Sheryl Gay Stolberg

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, will announce that his panel intends to mark up a bill eliminating the deadline for states to adopt the amendment, known as the ERA, which was one state short of the 38 needed for ratification when the deadline passed in 1982.

The aim is to clear the way for Virginia — where Democrats have just won control of the Legislature and are eager to approve the amendment — to become that final state. Although legal experts debate whether Congress’ deadline was ever constitutionally valid, and whether it can now remove that deadline, doing so would seem to help carve a legal path for the amendment to be written into the Constitution. But both the House and the Republican-led Senate would have to vote to do so.

“It is now highly likely that if we eliminate the deadline, Virginia will ratify and become the 38th state, and then the ERA can go into effect as a constitutional amendment,” Nadler said in an interview Friday. “So it’s time to do it.”

First proposed by women’s suffragists in 1923 and adopted by Congress in 1972, the Equal Rights Amendment, which would bar discrimination on the basis of sex, has for decades been a dream of women’s rights advocates. Its language is simple: “Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

Nadler’s move is part of a string of recent gains for the amendment’s backers, who struggled for years to get politicians of both parties to pay attention to their cause. Five years ago, they founded the ERA Coalition, a nonpartisan umbrella organization for groups that favor seeing the amendment enacted.

Bettina Hager, the coalition’s chief operating officer, said that as recently as 2016, she “was practically begging” for Hillary Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee, to talk about the amendment, but the Clinton campaign was unreceptive.

Now, Hager said, Democratic presidential candidates are not only mentioning the amendment, but competing to embrace it. Without her group’s prompting, Julián Castro raised the issue in a Democratic debate, and Sen. Kamala Harris of California and former Vice President Joe Biden quickly followed suit.

“Senator Harris said, ‘I’m going to pass the ERA and I support this,’ and Vice President Biden said, ‘Hey, I’ve been working on that for decades,’ ” Hager said. “It was almost humorous to see them one-upping the other.”

While the House is likely to vote to eliminate the deadline, the measure’s prospects in the Senate are uncertain.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, and Benjamin L. Cardin, D-Md., are co-sponsoring a companion measure to the House bill. And while Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, has pronounced the Senate a graveyard for progressive legislation in the House, Republicans are also looking for ways to attract female voters.

Republicans have a long history with the amendment. It was first incorporated into the Republican platform in 1940 — four years before it was added to the Democratic platform. It took three more decades for the ERA to pass both the House and the Senate with the required two-thirds majority.

The measure was then sent to the states for ratification with a seven-year deadline. When that deadline passed in 1979, Congress extended it to 1982.

While women have made great strides in their push for equality since then, Nadler and other proponents say the amendment is necessary because of loopholes in other laws. While Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination against women in the workplace, it applies only to workplaces with 15 or more employees. While Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in schools, it only applies to schools that receive federal funding.

Fatima Goss Graves, the chief executive of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, said the amendment was the next frontier for women’s rights, as millions of women were speaking out about their experiences with sexual violence through the #MeToo movement, and activists had mobilized against abortion restrictions and around efforts to close the wage gap between men and women.

“This is a movement in search of our collective right to be equal in this country,” Goss Graves said. “There is value in our foundational documents fully reflecting that equality.”

And Hager noted that while legislation can be rolled back, only one constitutional amendment — the one enacting prohibition — has been reversed.

“The most important part of the Equal Rights Amendment is that it is a statement of principle and permanence,” she said. “This is an incredible moment for us and for all women.”

This article originally appeared in

Congressional Democrats to Revive Equal Rights Amendment Push

Democrats, buoyed by their party’s electoral sweep in Virginia this week, plan Friday to revive the Equal Rights Amendment in Congress, embarking on what they hope is a final push to add the nearly century-old measure to enshrine equality of the sexes into the Constitution.

Garland Gentry, 74, a pro-Trump retiree, declared the House Democrats’ impeachment inquiry “another in a long line of hoaxes,” while Cindy Rafala, 59, a therapist, sat nearby and wondered, “If we don’t impeach, then what are our principles?”

Donnie Johnston, a newspaper columnist who voted for Trump but has since soured on him, said Democrats are right to look into the president’s effort to pressure the leader of Ukraine to dig up dirt on political rivals. Trump, he said, makes “a wonderful tyrant but he’s a miserable president.”

The shifting tides in Culpeper, a rural town of about 18,000 nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, and in communities across the country, are a warning sign for Trump as Congress returns to Washington on Tuesday after a two-week recess and Democrats’ impeachment inquiry kicks into high gear. They suggest that while Americans are deeply split along party lines over the push to remove Trump, their views on impeachment are beginning to crystallize in some unexpected ways.

From Iowa to Texas to Virginia to New York — and especially in swing districts like this one, where Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a freshman Democrat, flipped a seat long held by Republicans — interviews with dozens of voters suggest what public polls have begun to show: That there is growing support for the impeachment inquiry that could ultimately result in Trump’s ouster, even as sharp divides remain over his conduct and character.

Democrats, aware of the risks of a backlash by voters against the impeachment process, have been monitoring public opinion vigilantly and tailoring their message and strategy accordingly. On a private conference call Friday afternoon, leaders briefed their rank and file on private polling of 57 politically competitive districts that confirmed what public polls have reported in recent days: while a stark partisan divide persists, public support is growing for impeaching the president, and for the inquiry itself.

An average of impeachment polls calculated by the website FiveThirtyEight found that, as of Oct. 11, 49.3% of respondents supported impeachment and 43.5% did not. A survey released this past week by The Washington Post found 58% said the House was correct to open an inquiry.

And polling by a group of Democratic strategists found a potential opportunity to sway the public still further: Nearly a quarter of the respondents categorized by strategists as “impeachment skeptics” opposed the inquiry but were not ready to say that Trump did nothing wrong.

Those figures do not point to a broad consensus around impeachment, and the interviews in recent days made clear there is none. Republicans here and around the country view the Democrats’ inquiry as just one more effort to undo the results of the 2016 presidential race. Just 14% of them back impeachment, according to FiveThirtyEight, compared to 82% of Democrats.

At a weekly steak fry in Trump-friendly Bandera, Texas, a town that bills itself as the “Cowboy Capital of the World,” most people seemed to agree with Holly Mydland, a fiddler, that the inquiry is “just bull crap,” and the local congressman, Rep. Chip Roy, a Republican who has said he wants to follow the facts, but insisted that “only in Washington are people all in a tizzy about this.”

But Michael Clark, 69, a retired purchasing agent for an oil company who considers himself an independent, said the inquiry “has merit — we need to know the truth whatever the truth may be.”

Still, Democrats are confronting some warning signs of their own as they pursue what Speaker Nancy Pelosi has conceded is the most divisive process in American political life. While the Democratic base overwhelmingly supports impeachment, many share the view of Rafala, the therapist in Culpeper, who said she is “worried to death that it could backfire.”

In West Des Moines, Iowa, Dimeka Jennings said she is far more focused on the 2020 election than on the efforts in Congress to remove Trump, which she predicts will fail.

“We need to look at beating Trump, and doing so at all costs,” Jennings said.

And in Reno, Nevada, April Friedman, 48, a teacher for students with special needs, said she thought the impeachment inquiry was important but wished the government would also address other more pressing issues.

“I’m in a Title I school and we have cockroaches in our trailer,” she said, referring to the law that mandates extra federal funding for schools with large concentrations of low-income students. “I know there’s a lot going on, but that’s what I’m focused on.”

When lawmakers left Washington for their home districts at the end of September, Pelosi instructed her fellow Democrats to speak about impeachment in “prayerful, respectful, solemn” tones in an effort to persuade the public that Democrats were acting out of principle, not politics. Two weeks later, it is not clear whether they have succeeded.

“I think the jury’s still out,” said Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster. For Democrats, she said, “the risk is less that voters disagree with them on impeachment and more that people will think: ‘Why are you engaged in this when my prescription drug bill has gone up, my health care is uncertain, my job doesn’t pay very well, my kid’s got student debt?’”

Meantime, the impeachment inquiry is barreling ahead as Democrats seek to build their case that Trump abused his power by using a security aid package and the promise of a White House visit to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskiy of Ukraine to investigate Democrats including former Vice President Joe Biden and Mr. Biden’s son Hunter. On Friday, Marie L. Yovanovitch, the former ambassador to Ukraine, testified behind closed doors, telling impeachment investigators that the president had personally pushed for her ouster based on “false claims.”

During their conference call Friday, Rep. Cheri Bustos of Illinois, who runs the party’s campaign arm, urged fellow Democrats to focus on kitchen-table issues and to speak about impeachment in “direct, simple and values-based” language, according to aides who listened to the call.

The advice reflected the findings of internal polls that the most potent argument for Democrats is that Trump has abused his power and put himself above the law. It was also an acknowledgment that Republicans are succeeding at persuading some voters that the impeachment push is distracting Democrats from getting things done for their constituents.

“They’ve been hassling the president since the day he got in office,” said Diane Segura, 56, who works as a nurse near the 11th Street Cowboy Bar in Bandera. “I’m tired of hearing it, tired of dealing with it.”

“It’s just more of the same,” she added.

But for many Democratic voters, the impeachment push is long overdue.

“Regardless of what your party is, I don’t understand how you could look at that and think this is not worthy of an investigation,’” said Deborah Harris, a self-described “strong Democrat” in Iowa City, referring to Trump’s entreaties to Zelenskiy. She added, “This is crossing a line.”

But in between there are hints of an important shift among a constituency critical to the president’s future: independents. The FiveThirtyEight tracker shows 44% of independents favor impeachment, up from 33% after Robert Mueller, the special counsel, concluded his two-year investigation into Russian interference into the 2016 election. A memo prepared by Navigator Research, a progressive polling project, entitled “How to Talk About Impeachment,” found even stronger support among independents, with 51% backing impeachment.

Culpeper, a town that is older than America itself and sits roughly halfway between Washington, D.C. and Charlottesville, Virginia, offers a snapshot of America’s impeachment divide.

At the Rusty Willow Boutique, an upscale women’s clothing shop that was preparing for its grand opening, just the mention of Trump prompted a squabble between Sonya Pancione, 57, the shop’s owner, and Denise Reynolds, 50, one of her best friends from church. Pancione is dead-set against impeachment.

“Respect the office. It’s a democracy. People voted for him,” she said.

Reynolds loathes Trump and blames him for inciting racial hatred. She was once excited about his candidacy — “I thought we needed somebody who understood business in that seat,” she said — but says now that if he were impeached and removed from office, “it would not upset me in the least.”

Spanberger, a former CIA officer and federal postal inspector who worked on money laundering cases before joining Congress, reflects the shifting tide. She won her district, which includes Culpeper, narrowly in 2018, casting herself as a moderate who wanted to solve problems like the high cost of prescription drugs. She visited Culpeper this past week, making it the first stop on a two-day “education tour,” but declined an interview for this article.

For months, she resisted calls for impeachment. But after the Ukraine news broke, she joined six freshman Democrats who have national security backgrounds in writing an opinion piece in The Washington Post to call for Pelosi to open an inquiry.

Now Trump and his allies are targeting vulnerable Democrats like her. In Pennsylvania, Florida, Iowa and other battleground states, scores of Republicans turned out this month for “Stop the Madness!” rallies orchestrated by the Trump campaign. Here in Culpeper, the local party staged its own rally last Saturday.

“Abigail won on a blue-wave year, and she really won on this whole notion that she was going to go down and be an independent voice, the she wasn’t interested in impeachment, she was really interested in getting things done,” said Nick Freitas, a Republican member of the Virginia House of Delegates, who helped organize the event.

Impeachment Support Grows, as Does Divide

CULPEPER, Va. — Over lunch at the Frost Cafe, a corner diner in a picturesque pocket of Virginia that President Donald Trump won handily in 2016, opinion over his impeachment is as varied as anywhere in the country.

Newspapers declared he was breaking ranks. Conservative constituents branded him a traitor: “I’m Brutus, and Trump’s Julius Caesar,” he said. In short order, he was forced to explain himself to the Trump campaign’s political director, top House Republicans and the acting White House chief of staff. All had the same question: “What the heck are you doing?”

As evidence mounts that Trump engaged in an intensive effort to pressure the leader of Ukraine to investigate a political rival, Amodei is one of a growing number of Republicans who, while not explicitly endorsing the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, are at least indicating an openness to it. None have said Trump should be impeached. But neither are they defending him.

It is a politically delicate but increasingly common approach among independent-minded lawmakers like Amodei, who are working to balance their fear of inviting Trump’s wrath — and that of the party base — with a deep anxiety that there is more to be revealed about the president, some of it potentially indefensible, and the knowledge that history will hold them accountable for their words and actions.

In Michigan, Rep. Fred Upton told an audience at the Detroit Economic Club that while he did not support an impeachment inquiry, “there are legitimate questions” about Trump’s interactions with Ukraine, and he had no problem with Democrats’ efforts to get more information.

“We need to know what the answers are,” he said.

In Texas, Rep. Will Hurd — who is retiring, and therefore perhaps feeling liberated to speak his mind — has called on the House to investigate the “troubling” allegations against Trump, though he cautioned against a rush to impeachment. In Pennsylvania, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick said he thinks law enforcement should investigate. In Illinois, Rep. Adam Kinzinger said, “I want to know what happened here.”

And in nearby Utah, Sen. Mitt Romney, who has emerged as a lonely voice criticizing Trump’s dealings with Ukraine, and last week called the president’s appeal for foreign help investigating the Bidens “wrong and appalling,” appears to have company. Before a whistleblower’s complaint against Trump was made public, a fellow Utahan, Rep. John Curtis, introduced a resolution calling for the White House to release it, and he has said he is “closely monitoring the formal inquiry.”

As they distance themselves from Trump, these Republicans — some in swing districts in tight reelection races — are also taking care to distance themselves from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who they say rushed into the impeachment inquiry. For the most part they are refraining from directly criticizing the president, who has branded the investigation a “witch hunt” and a “hoax.”

But neither are they adopting the language of their leaders, whose strategy centers on attacking Pelosi, branding the inquiry politically motivated and changing the subject to Biden and his son Hunter, whose work for a Ukrainian energy company fed Trump’s accusations of a nefarious web of corruption involving one of his top political foes. More than a dozen House Republicans have remained silent.

“It’s a matter of following their conscience and saying what they will be happy defending to their children in later years,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist, adding, “Some of them are following the rule that if you can’t say anything good about your president, you should not say anything at all.”

These Republicans still account for a small minority of the 197 in the House. But their comments, at a time when polls show public support for the impeachment inquiry is growing, are the first hint at cracks in party unity. They also offer echoes of the path the party took during the impeachment proceedings against Richard M. Nixon, when even the staunchest defenders of the president eventually abandoned him.

“My sense is that if there were a secret ballot vote on impeachment it would garner significant Republican support,” said David Wasserman, who tracks House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, citing “my private conversations with Republican members of Congress who believe he is wildly unfit to be president. “

But, Wasserman added, “They can’t say that in public, or else their political careers would be torpedoed by one tweet from the Oval Office.”

Here in Nevada, Amodei, 61, a garrulous former federal prosecutor who led Trump’s 2016 campaign in Nevada, is choosing his words carefully.

During a candid hourlong conversation that included a tour of his lovingly restored red-and-white Chevy Silverado flatbed truck (model year 1988 — the same year he switched his party registration from Democrat to Republican), he sounded mystified at the uproar he created. He votes with Trump nearly 99% of the time, but described himself as a “process guy” who believes in congressional oversight.

“I just think you have to respect the process,” he said. “I think you need to be transparent, and you need to tell the truth.”

He said he is not a fan of Pelosi’s process and said she should have put the inquiry up to a vote of the full House. And he lamented that the word “inquiry” has become politically toxic for Republicans — a lesson he learned after he shared his views with local reporters, one of whom wrote that he backed the House inquiry but was withholding judgment on whether Trump “crossed the legal line.”

The characterization was accurate, Amodei said, but it sparked an uproar when news media outlets (including The New York Times) called him the first Republican who had broken ranks to support an impeachment investigation. He quickly recalibrated, issuing a statement making clear he did not support Trump’s impeachment.

“I now know ‘inquiry’ is a special word in the impeachment thesaurus,” he said wryly, “which I’m still looking for on Amazon, but I haven’t found.”

Still, anti-Trump voices within the Republican Party have been emboldened by comments like Amodei’s. Republicans for the Rule of Law, the main initiative of the conservative anti-Trump group Defending Democracy Together, is spending more than $1 million to run television ads on Fox and MSNBC, calling on Republicans to “demand the facts” about Trump and Ukraine.

The campaign began last week with ads in five districts — including Amodei’s, Upton’s and Fitzpatrick’s — and will expand this week to target 12 Republican senators and 15 members of the House.

“Given where they’ve been, for congressional Republicans to say, ‘Well, we need to see all the facts,’ is a pretty important step forward,” said Bill Kristol, the conservative commentator and a founder of Defending Democracy Together.

Polls have shown a steady rise in support for the Democrats’ impeachment inquiry, with a majority of Americans approving of it. But sentiment is split along party lines. A recent CBS poll found that nearly 9 in 10 Democrats approved of the inquiry, and two-thirds strongly approved, as compared with just 23% of Republicans.

“Overwhelmingly, Republicans oppose the impeachment inquiry,” said Ayres, the pollster. “They want their Republican elected officials to defend the president and protect him from his many enemies.”

But for Republicans in swing districts who have tight reelection races, like Fitzpatrick in Pennsylvania, defending Trump at all costs is not an option. In Washington state, for instance, Rep. Jamie Herrera Beutler, who represents a district Democrats have targeted, has echoed Amodei, saying that while there is not yet evidence of impeachable offenses, for the “sake of this nation, we should all follow a process that does not put conclusions before facts.”

Here in northern Nevada, though, sentiment runs strong in favor of Trump. Amodei’s district stretches south from Reno, past the cattle ranches and casinos that line the road to the state capital, Carson City, and into largely rural areas like Douglas County, where members of the local Republican women’s club were having their monthly luncheon last week.

“I think it’s a scam and it’s a witch hunt, just like Trump says,” said Gloria Darrington, 77, expressing the views of many here when she said she believed Democrats were simply continuing a long-running quest to undo the results of the 2016 election.

“He lives in a very Republican area, and he ought to be listening to his Republicans,” Elinor Lindberg, 83, said of Amodei.

Amodei, the only Republican in Nevada’s congressional delegation, is not in danger of losing his seat to a Democrat. But he is in danger of drawing a Republican primary challenger from the right, and already some well-known Nevada names — Adam Laxalt, the former attorney general who ran for governor last year, and Danny Tarkanian, a businessman — are being bandied about.

Amodei sounded unworried. He said some Democrats in his district have been thanking him for his open-mindedness.

“I am a member of the legislative branch — I defend that institution,” he said, adding, “Quite frankly, if you don’t believe in the processes of your own institution, what are you doing there?

As Evidence Mounts Against President, Some Republicans Keep a Careful Distance

RENO, Nev. — Rep. Mark Amodei was not prepared for the backlash from his fellow Republicans when he said Congress needed to “follow the facts” and look into whether President Donald Trump should be impeached.

Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, routinely lashes out at Democrats and detractors of President Donald Trump. She branded Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, one of two Muslim women in Congress, “an anti-Semitic socialist who slanders US troops.” She said anti-Trump texts sent by FBI agents “could well be treason.” She asked Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York to “do us all a favor and spend just a few minutes learning some actual history.”

Now, the tough-talking congresswoman, who is pondering a run for Senate, has laced into a fellow Republican, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, in a nasty and deeply personal clash — with multigenerational undertones — over Afghanistan policy and the firing of John Bolton, Trump’s hawkish national security adviser. The feud, which began on Twitter and has continued on television, has cemented Cheney’s reputation as the most combative Cheney in Washington.

At a time when the president’s hold on the Republican Party is as strong as ever, it comes down to a contest between Cheney and Paul over who is Trumpier.

Cheney, an unapologetic proponent of using the United States’ military might around the globe, is a backer of Bolton, who served in the George W. Bush administration with her father. Paul, a libertarian whose own father, former Rep. Ron Paul, has called the Bush-Cheney approach a “crazed neocon foreign policy,” is among the most vocal opponents in Congress of armed foreign intervention.

Their back-and-forth has gotten downright nasty.

Cheney has invoked Paul’s 2016 Republican presidential primary loss to Trump, calling the senator “a big loser (then &amp; now),” and resurfaced a 4-year-old Trump tweet likening Paul to “a spoiled brat without a properly functioning brain.” Paul shot back, suggesting that Cheney “might just be mad still about when Candidate Trump shredded your Dad’s failed foreign policy and endless wars.”

On Friday, at the House Republican retreat in Baltimore, Cheney took a victory lap.

“I enjoyed it,” she said wryly. “I thought it was an enlightening exchange. Here I had been thinking the Senate was dull.”

A lawyer, former State Department official, onetime Fox News pundit and mother of five, Cheney, 53, has had a stunning ascent in Washington. Some view her as a possible House speaker, though she may be setting her sights across the Capitol. She is weighing a run for the Senate seat being vacated by Michael Enzi, a Republican whom she briefly sought to oust in 2014 in a campaign that ended in disaster for her.

Cheney declined to be interviewed for this article. But she is a fixture on the Washington talk show circuit, and is on the forefront of Republican efforts to paint Democrats as “the party of anti-Semitism, the party of infanticide, the party of socialism,” as she said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this year. Her colleagues say she has brought an edge to Republican messaging that was lacking.

“We have a problem in our conference where a lot of our members fear engagement with the media because of the media bias that we all believe to exist,” said Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla. “Liz seems to understand the importance of doing a lot of media and also doing hostile media.”

Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican, said Cheney “hasn’t been afraid to call out some of the most radical members of the socialist Democrats.” But her tendency to name-check her opponents makes at least some colleagues uncomfortable.

“I think we have to get away from personalities,” said Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., the chairman the party’s campaign arm. “From a messaging standpoint, I think it’s a mistake — you don’t use names. This is not about the people — this is about their ideas. We need to have a battle of ideas in this country.”

Cheney’s meteoric rise has injected the politics of the personal into the highest levels of congressional leadership in a way not seen since Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker whose political action committee instructed Republicans to “learn to speak like Newt” by describing Democrats using words like decay, traitors, radical, sick, destroy, pathetic, corrupt and shame.

“I think that she’s been very effective when she’s been on TV,” Gingrich said in an interview. “I think she is personable, knowledgeable and assertive without being hostile.”

And in a party where 90% of House Republicans are white men, Gingrich said, Cheney is a huge asset in Republicans’ efforts to demonize three liberal freshman Democrats — Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Minnesota, Omar and Ocasio-Cortez — who have become lightning rods on the right, fueling Republican fundraising.

“You need a woman member to do that,” he said.

Cheney’s supporters say she pushes back hard at Democrats because she is deeply concerned about the direction in which the party, particularly the progressive left, would take the country. And they say she has drawn a sharp line against hateful speech, no matter where it comes from. When Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, seemed to embrace white supremacy, Cheney was among the first to condemn him.

But she also knows that tough talk wins elections. After Republicans took a drubbing in the 2018 midterms, losing control of the House, she complained the party had been too tame.

“We’ve got to change the way that we operate and really, in some ways, be more aggressive, have more of a rapid response,” she told The Associated Press at the time.

Cheney grew up around politics, handing out flyers and politicking for her father, who was elected to the House in 1978, when she was still a teenager. He once was the No. 3 House Republican; when Cheney’s colleagues voted her into the same post last year, the former vice president sat in the front row, wearing a silent smile, those in attendance said.

“The vice president has a great line: He says, ‘I’m conservative and I’m not mad about it,’” said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, a founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. “I think that’s the attitude Liz has had. She’s defending conservative Republican principles, she’s doing it with a smile on her face, and she’s doing it in an aggressive fashion.”

In 2013, after moving from suburban Washington to Wyoming, Cheney announced she would challenge Enzi, a genial and well-liked incumbent, in a Republican primary race.

It was an audacious move, and the campaign did not go well. Cheney was branded a carpetbagger; “Cheney for Virginia” bumper stickers sprung up around the state. Her ambitions divided the Wyoming Republican Party, splitting old alliances and friendships. It also created a rift within the Cheney family. Cheney came out in opposition of same-sex marriage, angering her sister, Mary Cheney, and Mary’s wife, Heather Poe.

She withdrew from the race in January 2014, citing “serious health issues” in her family. But in 2016, when Rep. Cynthia Lummis announced her retirement, Cheney sought her seat and won. Now Lummis has announced her candidacy for Enzi’s seat, promising a “barn burner” of a race if Cheney challenges her.

A Lummis-Cheney matchup would be “very difficult to handicap,” said Tucker Fagan, a former aide to Lummis. Fagan said Cheney’s high profile in Washington and her combative style are assets.

“Here our representative is being interviewed on national television,” he said. “So we’re not just the flyover state. We’re somebody to contend with.”

In the House, Cheney’s policies are as bellicose as her messaging. She has led an unsuccessful charge against a resolution, sponsored by Gaetz and Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., barring federal money from being used for war with Iran. She has also argued forcefully against a withdrawal of troops from Syria.

That is the root of her disagreement with Paul, which seems to have begun Sunday after Trump disclosed that he had canceled peace talks with the Taliban at Camp David to end the war in Afghanistan. Cheney tweeted that he was right to do so.

That prompted Paul to tweet a Washington Examiner op-ed article from Wyoming legislators upbraiding Cheney for opposing the president’s push to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. The tit-for-tat escalated, with the senator blasting the #NeverTrumpCheneys — a double swipe at the congresswoman and her father — and accusing Cheney of “pro-Bolton blather.”

On Friday, she seemed determined to have the last word.

“They’re issues that surround whether or not you put America first, as President Trump does,” Cheney told reporters, referring to her foreign policy disagreements with Paul, “or blame America first, as Rand Paul does and has for years.”

Liz Cheney, Tart-Tongued Fighter, Is Warring With Rand Paul Over Who's Trumpier

WASHINGTON — After becoming the highest-ranking Republican woman in Congress, Rep. Liz Cheney, the sharp-tongued lawmaker from Wyoming, wasted little time establishing her reputation as one of her party’s most combative partisan brawlers.

An erudite author, professor and former university president with a doctorate in American history from Yale, Sasse was once viewed as a potential primary challenger to Trump.

Now the president has endorsed Sasse for reelection — a surprise move that rendered the usually outspoken Nebraska senator mum and demonstrated yet again how much the Republican Party has become the party of Trump.

“Ben has my Complete and Total Endorsement!” the president exclaimed Tuesday night on Twitter, lauding Sasse as “great with our Vets, the Military, and your very important Second Amendment,” and “Strong on Crime and the Border.”

For Sasse, who has a habit of zipping through the Capitol while talking on his cellphone to avoid reporters, it was certainly an awkward moment. On Thursday, he was being ridiculed on Twitter after brushing off an NBC reporter who asked about the endorsement by saying, “I don’t have anything for you right now” — a remark his office later said was not directed to the reporter.

But his spokesman, James Wegmann, did speak up, saying the endorsement was unsolicited.

“Ben’s grateful for the president’s kind words,” Wegmann said. “They don’t always see eye to eye, but they’ve built a relationship where they work together when they agree and they wrestle hard when they don’t.”

Solicited or not, the tweet will effectively ensure reelection for Sasse, 47, who these days is more apt to criticize Trump’s policies than his personal behavior. He is being challenged in a primary by businessman Matt Innis, who is making the senator’s chilly relationship with the president a central theme of his campaign. The Trump tweet most likely neutralized the primary threat.

“Trump’s endorsement destroyed the anti-Sasse message,” said Jennifer Duffy, who analyzes Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which rates the Nebraska seat “solid Republican.”

For Trump, there is no downside. He wants to ensure that the Senate remains in Republican hands. And if Sasse wins his race, the president can do what he likes to do best: take credit.

“I think he believes Ben wants him to be successful,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a formerly savage critic of Trump who has more recently become one of his closest friends in the Senate. “He’s been a reliable vote for most things that Trump wants, and personal differences are meaningless to the president, because he’s trying to win. He’s trying to build a coalition.”

Graham, who once called candidate Trump “the world’s biggest jackass” and a “race-baiting xenophobic religious bigot,” was reminded that Sasse had said some very nasty things about Trump. “No nastier than I did,” replied the senator, who is also up for reelection next year.

Sasse, first elected in 2014, refused to vote for Trump in the 2016 general election, and told Omaha, Nebraska, reporters that he intended to write in the name of Mike Pence, now the vice president. It was during that campaign that he compared Trump to Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. But now that Trump occupies the Oval Office, the senator votes with him 85% of the time, according to the website FiveThirtyEight.

In the Senate, where he is prone to long-winded speeches on the Constitution and separation of powers, he has also been known to make appeals to decency and unity, as he did last year during the Supreme Court confirmation hearings of Brett Kavanaugh. When Trump mocked Christine Blasey Ford, who had accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers,

“We all know that the president cannot lead us through this time,” Sasse said then. “We know that he’s dispositionally unable to restrain his impulse to divide us. His mockery of Dr. Ford last night in Mississippi was wrong, but it doesn’t really surprise anyone. It’s who he is.”

But in the end, like almost every other Republican, Sasse voted to confirm Kavanaugh.

The senator’s critics say that more recently, as his reelection has approached, he has muffled his attacks on the president, noting that he said little about Trump’s divisive language over the summer, when the nation was reeling from mass shootings in cities like Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas.

Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, wrote on Twitter that Sasse had “preached unity” in a book he released last year titled “Them: Why We Hate Each Other — and How to Heal.” “His total silence during this entire summer when Trump dialed up division &amp; racism &amp; we faced El Paso was uniquely cynical in that context,” she added.

The senator, a frequent contributor to the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal, has been a vocal critic of Trump’s policies on tariffs and trade, which he has called “dumb” and potentially “disastrous.” On Thursday afternoon, he was headed to the White House with other Midwestern senators to meet with Trump on agricultural issues, said another attendee, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D.

When he announced his reelection campaign in August, Sasse promoted his conservative record and his votes in favor of the president’s “really great judicial nominees.” Local newspapers were quick to note that it was his only mention of the president.

He has also lately been making headlines as the lone member of the Nebraska congressional delegation who is not an honorary chairman of the president’s reelection in that state.

Trump has not always been so high on Sasse. During his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump, who is known to judge people on whether they look the part, had this to say about the lanky, youthful-looking Nebraska senator: “@BenSasse looks more like a gym rat than a U.S. Senator. How the hell did he ever get elected?”

Endorsement From Trump Quiets a Republican Critic

WASHINGTON — Sen. Ben Sasse is the rare Republican who has never been shy about criticizing President Donald Trump, once comparing him to white supremacist David Duke.

“This is not New York, this is Texas,” Cuellar said in an interview. “So you talk about guns, you talk about God, you talk about trucks.”

But times are beginning to change here in Texas, where a string of mass shootings in August left 29 people dead, and in Washington, where gun safety is now front and center on the congressional agenda.

Cuellar is emblematic of the shift. He voted this year for a House bill expanding background checks for gun buyers, which will almost certainly cost him his NRA “A” rating and the campaign contributions and endorsement that went along with it.

On Monday, with Congress back from its August recess, a bipartisan group of mayors and police chiefs met with top White House advisers to push for action on gun safety, and later joined top Democrats on Capitol Hill in demanding passage of the background checks bill in the Senate, where it is currently blocked.

Cuellar’s quiet evolution, though he does not call it that, tells a larger tale of how the Democrats have abandoned the NRA — and also hints of unrest among Republicans, especially those who have had mass shootings in their districts or home states.

Rep. Michael R. Turner, R-Ohio, is from a district that includes Dayton, where a gunman killed nine people outside a bar last month. He now backs a ban on the sale of military-style weapons. So does Rep. Brian Mast, R-Fla., where a 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland galvanized a youth movement for gun safety.

Cuellar, whose district includes Sutherland Springs, where a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle killed 26 people at a Baptist church in 2017, does not support an assault weapon ban. But his vote in favor of expanding background checks — an idea that President Donald Trump has embraced and that is likely to be considered in the Senate — buoyed gun safety advocates.

“Change is rippling across America, and he’s part of that change,” said John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group. “He is part of an evolving Democratic Party on this issue, and I also believe that the Republican Party is behind them and beginning to evolve, too.”

For Cuellar, evolution on guns may be necessary for political survival. In the last election cycle, he was one of only three House Democrats — the others are Reps. Sanford D. Bishop Jr. of Georgia and Collin C. Peterson of Minnesota, who also have A ratings — who took contributions from the NRA’s political action committee.

Now, he is facing a new reality: a primary challenge from the left.

His opponent, Jessica Cisneros, 26, an immigration rights lawyer who once worked as Cuellar’s intern, is backed by the Justice Democrats, the group that helped elect Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the liberal firebrand from New York. Cisneros has demanded that Cuellar give back his NRA contributions, including $6,950 he received for his 2018 race.

In 2017, another House Democrat, Rep. Tim Ryan, who also once had an A rating from the NRA, announced he would donate roughly $20,000 that the gun lobby gave him to gun safety groups.

“I truly believe that somebody like him, somebody that takes money from the NRA, somebody that received support and an A rating from the NRA, cannot call themselves a Democrat,” said Cisneros of Cuellar. “I think it’s very tone-deaf.”

On Monday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., a 2020 presidential candidate who has built her campaign around progressive activism, endorsed Cisneros, saying that people in the district “deserve a Democrat that will be on the side of working people, not the side of big money and obstructionist Republicans.”

Cuellar said he had no intention of returning the NRA money, which he characterized as minimal and without influence on his votes. He called Cisneros and her backers “justice socialists” and said that in a district like his, which includes “urban areas, rural areas, people that might not believe in guns, people that do believe in guns,” he has “balancing work” to do.

“I am for reasonable gun reform,” he said during the interview, in a busy taco restaurant. “But I’m not going to take guns away from people like they want to do.”

Texas has some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation. A law that took effect Sept. 1, for example, greatly expanded where licensed gun owners may carry their firearms, including churches. But the recent shootings have ratcheted up pressure on Republicans. On Friday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, a staunch conservative, said he would defy the NRA to push for background checks on private gun sales.

In Laredo, Cuellar’s race may reveal whether there is still a home in the party for a Democrat who talks about gun rights. His district stretches from San Antonio down a rural highway lined by hunting ranches to Laredo, where a local gun store, the Arena Gun Club, offers free rentals of fully automatic weapons each week on “Machine Gun Monday.” Last week, it was doing a brisk business at its indoor shooting range.

Daniel Cruz, 28, a truck driver who had just hit 14 bull’s-eyes on each of 14 targets, echoed the philosophy of many Texans when he said the answer to mass shootings was not fewer guns but more. He lamented that not enough people take advantage of Texas’ open-carry laws.

“These shootings are in public places,” he said, “but nobody has a gun to fire back.”

But in a working-class neighborhood across town, about two dozen enthusiastic, mostly millennial volunteers gathered in the backyard of one of Cisneros’ supporters. The recent massacres in El Paso, Midland and Odessa were very much on their minds.

The El Paso shooting, in a border city like Laredo, struck a particular nerve. A white gunman with an AK-47-style rifle drove 10 hours to a Walmart, where he killed 22 people, targeting Latinos.

“I feel like Laredo is a mini-version of El Paso,” said Eddie Gomez, 26, one of the volunteers. “It felt very deliberate, it felt very personal. It felt like an attack on what we are, on my people.”

Cuellar, 63, a lawyer and former state legislator first elected to the House in 2004, won in 2018 with 84% of the vote, and Republicans did not bother to field a candidate against him. He prides himself on bipartisanship. He once served as secretary of state to a Republican governor, Rick Perry, and endorsed another Republican, George W. Bush, for president in 2000.

Like many Texans, he grew up around firearms. The eldest of eight children, Cuellar lived on what he called “a ranch in the hill country” managed by his father, who kept guns for hunting and protection.

“My dad was the best shot,” Cuellar said. “He could see a deer 100 yards away.”

After the church massacre in Sutherland Springs, most Democrats were clamoring for expanded background checks and an assault weapons ban. Cuellar was not among them.

Instead, in light of news that the gunman had obtained his weapon despite a domestic violence conviction, Cuellar joined Republicans, who then led the House, to push the so-called Fix NICS bill. That bill made modest improvements to the National Instant Background Check System.

The measure was paired in the House with one that relaxed restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons across state lines. Cuellar was one of only six Democrats who voted in favor.

In a nod to gun enthusiasts, he also invited the so-called hero of Sutherland Springs, Stephen Willeford, who grabbed his own military-style weapon and chased down the gunman, to Trump’s State of the Union address.

“Henry is different than most Democrats, and I can appreciate that,” Willeford said in an interview. “He bucks the system of his own party — but not all the time.”

Willeford added that he strongly opposed the House background check bill that Cuellar voted for this year.

That House bill, adopted in February, would extend background checks to all private gun sales, including those at gun shows and over the internet. The congressman said his shift reflected his pragmatism. There was no point in calling for background checks when Republicans ran the House, he said, but with Democrats in the majority, “we’re pushing” for it.

“What he’s trying to do is an interesting cultural straddling,” said Kris Brown, the president of Brady, the gun safety group. “He’s not going to have an A rating anymore, and look, I give him credit for that. I just think that ultimately, in order to get the lifesaving measures that we need enacted, we need more politicians to lead on this issue.”

The NRA, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment on Cuellar. So far, the organization has contributed to only one House Democrat for the 2020 election cycle: Peterson of Minnesota. It has not released its ratings for 2020. While Cuellar said the gun lobby’s endorsement had been helpful to him, he shrugged when asked if he worried about losing it.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “What’s important is that I support the Second Amendment.”

In Texas, a Lone House Democrat Has an 'A' Rating From the NRA. Can He Survive?

LAREDO, Texas — In this gun-friendly border city, where Tuesdays are “ladies’ nights” at the shooting range and pistols in hip holsters are a common sight, Rep. Henry Cuellar is a proud defender of the Second Amendment, the lone House Democrat from Texas with an “A” rating from the National Rifle Association.

“Our great African American president hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore!” Trump wrote then on Twitter.

Now Trump is president himself, and he has written off this entire city as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested” place where “no human being would want to live,” and is blaming its longtime and revered congressman, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, for the city’s problems. But people here say that even if their city has its struggles, Trump has lost his right to point them out.

“This is the struggle that he doesn’t know anything about,” the Rev. Timmie Lee, from the Cornerstone Christian Community Church, said as he stopped by a street stand he operates in West Baltimore, where his son Isaiah, 12, was helping sell sneakers and soap. “If he was raised up in this community, if he had any dealings with this community, then he can speak to this community. Elijah Cummings is here. He walks through this community. He lives in this community.”

Trump’s weekend tweetstorm assailing the congressman — which continued into Monday with an attack on the Rev. Al Sharpton, a civil rights leader who was in Baltimore for a conference on the black economic agenda — reverberated throughout this long-suffering city, whose troubles predated the Freddie Gray uprising. City leaders and residents are furious but not entirely surprised that a president who seems intent on exploiting racial and cultural tensions as a path to reelection in 2020 would train his fire on Baltimore.

On Monday, Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland belatedly weighed in after absorbing criticism for an initially tepid response to the president’s comments. He called Trump’s attacks “outrageous and inappropriate,” though Hogan — a Republican who was once considered a possible primary race challenger to Trump — avoided going after the president by name. Instead, he issued a broad criticism of the dysfunction of Washington.

“No one in Baltimore is surprised that the president is attacking Baltimore,” City Council President Brandon M. Scott said in an interview Monday morning. “I think that this president is someone who’s trying to get reelected off us. So he is going to try to rally his base. He’s trying to stoke fears, racial biases — and he is trying to pull the worst out of American society in order to get reelected.”

Residents were more pointed still.

“Trump is a buffoon. He looks at this as an African American community, and that’s all he sees. That’s where his narrow mind is,” said John Cheatham, 66, who said he covers murder trials for a local radio station, adding, “If you had a Mount Rushmore of hate, he would be on it.”

It is not news to anyone here that Baltimore, which is 63% black, is struggling with long-term systemic problems and unstable political leadership. It has gone through five police commissioners in the past five years, and its crime rate is out of control: The city has recorded at least 33 more homicides this year than New York, despite being about one-fourteenth the size. The mayor who presided during the unrest did not run for reelection, and her successor was forced to resign amid a corruption scandal.

The city is confronting joblessness, homelessness, blocks of vacant housing, crushing poverty and a huge wealth gap. According to Lawrence Brown, an associate professor at Morgan State University in Baltimore, the median annual income for white families in the city is roughly $76,000, while the median income for black families is $36,000. But those problems have much more to do with a long history of housing segregation — mandated by law in the early 1900s — than with any one politician, city and community leaders say.

And if Trump wanted to do something about it, he has the power, through his Department of Housing and Urban Development, and his housing secretary, Ben Carson, who was a prominent surgeon in Baltimore for much of his life.

Candidate Trump promised repeatedly to fix the problems of urban America. President Trump appears determined to use it as a political foil.

“If he were out here helping people, it would be one thing,” said Tyra Reeder, 18, who was giving away cellphones as part of a government program to help the poor, outside a CVS Pharmacy that was looted and burned during the unrest of 2015. “But if he’s just watching from Trump Tower, drinking out of his $10,000 cup, then he can’t say anything about Baltimore to me.”

Brown put it this way: “He’s the president of the United States. The last time I checked, Baltimore is part of the United States. So if there is blame that needs to go around, that includes everybody — from the governor on down, and of course the president.”

Baltimore is in some ways two cities — one black and one white. It is also a collection of neighborhoods: The West Baltimore of Trump’s imagination is just one corner of a city that also boasts a bustling harbor; new investment along the waterfront; and hip commercial strips like 36th Street, known as “The Avenue,” in Hampden, where rainbow flags fly from storefronts and Casey Hunt, a 24-year-old chemist, was sipping a National Bohemian — the local beer known as “Natty Boh” — on Monday afternoon at the Cafe Hon. (In Baltimore, waitresses always call the customers “Hon.”)

“A lot of people like to talk” badly about Baltimore, she said, using a far more colorful word, “but they’ve never been here.”

In the Druid Heights neighborhood of West Baltimore on Monday, Kevin Brown, 55, was tending a garden where an empty lot used to be — two blocks from where Cummings lives — against the backdrop of a colorful mural painted on the brick wall of a historic home. The owner had planted it in an effort to beautify the neighborhood.

BALTIMORE — The last time Donald Trump blamed a black man for the condition of this undoubtedly troubled city, the year was 2015, the death of Freddie Gray in police custody had spawned a racial uprising, and the black man in question was President Barack Obama.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg

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