Opinion | The Point: Conversations and insights about the moment. (2024)

Two weeks ago, a pillar of the Democratic leadership on Capitol Hill told me that if President Biden performed poorly in Thursday night’s debate, Democrats would yank him as a candidate. They simply cannot let him pull down the entire ticket and turn the country over to a would-be dictator.

That fear, as viewers saw on national television, was borne out, and now panicking senior Democrats have a decent shot at prevailing upon the president to withdraw. He should do so gracefully and instruct his delegates to vote for whoever is chosen in Chicago, where the Democratic convention opens on Aug. 19.

That move would have the short-term advantage of wrecking the Republican convention, which opens in Milwaukee on July 15. The G.O.P. plans to spend four days savaging Biden. If he dropped out, Republicans would have to explain what they want to do for the country, and the public would realize the only answer is: nothing but harm it in unpopular ways.

Biden could help maximize the power of his withdrawal by laying down a few ground rules for the Democrats, which — given his control of delegates and his status as a beloved elder statesman — would very likely be obeyed:

• None of the candidates in the next seven weeks — about the typical length of European campaigns, by the way — may attack rivals or spend money on their own campaigns that will be needed in the fall against Donald Trump. If any do, Biden will come out against them.

• Only those with a certain threshold of support in polls may take part in any Democratic debates to be scheduled before the convention.

• Each qualifying candidate will be granted a half-hour address on the opening night of the convention, with the winner expanding on it in his or her acceptance speech.

• The delegates should take into consideration — though not be bound by — state and national polls showing the relative strengths of the candidates.

• The candidates should identify possible running mates.

Unlike the 2020 primaries, this summer’s contest would include no viable candidates from the party’s left wing. Two senators, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are too old and have said they aren’t running, nor is anyone from the Squad. If they change their minds, Biden should come out against them.

Some analysts say the delegates would nominate Vice President Kamala Harris. Perhaps, but if she was outshined in speeches and debates this summer by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, Senator Amy Klobuchar, Senator Cory Booker or a dark-horse candidate, Harris probably wouldn’t be the nominee.

Like the bosses of old — and this is how nominees were chosen until the 1960s — Democrats have a political obligation to pick the candidate most likely to win. This becomes a moral obligation in an election in which democracy is on the line.

Rather than a chaotic mess, an open convention would create enormous excitement that would propel the nominee into the fall campaign. And without Biden to trash, Trump would try to slam a new nominee. But after chasing a moving target of possible rivals over the summer, he would have only a short time to make anything stick.

One thing is for sure: Whoever would prevail in Chicago would be a stronger candidate than Biden, who cannot reverse the verdict that he is too old to serve.

Many Americans watched the first debate of the 2024 presidential election in shocked disbelief as President Biden and Donald Trump bickered, often incomprehensibly, over their mental acuities, legal troubles and golf handicaps.

The disappointing back and forth served as a stark reminder that one of them, as the nation’s commander in chief, could have unilateral decision-making power to wage nuclear war.

The United States has a nuclear monarchy. Only the president can decide whether to use nuclear weapons. That power is absolute; he or she does not need to consult Congress, the courts or senior advisers, as Times Opinion explored in our series At the Brink, about the modern nuclear threat.

The American president’s sole authority to launch nuclear weapons began in practice on Aug. 10, 1945 — just days after the United States dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — when President Harry Truman ordered that such an action could not be taken without the White House’s direct order. It has remained in the Oval Office ever since.

Polling from last August found that 61 percent of Americans said they were uncomfortable with the nuclear sole-authority power. As I wrote in March, “Putting so much unchecked power in the hands of one person is not only risky but also deeply antithetical to how America defines itself.”

In the months ahead, voters will have to decide which person they prefer to make that decision. Biden, who is 81, and Trump, who is 78, would be the oldest candidates in the nation’s history to appear on their parties’ tickets.

Under law, neither man’s age would allow him to pilot a commercial airliner. Or serve in command as a military officer. Or be appointed as an appellate judge in most U.S. states. And in Trump’s case, because of his felony conviction, he is not allowed to own a gun.

Both men are, however, still eligible to control the deadliest weapon arsenal known to man.

Well, that was adequate.

President Biden seemed back to his base-line self at Friday’s rally in Raleigh, N.C., his first appearance after Thursday night’s debate debacle.

He came out onstage holding Jill Biden’s hand, which was adorable but also helped deflect attention from his stiff gait. He still had a nasty cough, but the eye twinkle and the smile were back. And when other people were speaking, his resting face looked way less slack-jawed. His voice was stronger, his energy level higher and his speech crisper. He didn’t seem frazzled by the hecklers in the crowd who kept interrupting him and who were in turn drowned out by the chants of “Four more years!”

And, yes, reading from a prompter, he managed to deliver a perfectly coherent case against Donald Trump, with an emphasis on the threat Trump poses to women’s reproductive rights, the rule of law and the foundations of American democracy.

It wasn’t a glorious speech. (Donald “Herbert Hoover” Trump”? Seriously, man?) But he did get in a couple of hard jabs about Trump as a felon and an inveterate liar.

For me, the most interesting bit was his reference to last night’s meltdown. “I know I’m not a young man, to state the obvious,” he told the crowd. “I don’t walk as smoothly as I used to. I don’t speak as smoothly as I used to. And I don’t debate as well as I used to. But I know what I do know. I know how to tell the truth. I know right from wrong. I know how to do this job. I know how to get things done. I know what millions of Americans know: When you get knocked down, you get back up.”

Translation: Everyone has a bad night now and then, and I have every intention of soldiering on.

He then gave the crowd his word “as a Biden” that if he didn’t believe with all his “heart and soul” that he could do this job, he wouldn’t be running.

Um, fantastic? Except that Biden’s belief in his fitness is not the issue, per se. The problem is the yawning gap between his belief and the direct observations of so very many voters.

In a perfect world, Congress would have long ago made a law specifically prohibiting a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol incited by the sitting president in an attempt to block the certification of an election he lost fair and square.

Congress never made such a law, nor has it made countless other laws to cover other scenarios that might one day occur. That would be impossible. Instead, as anyone who has ever tried to make a law knows, you craft general language that can be adapted to specific circ*mstances later.

That’s not good enough, a majority of the Supreme Court said on Friday morning. In ruling for Joseph Fischer — who was convicted of obstruction for being part of the mob that broke into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to stop the counting of electoral votes and keep Donald Trump in office — the court decided that federal prosecutors wrongly relied on an Enron-era law that covered only the intentional destruction of physical documents.

The law in question applies to anyone ​​who corruptly “alters, destroys, mutilates or conceals a record, document or other object,” or who “otherwise obstructs, influences or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.”

This sounds very much like what the Jan. 6 rioters did, as Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. “Blocking an official proceeding from moving forward surely qualifies as obstructing or impeding the proceeding by means other than document destruction,” Barrett wrote. And yet the majority executed what she described as a series of “textual back flips” by narrowly interpreting the meaning and placement of the word “otherwise.” Why? Because, she wrote, “it simply cannot believe that Congress meant what it said.”

The court’s ruling overturns only Fischer’s conviction, but it will require revisiting the charges against about 350 Jan. 6 rioters under the same law, including some of the most serious cases of the 1,450 people who have been charged to date. It’s also a law the special counsel, Jack Smith, has charged Trump with violating, among other charges in the indictment. (It’s not clear whether the decision will require dropping the obstruction charges against Trump.)

That brings us to the deeper problem with Friday’s ruling, which is that we can neither legislate nor prosecute our way to a healthier democracy. Those who stormed the Capitol (whom Trump still refers to as “political prisoners” and promises to pardon if elected) should of course be punished. But whatever happens to them, the man most responsible for the events of that day stands on the cusp of being elected to the White House once again.

That’s why the real blame here lies not with the prosecutors or even the court; it lies with the Senate Republicans who refused to hold Trump to account in the weeks after Jan. 6. Had they voted to convict him following his impeachment, he would not now be eligible to run for president. No federal law, however well written, can make up for political cowardice like that.

The Supreme Court has issued its most direct ruling in decades on the rights of more than half a million people experiencing homelessness in the United States, and it sets a devastating precedent. Now laws that punish people without shelter from sleeping on the streets have a stamp of approval from the highest court in the country.

A divided court ruled in favor of Grants Pass, Ore., a city that seeks to bar people without homes from sleeping in public within the city limits, even if shelter space isn’t available. The majority opinion, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch, claims criminalizing sleeping outside does not criminalize people based on their status. It makes no difference, he writes, if the person is “experiencing homelessness, a backpacker on vacation or a student who abandons his dorm room to camp out in protest on the lawn of a municipal building.”

So-called camping bans — ordinances that prohibit sleeping in public places with blankets, cardboard boxes, tents and vehicles — have proliferated across the country, in reaction to skyrocketing rates of homelessness since the Covid-19 pandemic. This February, Times Opinion spoke to dozens of people across the country experiencing homelessness to better understand their day-to-day realities. Laws that criminalize aspects of homelessness have become a go-to for local governments looking for a quick solution to growing street homelessness. Many of the people we spoke to had been fined or even jailed for sleeping outside.

Homelessness is a manifestation of the many ways the American underclass succumbs to poverty — through the housing and affordability crisis, health care costs and the collapse of welfare systems that once helped Americans on the margins. Bans like the one in Grants Pass ignore these converging forces, instead criminalizing the people who are living through these crises for surviving with whatever means they have left.

The court’s decision is written with a great deal of sympathy for cities and towns. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissenting opinion gives credence to the feeling that local governments are ill equipped to handle the swelling population of people living without shelter across the country. But, she says, “the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.”

Sleep, she noted, “is a biological necessity, not a crime.”

That cruel choice could now be one that thousands of people across the country could make every night. With this ruling, the court has failed to understand the cruelty of what it means to be homeless in America. That the Supreme Court can’t see them as worthy of a basic right — seeking a place to lay their head at night — speaks to the growing chasm between the people living out America’s policy failures and the people enforcing them.

Joe Biden has done an excellent job as president. In fact, I consider him the best president of my adult life. Based on his policy record, he should be an overwhelming favorite for re-election.

But he isn’t, and on Thursday night he failed to rise to the occasion when it really mattered. I could and would complain about the lack of real-time fact-checking as Donald Trump spewed a fire hose of lies and about the general prevalence of theater criticism taking the place of policy analysis. But complaining about those things right now isn’t going to save American democracy in this moment of crisis.

Given where we are, I must very reluctantly join the chorus asking Biden to voluntarily step aside, with emphasis on the “voluntary” aspect. Maybe some Biden loyalists will consider this a betrayal, given how much I have supported his policies, but I fear that we need to recognize reality.

Step aside for whom? Kamala Harris was, by all accounts, an effective district attorney and attorney general, and she has also been quietly effective as vice president, promoting Biden’s policies. Choosing her as his successor would in no sense be settling for less.

It’s true that she didn’t do well in the 2020 Democratic primaries, but her problem then, as I saw it, was that she had a hard time making the case for choosing her over other candidates. She would have no problem making the case for choosing her over Trump.

Maybe some American voters aren’t ready for a Black woman to be president. But I’d like to think better of us than that, and there are several excellent governors she could choose as a running mate.

In any case, although I hate to see Biden in this position, he’s a good man, and I hope he’ll do the right thing.

President Biden is a good man who capped a long career in public service with a successful presidential term. But I hope he reviews his debate performance Thursday evening and withdraws from the race, throwing the choice of a Democratic nominee to the convention in August.

One of the perils facing this country, I believe and Biden believes, is the risk of a victory by Donald Trump. And after the debate, it’s hard to avoid the feeling that Biden remaining in the race increases the likelihood that Trump will move into the White House in January.

Biden has never been a great debater, but his voice and manner didn’t put to rest the doubts about his age and effectiveness. Rather, he amplified them. I happened to chat today with a woman who is undecided about whom to vote for — she says she distrusts both Trump and Biden but will choose based on who will do better for the economy — and I bet that now she will be supporting Trump.

In some sense, this may be unfair. This was one debate. A candidate’s physical frailty, hoarse voice and rambling responses may not be good predictors of how that person will govern. But in this election, they probably are good predictors that the candidate will lose in November and not have a chance to govern again.

We see the world through narratives, and one of the narratives about Biden is that he is too old. His performance reinforced that narrative when he needed to shatter it. Biden, unable to puncture Trump’s repeated falsehoods, allowed a convicted felon to win the debate.

Biden can resolve this by withdrawing from the race. There isn’t time to hold new primaries, but he could throw the choice of a successor to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. The Democratic Party has some prominent figures who I think would be in a good position to defeat Trump in November, among them Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Gina Raimondo, the secretary of commerce. And there are many others.

My phone has been blowing up with texts from people saying, as one put it: “Dear God. What are we going to do?” Another, also a fan of Biden, texted: “It’s imperative we change horses.” But Democrats have been reluctant to say this out loud and undermine Biden. So it will be up to Joe and Jill Biden to make this choice themselves.

This will be a wrenching choice. But, Mr. President, one way you can serve your country in 2024 is by announcing your retirement and calling on delegates to replace you, for that is the safest course for our nation.

The president who walked haltingly to the podium as the debate began Thursday night was not State of the Union Joe Biden. There was no sign of the joy and fire that he brought to his speech before Congress in March, which briefly brought life to the hopes of Democrats that Biden had the vitality to run this race.

Instead, his voice was hoarse, he stumbled over facts, and occasionally he seemed to lose his train of thought and became a little incoherent. You could almost hear the whispered gasps of his supporters across the country.

And yet, despite his terrible delivery, Biden was at least telling voters the truth. Donald Trump might have looked more healthy and sounded more energetic, but what came out of his mouth was a mix of word foam and outright lies.

Trump said he never got any credit for getting the country out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Of course he didn’t; his policies and lack of action made the pandemic far worse. He dismissed the huge job gains under Biden as “bounce back” jobs, as if they would have happened automatically, when in fact they were created by Biden’s huge investments and skillful handling of pandemic recovery.

Trump said everyone wanted to end Roe v. Wade, which is nonsense, and stunningly claimed that “the country is now coming together” on abortion, which he said has been a “great thing.”

Biden summoned the strength to call this stuff “foolishness” and “malarkey,” adding that “everything he just said was a lie.” He noted forcefully that the economy was “flat on its back” when he took over from Trump. He reminded the world that Trump was a felon and had encouraged the rioters of Jan. 6.

But the substance (or lack of it) of what the two men said at the beginning of the debate was heavily overshadowed by the way they said it. Biden did nothing to change the minds of those voters who feel he is no longer up to the job, and his performance on Thursday night may mean that many Americans won’t pay attention to whether his thoughts and his actions were the right ones.

Within the first half-hour of the presidential debate, I heard from three veteran Democratic presidential campaign officials, and all of them had the same reaction to President Biden’s performance: This is a disaster.

By the end of the debate, I was hearing a level of anxiety and alarm from those Democrats and several other party leaders and operatives that I’d never seen in 20 years of covering presidential politics. The discussion turned squarely to the need for the Democratic Party to replace Biden as the 2024 nominee, with four months to go to the election, and how to make that happen.

Could former President Barack Obama talk him out of the race? Could Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader and an old friend? Most of the Democrats agreed that only Jill Biden and the president’s family, and his longtime close aides, could get Biden to reconsider the race.

The Democratic panic was, on one level, a little shocking, given how much Donald Trump lied during Thursday’s debate and, more broadly, because of the threat that Trump poses to American democracy. Trump has already betrayed the Constitution, and Thursday night he wouldn’t promise to accept the 2024 election results and gave a weak answer about opposing political violence. He got worse as the debate went on, hurling unhinged attacks on Biden, even calling him a “Manchurian candidate.” His relative steadiness in the first 30 minutes started coming undone.

But the danger of a second Trump presidency is exactly what is fueling the panic. Democrats say Trump must be stopped. The Democratic nominee must stop him. And what we saw Thursday night was a Democratic president who could not effectively respond to Trump or deliver a memorable line — even when he rightly said of Trump, “Something snapped in you when you lost the last time.”

It wasn’t just that Biden wasn’t landing a glove on Trump on the economy, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, Covid, taxes, temperament or anything else that was coming up in the questioning. It was Biden’s voice (low and weak) and facial expression (frozen, mouth open, a few smirks) with answers that were rambling or vague or ended in confusion. He gave remarks about health care and abortion that didn’t make strong points, giving Trump a chance to say lines like, “I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said, either.”

Biden is only three years older than Trump, but he looked and sounded 20 years older. One Democratic National Committee official told me before the debate that Biden’s age was Democrats’ biggest problem and texted on Thursday night, “Things have gone from bad to worse.”

One of the other Democrats said Biden looked scared during the debate as he listened to Trump. Another said it was an “emperor has no clothes” performance. The third said of the performance overall, “Don’t ask.”

Several others said that Biden had to drop out and that a governor — Gavin Newsom, Andy Beshear, Gretchen Whitmer, Josh Shapiro — needed to seek the nomination at an open convention. One said that Vice President Kamala Harris was a key player and voice now in any outcome but not to assume she would be a post-Biden nominee.

None of the Democrats counseled patience or said that the pundits or instant reaction was off base. But I am mindful of how things change. There was anxiety after Obama’s first, bad debate performance against Mitt Romney in 2012. There was confidence in Hillary Clinton’s debate performances against Trump in 2016. There are four months to go before the election, and candidates can recover. Trump being Trump, he has plenty of time to do damage to himself.

Frank Luntz, a veteran focus-group moderator who was holding a live focus group with undecided voters during the debate, wrote of their reactions after the first half-hour of the debate: “The group is so bothered by Biden’s voice and appearance. But they’re getting madder and madder with Trump’s personal attacks.”

“If Trump talks less,” Luntz said, “he wins. If Biden doesn’t stop talking, he loses.”

After the debate was over, Luntz wrote: “Twelve out of 14 say they are now leaning Trump. One chose Biden and one didn’t move. This is an unmitigated disaster for the Democrats.”

The CNN moderators get to ask the questions of President Biden and Donald Trump at Thursday night’s debate, but our Opinion writers have a few suggestions of their own.

Binyamin Appelbaum, editorial board member:
What steps would you take as president to increase housing production in the United States?

Charles Blow, Opinion columnist:
Mr. Trump, how would your policies on the war in Gaza differ from President Biden’s?

Michelle Cottle, Opinion writer:
What do both of you say to the significant bloc of voters who are not enthusiastic about their electoral choices this election, who want fresh blood and something/someone different?

Ross Douthat, Opinion columnist:
The last few years have seen an accelerating decline in birthrates all around the developed world. This is bad news for economic prosperity and also a national security challenge: If current trends continue, the population of a close American ally like South Korea could be cut in half by later in the 21st century. What, if anything, should be the U.S. government’s response to this mounting demographic challenge?

Maureen Dowd, Opinion columnist:
Mr. Trump, it’s been reported that you said Mike Pence should be hanged, due to his conduct on Jan 6. Do you still feel that way?

Mr. Biden, women are being stripped of their rights and you’re running against a felon, yet you’re having a hard time pulling even. Doesn’t that undermine your claim that you’re the best Democrat to beat Trump?

Thomas L. Friedman, Opinion columnist:
What was the biggest mistake you made in your four years as president that you absolutely will not repeat if elected again?

What will you do if you win to unite the country and persuade those who did not vote for you that they have nothing to fear from your presidency?

Patrick Healy, deputy Opinion editor:
Do you think inflation is getting better or getting worse for Americans?

What’s something that young voters in America should know about you that they might not know?

You’ve both been called fascists by some voters. What do you think about that word, and do you think your opponent is a fascist?

Paul Krugman, Opinion columnist:
Mr. Trump, why was your prediction that electing Biden would cause a stock market crash so wrong?

Nicholas Kristof, Opinion columnist:
One of the worst things that could unfold in the next administration would be a war with China, so how do you propose to navigate the fine line of deterring but not provoking China? If China blockaded Taiwan, would you order the U.S. Navy to break the blockade?

If China continues to pressure the Philippines in the South China Sea, would you dispatch ships to back the Philippines and confront China? And if we found ourselves losing a conventional war with China, would you reach for nuclear weapons?

Pamela Paul, Opinion columnist:
What would both of you tell the graduating seniors at Newtown High School about your plans on gun control?

Farah Stockman, editorial board member:
It’s been more than two years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and Russia has put its entire economy on a war footing. The tide appeared to be turning against Ukraine, partly because of the Republicans’ decision to block aid for so long, thanks to opposition by Mr. Trump. How would you bring about an acceptable ending to the war?

Zeynep Tufekci, Opinion columnist:
Mr. Trump, you continue to deny the results of the 2020 election. If you don’t respect the will of the people, the bedrock of democracy, how can Americans trust that you will not abuse the vast powers of the presidency to benefit yourself?

President Biden, you got elected on promises to do better than President Trump on the coronavirus pandemic that started in China, and yet your administration seems to be doing too little to stop a potential new pandemic from emerging from the United States. An outbreak of the dangerous H5N1 bird flu virus among dairy cows in the United States is spreading to humans. How can you reassure the American people given this situation?

We invite readers to submit debate questions they would ask by using our comments section.

The new issue of Bloomberg Businessweek (its first as a monthly) includes a delicious profile of the libertarian billionaire Jeff Yass, a co-founder of the giant trading firm Susquehanna International Group, who once boldly declared: “What’s the difference between a billionaire and a guy that’s making $100,000 a year? They’re both at home watching Netflix. And they’re both on their iPhones.”

This is right in one way and so wrong in others.

To Yass’s credit, I’m guessing that most of the time, his life really is not that different from the lives of the millionaires and thousandaires who surround him. Get up, go to work, watch Netflix, go to bed. The best things in life are free: the sun in the morning, the moon at night, the occasional solar eclipse. Or almost free: Donald Trump chows down on McDonald’s just like people with a billionth of his net worth.

But Yass’s message — that inequality is a mostly solved problem — is absurd. The Bloomberg Businessweek story cites a 2022 interview with Yass by the Adam Smith Society, in which Yass also said:

“In America, not around the rest of the world, but we’re getting there,” Yass said, “everybody has all the stuff they need. No one’s hungry, no one’s cold, no one doesn’t have some basic, uh, health insurance, so the rising tide gets rid of the real inequality.”

Let’s start with “no one’s hungry.” According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in 2022 nearly seven million American households experienced “very low food security,” meaning that “normal eating patterns of one or more household members were disrupted and food intake was reduced at times during the year because they had insufficient money or other resources for food.”

I could go on with “no one’s cold” (what about the unhoused?) or no one doesn’t have health insurance, but you get the idea. One of Yass’s mistakes, I guess, is that he simply can’t fathom anyone earning less than $100,000 a year (a sum substantially higher than the median income).

Billionaires have their own special kinds of woes, to be sure. Yass, for example, is struggling to keep the federal government from banning TikTok, since he’s a major investor in its parent, ByteDance. But that’s nothing compared with the struggles of ordinary Americans just to make ends meet each month.

No, Jeff, it’s not true that “everybody has all the stuff they need.”

The Supreme Court’s right-wing supermajority talks a lot about the importance of history and tradition in deciding cases. And yet as those six justices made clear once again on Thursday morning in one of the biggest cases of the current term, only certain histories and certain traditions matter.

The decision, in Securities and Exchange Commission v. Jarkesy, struck down the S.E.C.’s use of in-house judges to bring enforcement actions against securities fraud. The Seventh Amendment guarantees the right to a jury trial in civil cases, the majority wrote, which means arrangements like the S.E.C.’s — which Congress explicitly created and which are also used by roughly two dozen other agencies — are unconstitutional. If the agency wants to go after securities fraud, it will have to go to federal court.

The problem with this neat-sounding conclusion is that it ignores two centuries of well-established practice to the contrary. When a lawsuit involves the protection of rights of the public generally, juries have never been required. As the Supreme Court affirmed in a 1977 case, Congress’s power to give executive-branch agencies the first stab at adjudicating and imposing civil penalties has been “settled judicial construction … from the beginning.”

Thursday’s ruling is thus “a seismic shift in this court’s jurisprudence,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Its impact will reach far beyond securities fraud, hamstringing similar tribunals in agencies responsible for the environment, public health, food and consumer safety, worker protections and much more.

This is, naturally, the whole point. Led by Justice Neil Gorsuch, the Supreme Court’s conservatives have been engaged in a multipronged assault on the administrative state, which they consider part of a bloated and unaccountable federal government. Their answer is to arrogate more power to themselves. Thursday’s decision, Sotomayor wrote, is “part of a disconcerting trend: When it comes to the separation of powers, this court tells the American public and its coordinate branches that it knows best.” She called it, in fact, a “power grab.”

What the majority refuses to acknowledge is that there is no way the federal courts can handle the volume and sophistication of cases that pass through those agencies.

The irony is that earlier right-wing justices understood that a modern, highly advanced society cannot operate without robust executive agencies. In 1989, Justice Antonin Scalia spoke out in defense of another longstanding administrative-state precedent that the Roberts court appears to be on the verge of crippling, saying it “accurately reflects the reality of government” and “adequately serves its needs.”

Of course, the modern right does not really want to eliminate the administrative state; it wants to control it. As Senator (and vice-presidential hopeful) J.D. Vance explained in 2022, if Donald Trump is elected in 2024, he should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” If you are wondering who, exactly, “our people” are, then it’s not you.

Last year, five female legislators in South Carolina tried to stop an abortion ban with a filibuster. They were known as the “sister senators” — three Republicans, one Democrat and one independent. Ultimately, the effort failed, and abortion was banned after six weeks in the state.

And as of Tuesday night, all three Republicans have now officially lost to primary challengers this year.

One of the three, Sandy Senn, spoke with Jane Coaston last year for Times Opinion in an interview that’s worth reading front to back, because it dives into the details of the politics as seen through a very specific, gendered Republican viewpoint looking for consistency in policy and more democratic outcomes — and her frustration with men in government imposing a certain idea of what the law should be.

There’s obviously been plenty written about how much the Dobbs decision scrambled conservative politics, how much the anti-abortion movement has struggled with what have turned out to be unpopular policies when put to statewide ballots and how chaotic the courts are now on this subject. But it’s been less clear how much this might reshape the makeup of the parties in the long term. Senn had a prediction about it.

“In reality, we lose elections because this is a losing issue and we lose people that are in the middle,” she told Coaston last year. “People who had previously leaned to the right are now going to lean to the left.”

Along those lines, this week a top Biden campaign official, Jen O’Malley Dillon, made a point to John Heilemann on Puck about persuadable voters, pairing the Dobbs decision and, essentially, Nikki Haley primary voters — a linkage I had not seen made before.

“There’s a whole new cohort that has come in since 2020, who were not available to us [then] who we saw vote in 2022, post-Dobbs,” O’Malley Dillon said. “They are the same people who, in primary after primary on the Republican side, protested Donald Trump. And I definitely think they’re gettable. Is it a small number of states in the scheme of things and a small number of voters who ultimately are on the margins? Yes.”

I think many of these voters probably already voted for President Biden once or avoided voting anyone for president in 2020. That might be right or wrong. But regardless, there is something interesting about what is essentially a practical, smaller-government conservatism of gender — even if it’s for a narrow slice of voters — that is ultimately very reactive to government power being used with aggression, through the prism of abortion policy.

As someone who closely follows both politics and reproductive rights, I’ve been very interested in seeing whether a particular Supreme Court decision about abortion would come out before Thursday night’s presidential debate.

On Wednesday, the draft text of the decision in Moyle v. United States and Idaho v. United States was accidentally posted on the Supreme Court website, Bloomberg News reported.

It’s unclear whether the decision that was posted is final, but if it is then it seems the court will soon vote 6 to 3 to effectively dismiss the cases. The real-world effect, at least in the short term, would be that emergency abortions will continue to be available in Idaho.

At issue in the case is whether a federal statute known as EMTALA, or the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act — intended to ensure that anyone who walks into an emergency room will receive care, regardless of the ability to pay — applies in some circ*mstances in Idaho, which after Roe v. Wade’s demise enacted a near-total abortion ban. In simple terms, the question before the justices has been whether a pregnant woman in Idaho who is experiencing a medical emergency must be given an abortion, if that abortion would stabilize her health.

A ruling allowing Idaho to ignore EMTALA would be a big problem for Trump’s election, and if it came out before Thursday evening, it could have hurt him in the debate. Abortion has been Trump’s trickiest policy issue. Virtually every electoral data point since Roe was overturned makes clear that most voters do not like strict abortion bans. And Trump, who campaigned in 2016 on a promise to outlaw abortion, not only set in motion the series of events that led to a lot of strict abortion bans being passed around the country, he also bragged about it once the deed was done.

Biden has the upper hand on the issue regardless, but a different court decision ahead of the debate might have given him a gift tied up in bow.

For now, the important thing is that Idaho women appear to have a reprieve. But this isn’t necessarily the end of the story: The court could get another chance down the road to rule on the substance of this issue, just as it could get another chance to rule on access to abortion pills — another case the justices took up but ultimately punted on this term.

Because of Trump’s appointments to the Supreme Court, further threats to abortion remain on the table, regardless of who wins the advantage at the debate.

President Biden’s decision on Wednesday to pardon thousands of L.G.B.T.Q. service members who had been unfairly punished, discharged or court-martialed for their sexual orientation or gender identity was long overdue. His proclamation will restore benefits and honor to 2,000 or so service members, just atonement for the U.S. military’s long, discriminatory history against L.G.B.T.Q. Americans.

As documented by Allan Bérubé in his exhaustively researched book “Coming Out Under Fire,” a cruel, hom*ophobic military culture was forged during World War II. Back then, those accused of hom*osexuality (often with flimsy or nonsensical evidence) could be subjected to systematic witch hunts, scurrilous interrogations, solitary confinement and “queer stockades” rife with harassment. Public discharge records meant that L.G.B.T.Q. service members were outed upon returning home, which inevitably led to further discrimination.

This culture was explicitly formalized after President Harry Truman created the Uniform Code of Military Justice in 1951, which prohibited “unnatural carnal copulation with another person of the same or opposite sex,” effectively criminalizing hom*osexuality. Over the following decades, L.G.B.T.Q. veterans became some of the country’s foremost L.G.B.T.Q. activists, and discriminatory military policies were among the community’s key targets. Their efforts culminated in the end of the notorious “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy in 2011.

When some of the government’s most prominent institutions declared that a group of people was inferior, many in the country came to believe it. Biden’s pardon, acknowledging flaws in the higher moral standing that the military has long claimed to espouse, redresses a historical harm and reinforces the idea that L.G.B.T.Q. Americans are not inferior.

But the commander in chief chose perhaps the most frictionless, election-friendly way to signal his support for the L.G.B.T.Q. community. And the rest of Washington is allowing another Pride Month to pass without reaching for more daring possibilities.

Congress has yet to pass the Equality Act, a measure supported by the president, which would expand the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to protect Americans from discrimination based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. To be frank, the bill has long seemed like a pipe dream, given a divided Congress and a mounting reactionary wave that targets queer people. But the president could do more to pressure both his allies on the Hill and his adversaries to end this overt discrimination.

The president has already earned the title of most pro-L.G.B.T.Q. president in history. But without a law in place, many of his efforts will only last as long as his presidency. What’s the point of attempting to deliver “the full promise of equality” if the next guy to sit behind the Resolute Desk can strip it away with the stroke of a pen?

It often seems that Justice Samuel Alito would be happier swapping out his black robes for the garb of whichever right-wing plaintiffs have arrived before the court to air their culture-war grievances.

On Wednesday, Alito was at it again, dissenting at length from the court’s 6-to-3 decision that threw out a conservative challenge to the Biden administration. The White House had tried to counteract the reams of misinformation being spread on social media sites during the Covid pandemic and the aftermath of the 2020 election, urging social media sites to regulate what was allowed to be posted. Two Republican states and five private citizens cried “censorship!” and said the administration had infringed on their right to free expression, but the court’s majority said they had no right to bring the lawsuit.

Referring to the plaintiffs as “victims” of government censorship who “simply wanted to speak out on a question of the utmost public importance,” Alito wrote grandly, “if the lower courts’ assessment of the voluminous record is correct, this is one of the most important free speech cases to reach this court in years.”

That is a very big “if,” as the court’s majority noted in tossing the suit for lack of standing. Not only could the plaintiffs not show “any concrete link between their injuries and the defendants’ conduct,” but the lower courts’ assessment of the record was, in fact, far from correct. Many of the district court’s findings, on which the increasingly off-the-wall U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit relied, “unfortunately appear to be clearly erroneous,” Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote for the court.

During oral arguments in the case, several justices expressed similar concerns with the loose relationship to the truth that Benjamin Aguiñaga, Louisiana’s solicitor general and one of the plaintiffs’ lawyers, had. “I have such a problem with your brief,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told him. “You omit information that changes the context of some of your claims. You attribute things to people who it didn’t happen to.”

Aguiñaga said he was sorry “if any aspect of our brief was not as forthcoming as it should have been” — an unusually frank admission of dishonesty by a government official.

And yet his distortions appeared to pose no problem for Alito, who seemed as eager as any Facebook anti-vaxxer to trample basic facts and evidence in service of the right to spew dangerous lies in public without consequences. As Barrett pointed out regarding Jill Hines, one of the plaintiffs, Alito “draws links that Hines herself has not set forth, often based on injuries that Hines never claimed.”

Making up facts to reach the conclusion you want to reach isn’t a Supreme Court justice’s job, of course, but it’s entirely in character for a committed culture warrior.

Two months ago, world leaders gathered in Paris and said all the right words about the horror unfolding in Sudan, where a vicious civil war has stolen the dreams of a proud and resilient people, leaving five million people on the brink of famine. In Paris, diplomats pledged $2.1 billion and condemned indiscriminate attacks on civilians, including children.

But nothing has changed.

“Sudan has become one of the world’s largest — and most ignored — man-made human tragedies,” my friend Tjada D’Oyen McKenna, chief executive officer of Mercy Corps, wrote to me recently.

In some cases, the dithering is maddeningly academic, mired in debate about whether the criteria for a famine declaration have been reached. In other cases, it seems that the concern was performative.

“A mere 12 percent of those pledges have been disbursed so far,” Tjada wrote. “Even as the situation is rapidly deteriorating.”

I must admit to being at a loss for what to say about such tragedies sometimes, with so much suffering in this world and so few good policy options. Sudan is a particular heartbreak: In 2019, a peaceful revolution led by doctors, mothers, activists and scholars toppled a longtime dictator in Khartoum, opening the door to what could have been a new and democratic era for the country. Instead, two selfish military leaders derailed the country’s democratic transition and then turned on each other, dragging the country back into a civil war.

But what continue to inspire me about Sudan are the community-based organizations that save lives by running informal soup kitchens and clinics out of their homes. They are the future of Sudan, if Sudan is to have a future. Good people around the world should support them by donating to reputable international organizations like Mercy Corps and Solidarités International that work closely with community groups that persevere, against all odds.

Update: George Latimer defeated Jamaal Bowman in the Democratic congressional primary on Tuesday.

In Tuesday’s primary election in the 16th Congressional District of New York, the Westchester County executive, George Latimer, is running against Representative Jamaal Bowman, a member of the House’s progressive “Squad.” The chatter has been all about campaign gaffes and fund-raising. But in this case, it should be about the merits of the candidates.

We’ve heard plenty about the outsize funding for Latimer, particularly from AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. The question said aloud by Bowman supporters has been, “Why so much money from a foreign government for a local congressional candidate?” The unspoken question has been, “Why are the Jews funding this candidate?”

We’ve also heard Bowman ridiculed for holding a rally in the South Bronx, which he does not represent. Onstage, Bowman proudly cursed in a manner unbecoming to a public official. There’s also his schoolyard prank in the halls of Congress, pulling a fire alarm to stall a bill and then lying about it.

But let’s put aside money and manners. Let’s even put aside the war in Gaza, an issue on which the candidates strongly differ. (Latimer offers a centrist view broadly supportive of President Biden’s policy, while Bowman has taken a forceful pro-Palestinian stance.)

This election is about substantive issues relevant to the 16th District, which has been redrawn twice since Bowman’s 2020 win to include less of the Bronx and more of Westchester County. Bowman, elected to a largely different district, no longer represents the interests of his constituency.

He voted against Biden’s infrastructure bill, one of the administration’s key bipartisan successes and fundamental to Biden’s re-election, which hinges on independents and the center. By contrast, Latimer has shown himself successful in helping turn a largely Republican district blue and is supportive of abortion rights, gun control and other domestic issues aligned with his district.

This election is also about the future of the Democratic Party, pitting a centrist vision of the party, the growing resonance of which was recently demonstrated by the election of Tom Suozzi in Nassau County, against its progressive fringe. Notably, Hillary Clinton, a Westchester resident and moderate Democrat, has endorsed Latimer. This week, Representative Josh Gottheimer, a co-chair of the centrist Problem Solvers Caucus, also endorsed Latimer.

Bowman has proved himself out of sync with his district, and his re-election would take the Democratic Party in a losing direction. Equally important, based on his record, Jamaal Bowman does not deserve re-election.

Elected officials who prefer not to discuss the fact that New York City has one of the most segregated school systems in the United States could soon have no choice. A state appellate court has said that an anti-discrimination lawsuit can move forward.

The suit charges New York with maintaining a “racialized pipeline” through which gifted and talented programs and screening practices condemn many students of color to “neglected schools that deliver inferior and unacceptable outcomes.” If successful, this landmark legal challenge could remake admissions practices at selective public schools.

At the same time, in Brooklyn, a public school district that covers both poor and affluent neighborhoods has shown it is possible to integrate schools — without rancor or a mass exodus of white families — when parents and school officials value integration as a benefit in itself.

As my colleague Troy Closson explained last week, the remaking of Brooklyn’s District 15 began several years ago, when parents expressed a desire to integrate middle schools that were among the most hom*ogeneous in the city. “Selective admissions were scrapped,” Closson wrote. “Every child got a lottery number instead. Schools adopted targets to admit certain numbers of disadvantaged children.” Middle schools set aside seats for students who were from low-income families, living in temporary housing or still learning English. Crucially, the schools fill incoming classes through a lottery, instead of using metrics like grades or attendance.

As a result, the district’s middle schools, which were the second-most socioeconomically segregated, improved to rank 19th out of the city’s 32 local districts. Teachers and students now say friendships are emerging across income lines, and a more diverse set of middle schoolers began taking state algebra exams.

Antonia Martinelli, a parent leader, told The Times: “We’ve managed to debunk this ‘good school-bad school’ narrative. Parents understand that they’re all great schools.”

Integration is hardly a cure-all, and challenges remain. But this example shows that breaking with segregation does not have to involve bitterness and decades of delays.

Partisan hit jobs. Left-wing smears. That’s how Mark Robinson’s aides characterize any attention to his diatribes against Jewish people, gay people, women. They want voters in North Carolina, where he is the Republican nominee for governor, to see him as just another conservative whose straight talk and religiousness come under predictable fire from the ambassadors of wokeness. Nothing to see here, folks, nothing but the usual disdain for MAGA might.

That’s a lie as big as any in an epoch of epic fabulism. And Robinson’s fate will be an especially revealing referendum on just how much, in the America of 2024, tribalism trumps common sense and common decency and voters tune out the truth.

The governor’s race pits Robinson, who’d be North Carolina’s first Black governor, against Josh Stein, the Democrat, who’d be its first Jewish one. To go by polls, it’s a dead heat. But the Stein campaign has only just begun its advertising blitz and three weeks ago released a whopper of an ad that spotlights Robinson’s 2019 remark that abortion “is about killing the child because you weren’t responsible enough to keep your skirt down.”

Robinson’s rants — mocking Paul Pelosi after he was attacked, suggesting that Michelle Obama is a man — are that hateful. And they’re the very foundation of his improbable political career: He was elected lieutenant governor of North Carolina in 2020 almost solely on the basis of a single speech in opposition to sensible restrictions on firearms. His work history included nothing — zilch — that prepared him for political leadership. But he could shout. He could spew.

He has spewed less of late. Ambition can be a gag. But his extremism remains so close to the surface that Paul Shumaker, a Republican strategist in North Carolina, was recently quoted in New York magazine as predicting that “Donald Trump will unendorse Mark Robinson by the time we get to Labor Day.”

Robinson should, indeed, be poison in this purple state. He should be struggling, too, given Stein’s bona fides: eight years as the state’s attorney general, before which he served in the State Senate and was a top aide to John Edwards in the U.S. Senate. There’s not a whiff of extremism about him. But late last month, The Cook Political Report changed its assessment of the Stein-Robinson race from leans Democratic to tossup. In any other year, I’d be shocked. In this one? I’m just terrified.

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

• On Saturday my brother asked me a question with some urgency in his voice: “Are you seeing any new signs Biden can beat Trump?” My brother is a 63-year-old independent in Boston who says he “votes the person, not the party,” and thinks President Biden has done about the best anyone could at bringing America back from the disastrous Covid economy. He thinks Donald Trump would be a joke if he weren’t so dangerous.

• I told him about some of Biden’s latest messaging and ads emphasizing that Trump is a convicted criminal and a new Fox News national poll that gives Biden a two percentage point lead over Trump and shows more voters feeling good about the economy. Then I said: “To answer your question — not really, no. Nothing game changing. That’s why the debate is so important.”

• Biden has to find ways to make people want him for another four years. Being not Trump is not enough. Biden’s biggest problem is that a small but meaningful share of his own supporters — Biden 2020 voters, to be specific — don’t want to vote for him again and they are considering third-party candidates, sitting out the presidential election or voting for Trump.

• Yes, political journalists always geek out on presidential debates and describe them as really big deals, but Thursday night’s debate is Biden’s best chance so far this year to start turning things around. He did well at his State of the Union, but it was a teleprompter speech, and I doubt many swing voters were swayed. (He didn’t get a lasting poll bounce.) Trump’s criminal conviction was good for Biden, but Biden hasn’t yet leveraged it to make voters want his decency all over again. An unscripted debate is his best shot and big test.

• It’s the economy, really, that’s everything. Biden has to speak plainly and with humility and feeling about what people are experiencing in the economy and how he will address inflation. He can’t tell people what to feel or lapse into defensiveness — which is easier said than done in a debate, where the phrasing of a question or the tone or specifics of your opponent’s answer can send you off track. If Biden gets off track or has a senior moment or two, he will be judged harshly by the many voters who seem unwilling to give him credit for anything.

• My bet is that Biden and Trump will acquit themselves pretty well on Thursday (with Trump benefiting from his mic being muted at times, reducing the opportunity for him to sound like a raving nut again). They know the stakes, and both will be a little nervous and rusty. They will probably stick to their core messages, so it comes down to what voters want to hear the most. As my colleague Ezra Klein recently noted, Trump is talking a lot more about inflation and immigration than people may realize, and he talks about it pretty effectively. If he shows some discipline (I know, I know) and persuasively makes it sound that America was better off during his first three years in office than it is now, he could have a good night. No one knows this more than Biden; he needs to play strong offense and even stronger defense, pointing to how bad things got under Trump. The Covid economic train wreck under Trump would be one place to start.

At this rate the Supreme Court is going to need a few more justices just to keep up with all the extra litigation it’s generating on its way to dismantling the administrative state.

On Friday morning the right-wing supermajority overturned one of the court’s most frequently cited precedents and dealt the second blow in two days to the basic infrastructure of American government, voting 6 to 3 to overrule what’s known as the Chevron doctrine.

Named after an oil company case, the doctrine — a decades-old “cornerstone of administrative law,” in the dissent’s words — gave federal agencies the flexibility to interpret ambiguous laws without constant second-guessing by the courts, which deferred to those interpretations as long as they were reasonable. It was adopted, as Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent, for a simple reason: Congress’s laws “will inevitably contain ambiguities that some other actor will have to resolve, and gaps that some other actor will have to fill. And it would usually prefer that actor to be the responsible agency, not a court.”

This may sound complicated, but it’s central to the functioning of modern government regulation. The Chevron doctrine, she explained, has been the key to “keeping air and water clean, food and drugs safe, and financial markets honest.”

To the court’s conservative majority, however, it was just another example of deep-state bloat. “Agencies have no special competence,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court. The problem with this is not only that it’s wrong, but that it was the courts that developed the Chevron doctrine in the first place. In addition to respecting Congress’s intent, they were sick and tired of trawling through thousands of pages of federal law to understand how everything fit together.

Most Americans have no idea how many executive agencies there are, or how complex and technical much of their work is, but the courts do. Now all the tangled questions of law and policy will wind up back in their courtrooms, yet they’re no more equipped to answer them than they were 40 years ago.

This doesn’t have to be a left-right issue. At the start, it wasn’t even controversial. As I noted in response to Thursday’s equally destructive administrative-state ruling, Justice Antonin Scalia, the conservative stalwart, defended the Chevron doctrine’s value, saying in 1989 that it “accurately reflects the reality of government” and “adequately serves its needs.”

It does not, however, serve the needs of America’s business community, which looks at the slew of federal regulations and sees only reduced profits. Deep-pocketed businesses have been the staunchest opponents of the doctrine; along with a raft of committed right-wing activists, they finally managed to get enough like-minded friends on the Supreme Court to kill it off.

Those businesses are predictably thrilled with Friday’s ruling, the practical effect of which will be to save them money by scaring off agencies from imposing regulations that they know will be tied up in endless litigation. The rest of us — at least those of us who drink water, eat food, pay taxes, drive cars, buy products and breathe air — will increasingly be left to fend for ourselves.