long-sought project in her district.

Ms. Maloney said that she had advanced the project, while Mr. Nadler had yet to secure funds for a proposed freight tunnel that would run beneath New York Harbor, a project that he has championed for years.

“It’s still not built,” Ms. Maloney pointed out.

The exchange drove home the end of decades of political harmony preached on a dividing line between the two elected officials’ districts: Ms. Maloney represented most of Manhattan’s East Side, while Mr. Nadler served constituents on the West Side. Over their time in office, their reach grew to neighborhoods in parts of Brooklyn and Queens, after changes made in the state’s redistricting process. Both had endorsed each other’s previous re-election bids, supporting their respective journeys to becoming New York City political icons.

But the alliance fractured in May, when a state court tasked with reviewing New York’s congressional map approved a redistricting plan that threw the two powerful allies into the same district, one that combined Manhattan’s East and West Sides above 14th Street into a single district for the first time since World War II.

Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney ultimately chose to run against each other rather than seeking a neighboring seat — a decision that guaranteed that at least one of the two will lose their position, robbing New York’s congressional delegation of at least one high-ranking member with political influence.

Ms. Maloney leads the House’s Oversight and Reform Committee, a key investigative committee. Mr. Nadler chairs the Judiciary Committee, a role that vaulted him into the national spotlight during both of Mr. Trump’s impeachment trials.

For months, the two have engaged in a crosstown battle for their political survival that has riveted the Democratic establishment. Both Mr. Nadler and Ms. Maloney have drawn on political ties to try to pressure old allies and wealthy donors they once shared to back one of them.

All three of the candidates at Tuesday’s debate and political analysts alike have acknowledged that the race’s outcome may largely depend on who casts ballots. Even as they tried to appeal to voters, Ms. Maloney, Mr. Nadler and Mr. Patel acknowledged they largely share political viewpoints on key issues like abortion and gun control.

“We are, on this stage, star-crossed lovers,” Mr. Patel said. “We are arguing right now, but the fact of the matter is, we’re on the same team.”

Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting.

Pat A. Cipollone, the White House counsel under former President Donald J. Trump who tried to stop some of his more extreme efforts to overturn the 2020 election, has been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury investigating activities in the lead-up to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021, a person familiar with the subpoena said.

It was unclear which grand jury had called Mr. Cipollone to testify as a witness. Two are known to be hearing evidence and testimony — one looking at the scheme by some of Mr. Trump’s lawyers and advisers to assemble slates of electors who would falsely claim that Mr. Trump was the actual winner of the election, and another focused on the events of Jan. 6.

But Mr. Cipollone is the highest-ranking White House official working for Mr. Trump during his final days in office who is known to have been called to testify by federal investigators.

He was in the West Wing as Mr. Trump’s supporters violently stormed the Capitol and the president repeatedly refused to call them off. Mr. Cipollone also attended several meetings in the run-up to the riot in which Mr. Trump and his allies discussed how they could overturn the election and keep him in office.

Mr. Cipollone repeatedly pushed back on those efforts.

The subpoena was reported earlier by ABC News. An aid to Mr. Cipollone did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment.

Mr. Cipollone’s appearance has been requested at a time when federal prosecutors are sharpening their focus on the conduct of Mr. Trump, and not simply the people who were advising him.

In recent weeks, investigators have asked witnesses questions about Mr. Trump and his actions, including of people who worked in the White House. Two former senior advisers to Vice President Mike Pence — his chief of staff, Marc Short, and his chief counsel, Greg Jacob — recently testified before one of the grand juries, according to people familiar with their appearances.

Given the nature of Mr. Cipollone’s job, it was unclear how much information he would provide. He was subpoenaed by the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot and the events that helped precipitate it, and sat for a transcribed, recorded interview.

But certain terms were discussed ahead of time, and Mr. Cipollone, citing attorney-client and executive privilege, declined to discuss specific conversations with Mr. Trump.

Mr. Cipollone was a witness to some of the most significant moments in Mr. Trump’s push to overturn the election results, including discussions about seizing voting machines, meddling in the Justice Department and sending false letters to state officials about election fraud.

“That’s a terrible idea for the country,” he said of suggestions that the Trump administration seize voting machines, adding, “That’s not how we do things in the United States.”

Mr. Cipollone was also in direct contact with Mr. Trump on Jan. 6 as rioters stormed the Capitol and told the House committee he believed more should have been done to call off the mob.

“I think I was pretty clear there needed to be an immediate and forceful response, statement, public statement, that people need to leave the Capitol now,” Mr. Cipollone testified.

katie benner contributed reporting.

Supporters of abortion rights won a huge and surprising victory on Tuesday in one of the most conservative states in the country, with Kansas voters resoundingly rejecting a constitutional amendment that would have let state legislators ban or significantly restrict abortion.

Results were still coming in as the night wore on, but with more than 90 percent of ballots counted, the pro-abortion-rights side was ahead by about 18 percentage points, a staggering margin in a state that voted for President Donald J. Trump in 2020 by a margin of just under 15 percentage points.

Here is a look at what happened.

Abortion opponents underperformed even in conservative areas.

Going into Election Day, many observers believed the outcome of the referendum would be determined in increasingly Democratic areas like the Kansas City suburbs — that is, by whether enough voters turned out there to compensate for the very conservative lean of the rest of the state. But abortion opponents did surprisingly poorly even in the reddest places.

Consider far western Kansas, a rural region along the Colorado border that votes overwhelmingly Republican. In Hamilton County, which voted 81 percent for Mr. Trump in 2020, less than 56 percent chose the anti-abortion position on Tuesday (with about 90 percent of the vote counted there). In Greeley County, which voted more than 85 percent for Mr. Trump, only about 60 percent chose the anti-abortion position.

We can talk about the cities all day long, but Kansas is known as a rural Republican state for a reason: Rural Republican areas cover enough of the state that they can, and almost always do, outvote the cities. The rejection of the amendment has as much to do with lukewarm support in the reddest counties as it does with strong opposition in the bluest ones.

Yes, the swing areas swung left.

Certainly, though, the cities and suburbs deserve some credit. The comparatively slim margins of victory for abortion opponents in western Kansas left the door wide open, but abortion rights supporters still had to walk through it, and they did.

Wyandotte County, home to Kansas City, Kan., voted 65 percent for Joseph R. Biden Jr. in 2020, but 74 percent for abortion rights on Tuesday. Neighboring Johnson County, the state’s most populous, voted 53 percent for Mr. Biden but more than 68 percent for abortion rights.

What was striking, in fact, was the degree to which the picture was similar everywhere. From the bluest counties to the reddest ones, abortion rights performed better than Mr. Biden, and opposition to abortion performed worse than Mr. Trump.

Turnout was high.

We won’t know exactly how many people voted, much less their partisan breakdown or demographic characteristics, until the results are fully counted. But we can already say that statewide turnout was much higher than expected — nearly as high as it was in the last midterm election.

Roughly 940,000 Kansans voted in the referendum, according to preliminary New York Times estimates, compared with about 1.05 million people in the November 2018 midterm election. The gap between turnout in primaries and general elections is usually much larger than that.

Before Tuesday, the Kansas secretary of state’s office predicted a turnout of about 36 percent. But as voting ended, Secretary of State Scott Schwab told reporters that anecdotal evidence indicated turnout might hit 50 percent, an extraordinary increase over what was expected. The Times’s 940,000 estimate would mean a 49 percent turnout.

The voters who would have been expected to show up on Tuesday, under normal circumstances, would mostly have been Republicans. That is not only because registered Republicans significantly outnumber registered Democrats in Kansas, but also because most of the contested races on the ballot were Republican primaries, giving Democrats little reason to vote — except to oppose the constitutional amendment.

The Supreme Court scrambled abortion opponents’ calculus.

Abortion opponents’ strategic decisions around the amendment started with the choice to put it on Tuesday’s ballot in the first place. The primary electorate was expected to be small and disproportionately Republican, and it seemed like a reasonable assumption that the amendment would have a better chance of passing in that environment than on a general election ballot.

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in June upended that strategy, turning what might otherwise have been an under-the-radar ballot measure into a nationally scrutinized referendum on abortion rights. Many voters might previously have seen the stakes as theoretical: If the US Constitution protected abortion rights, how much did it really matter whether the Kansas Constitution did? But then the Supreme Court undid the first part of that equation, and Kansas abruptly became an island of abortion access in a sea of ​​Southern and Plains states banning the procedure.

Groups on both sides blanketed the state with millions of dollars in advertising. Democrats who would otherwise have stayed home, knowing their party had few competitive primaries on the ballot, turned out specifically to vote against the amendment. Supporters of abortion rights were gripped with that great political motivator: anger.

On Tuesday, the results were clear.