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The definition of “fitness” is, to some extent, in the eye of the beholder. It centers on who we see representing us — our needs, our desires, and our fears. It is shaped by our biases and our proclivities. Notions of “fitness” also change over time as our society evolves.
There was a time when women weren’t considered “fit” for elected office, even by other women. Same went for members of marginalized racial groups. Slowly, far too slowly, progress has arrived, thanks to courageous pioneers who steadfastly chipped away at these prejudicial definitions of “fitness.” First at the local level, and then at the state and federal. For all the problems that ail us, including ongoing racism and misogyny, today's slate of candidates (in both political parties) suggests that most Americans are now willing to vote for people once considered "unfit" based on their race and/or gender.
Fitness in terms of health, both mental and physical, is a more complicated matter. There is a widespread belief that voters should have a sense of their candidates' health. After all, we are selecting the people who will represent us in important decision-making capacities. If someone's impairment or illness would affect their ability to fulfill the requirements of their office, there is a general belief that voters have a right to know.
The burden is not the same for all elected officeholders. Those in the executive branch, especially the president, must make split-second decisions that could mean life and death. In many cases, they are the sole decision-maker, the person with whom the buck stops. Those in the legislative and judicial branches often can carry out their duties with greater accommodation to health concerns. So perhaps for them, the stakes may be lower. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was able to serve for years after a serious cancer diagnosis. Would the calculus have been different if she had been president?
But even in the realm of physical or mental health, societal mores can change. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was mostly paralyzed from the waist down, and yet this fact was painstakingly hidden from the public. The press was complicit in this concealment. There was a belief that pictures of FDR unable to stand would convey weakness. The historical record demonstrates how preposterous this prejudice was. His leadership was strong in the depths of the Great Depression and in war. Historians to this day praise him for it.
In a sign of progress, the FDR Memorial unveiled 20 years ago features a statue of the president in a wheelchair. The Washington Post explained at the time that the monument represented the culmination of “an emotional six-year campaign led by disability advocacy groups to show the 32nd president as he lived, not as he portrayed himself to the public in a bygone era.”
A bygone era, indeed. As just one example among many: Today we may apply various criteria to judge Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s fitness for office, but his use of a wheelchair is not one of them.
Questions of mental and emotional health are more complicated, in large part because the stigmas around them are more persistent and because they are more difficult to see. Even there, however, society has evolved. During the 1972 Democratic primaries, the question of whether Maine Senator Edmund Muskie cried at a campaign event made headlines (Muskie had been targeted by a dirty trick campaign from backers of Richard Nixon). At the time, a crying politician raised questions of fitness. Fifty years later, that seems absurd.
On the other hand, once again back in 1972, Missouri Democratic Senator Thomas Eagleton dropped out as his party's vice presidential nominee just days after the Democratic Convention. The reason? Revelations that he had been hospitalized and received electric-shock therapy for depression. George McGovern, the Democratic nominee for president, feared that voters would worry a recurrence of Eagleton's depression could endanger the country. Would the same judgment be made now? And what do we make of speculation among historians that Abraham Lincoln, perhaps our greatest president, might have suffered from depression?
If you have been following the news, you may anticipate where this discussion of “fitness” is going. We are less than a month from Election Day, and control of both the House and the Senate is on the line. For the latter chamber, a key contest is in Pennsylvania. Democratic nominee John Fetterman once had a sizable lead in the polls over TV's Dr. Mehmet Oz, but the race has tightened considerably. After all, the Keystone State has been a toss-up for a few election cycles now.
But a central attack from Oz is whether Fetterman is “fit” to serve in the Senate following a serious stroke in May, just days before the Democratic primary. After taking time off to recover, Fetterman returned to the campaign trail but admits he is not 100 percent. He sometimes seems to exhibit a lingering problem with his auditory processing.
In a recent NBC News interview, Fetterman requested that he read the questions as they were being asked, through closed captioning technology. When the interview ran, the entire thrust of the story was Fetterman’s health and the closed captioning provisions for the interview. The footage also showed Fetterman struggling to find some words. The NBC reporter, Dasha Burns, said Fetterman had trouble with “small talk” before the interview.
This issue has now blown up. Not surprisingly, Republicans are eager to jump on this development as evidence of Fetterman’s supposed cognitive deficit. But the characterizations of the NBC News report have prompted a fierce backlash — in particular from two reporters who recently interacted at length with Fetterman.
Kara Swisher, a stroke survivor herself, noted that in her hour-long interview with Fetterman for her podcast, he was fully engaged. She said in a tweet: “Sorry to say but I talked to John Fetterman for over an hour without stop or any aides and this is just nonsense.” She added, “Listen to my interview. Even my rabidly GOP mother had to admit she was wrong.”
Rebecca Traister, whose New York Magazine profile The Vulnerability of John Fetterman deals with how Fetterman's health is being covered, wrote in a tweet, “Watching tv news/online pundits leer over clips of an interview in which he’s completely engaged and communicative is stomach-turning and a super depressing example of what I was trying to describe.”
Underlying this discussion is the progress we have made in treating strokes specifically, and serious medical conditions more broadly. Diagnoses that once would have appeared hopeless no longer are. Also, American demographics are shifting — we are aging as a society. Both factors suggest our standard of who is fit for office will continue to change.
But attacks on mental acuity still resonate. Republicans lob them in their attempts to undermine President Biden. The topic was an active source of speculation for Trump, as well.
At the same time, perhaps this idea of how we measure fitness is too limited. Are people who deny the results of the 2020 election fit for elective office? What about politicians who embrace lies, stoke division, and foment violence? Many doctors and scientists have warned that Oz, Fetterman’s opponent, has spread dangerous medical misinformation. How should that be factored into assessing fitness?
For the press, there will always be questions of context and balance. Judging medical fitness is legitimate, but are we providing the audience a nuanced understanding, or are we playing into stereotypes? What extra responsibility do we have if the main argument from a candidate’s opponent is that they are not mentally up to the job? How an interview is portrayed or edited together can shift the narrative significantly, and we should remember that as we weigh the impact of our work. We have seen the press cover up for politicians in the past. That was wrong. But so was elevating relatively minor issues through false equivalence. Are we being ableist? These considerations should always merit active discussion within newsrooms. How will the press cover the debate between Oz and Fetterman on October 25?
Governance is about the long haul, and none of us can predict the future. The Senate in particular is known for residents who stay for decades, long enough for their mental faculties to wane (as happens to most of us). How should we evaluate them?
Ultimately, it is up to us as voters to assess fitness and weigh our choices. Ideally, we’ll be careful of jumping to snap decisions or penalizing limitations that may not be relevant.
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Court filings by the Justice Department, including a photo that shows documents seized during the FBI search Aug. 8 of former president Donald Trump's Mar-a-Lago estate. (photo: Justice Department/AP)
Key witness and security-camera footage offer evidence of Trump’s actions after government subpoena, people familiar say
The witness description and footage described to The Washington Post offer the most direct account to date of Trump’s actions and instructions leading up to the FBI’s Aug. 8 search of the Florida residence and private club, in which agents were looking for evidence of potential crimes including obstruction, destruction of government records or mishandling classified information.
The people familiar with the investigation said agents have gathered witness accounts indicating that, after Trump advisers received a subpoena in May for any classified documents that remained at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told people to move boxes to his residence at the property. That description of events was corroborated by the security-camera footage, which showed people moving the boxes, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
Spokespeople for the Justice Department and FBI declined to comment.
Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich declined to answer detailed questions for this article. “The Biden administration has weaponized law enforcement and fabricated a Document Hoax in a desperate attempt to retain political power,” Budowich said in a statement. “Every other President has been given time and deference regarding the administration of documents, as the President has the ultimate authority to categorize records, and what materials should be classified.”
Budowich accused the Justice Department of a “continued effort to leak misleading and false information to partisan allies in the Fake News,” and said that to do so “is nothing more than dangerous political interference and unequal justice. Simply put, it’s un-American.”
The employee who was working at Mar-a-Lago is cooperating with the Justice Department and has been interviewed multiple times by federal agents, according to the people familiar with the situation, who declined to identify the worker.
In the first interview, these people said, the witness denied handling sensitive documents or the boxes that might contain such documents. As they gathered evidence, agents decided to re-interview the witness, and the witness’s story changed dramatically, these people said. In the second interview, the witness described moving boxes at Trump’s request.
The witness is now considered a key part of the Mar-a-Lago investigation, these people said, offering details about the former president’s alleged actions and instructions to subordinates that could have been an attempt to thwart federal officials’ demands for the return of classified and government documents.
Multiple witnesses have told the FBI they tried to talk Trump into cooperating with the National Archives and Records Administration and the Justice Department as those agencies for months sought the return of sensitive or historical government records, people familiar with the situation said.
But entreaties from advisers and lawyers who pushed for Trump to hand the documents back fell on deaf ears with Trump, these people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Trump grew angry this spring after a House Oversight Committee investigation was launched, telling aides they’d “screwed up” the situation, according to people who heard his comments. “They’re my documents,” Trump said, according to an aide who spoke to him.
The details shared with The Post reveal two key parts of the criminal probe that until now had been shrouded in secrecy: an account from a witness who worked for and took directions from Trump, and the way that security footage from Mar-a-Lago has played an important role in buttressing witness accounts.
Together, those pieces of evidence helped convince the FBI and Justice Department to seek the court-authorized search of Trump’s residence, office and a storage room at Mar-a-Lago, which resulted in the seizure of 103 documents that were marked classified and had not been turned over to the government in response to the May subpoena. Some of the documents detail top-secret U.S. operations so closely guarded that many senior national security officials are kept in the dark about them. The Aug. 8 search also yielded about 11,000 documents not marked classified.
The failure or possible refusal to return the classified documents in response to the subpoena is at the heart of the Justice Department’s Mar-a-Lago investigation, which is one of several high-profile, ongoing probes involving Trump. The former president remains the most influential figure in the Republican Party and talks openly about running for the White House again in 2024.
Within Trump’s orbit, there have been months of dueling accusations and theories about who may be cooperating with the federal government. Some of the former president’s closest aides have continued to work with Trump even as they have seen FBI agents show up at their houses to question them and serve subpoenas.
Within the Justice Department and FBI, the witness’s account has been a closely held secret as agents continue to gather evidence in the high-stakes investigation. In addition to wanting to keep the information they have gathered so far under wraps, people familiar with the situation said, authorities are also concerned that if or when the witness’s identity eventually becomes public, that person could face harassment or threats from Trump supporters.
In a filing to the Supreme Court on Tuesday, Justice Department lawyers appeared to allude to witness accounts and the video footage when they wrote: “The FBI uncovered evidence that the response to the grand jury subpoena was incomplete, that additional classified documents likely remained at Mar-a-Lago, and that efforts had likely been taken to obstruct the investigation.”
Since the Aug. 8 search, Trump has offered a number of public defenses of why documents with classified markings remained at Mar-a-Lago — saying he declassified the secret documents, suggesting that the FBI planted evidence during the search, and suggesting that as a former president he may have had a right to keep classified documents. National security law experts have overwhelmingly dismissed such claims, saying they range from far-fetched to nonsensical.
Officials at the National Archives began seeking the return of documents last year, after they came to believe that some presidential records from the Trump administration — such as letters from North Korean leader Kim Jong Un — were unaccounted for, and perhaps in Trump’s possession.
After months of back-and-forth, Trump agreed in January to turn over 15 boxes of material. When archivists examined the material, they found 184 documents marked classified, including 25 marked top secret, which were scattered throughout the boxes in no particular order, according to court filings.
That discovery suggested to authorities that Trump had not turned over all the classified documents in his possession. In May, a grand jury subpoena demanded the return of classified documents with a wide variety of markings, including a category used for secrets about nuclear weapons.
In response to that subpoena, Trump’s advisers met with government agents and prosecutors at Mar-a-Lago in early June, handing over a sealed envelope containing another 38 classified documents, including 17 marked top secret, according to court papers. According to government filings, Trump’s representatives claimed at the meeting that a diligent search had been conducted for all classified documents at the club.
That meeting, which included a visit to the storage room where Trump’s advisers said the relevant boxes of documents were kept, did not satisfy investigators, who were not allowed to inspect the boxes they saw in the storage room, according to government court filings.
Five days later, senior Justice Department official Jay Bratt wrote to Trump’s lawyers to remind them that Mar-a-Lago “does not include a secure location authorized for the storage of classified information.” Bratt wrote that it appears classified documents “have not been handled in an appropriate manner or stored in an appropriate location.”
“Accordingly, we ask that the room at Mar-a-Lago where the documents had been stored be secured and that all of the boxes that were moved from the White House to Mar-a-Lago (along with any other items in that room) be preserved in that room in their current condition until further notice.”
Agents continued to gather evidence that Trump was apparently not complying with either government requests or subpoena demands. After significant deliberation, aware that it would be highly unusual for federal agents to search a former president’s home, they decided to seek a judge’s approval to do so.
That Aug. 8 search turned up, in a matter of hours, 103 documents marked classified, including 18 marked top secret, according to court papers. The stash included at least one document that described a foreign country’s military defenses, including its nuclear capabilities.
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The election at the ALB1 Amazon warehouse near Albany could prove the Staten Island union victory was no fluke. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty)
The election at the ALB1 Amazon warehouse near Albany could prove the Staten Island union victory was no fluke.
She told Recode that when she started working at an Amazon facility in February 2022 and discovered what she saw as poor treatment of the company’s lowest-paid workers, she felt like she needed to stand up and start organizing workers in the hope of influencing positive change.
“Amazon’s obsession was placed on consumers to the point where it became negligent to employees,” she told Recode in late September.
As Amazon has grown over the last decade, so too has scrutiny of how the company treats its hundreds of thousands of workers who have long been the invisible engine of the picking, packing, and shipping machine that powers the company’s e-commerce dominance. While the company led the way for large nonunion retailers in boosting its minimum hourly pay to $15 back in 2018, its warehouses have been home to comparatively high injury rates and worker turnover numbers that led some inside the company to predict that Amazon would run out of workers to hire in the not-so-distant future. In return, worker organizing inside Amazon warehouses has picked up in recent years, with the pandemic as a catalyst. Amazon has responded by deploying staff and hiring anti-union consultants to apply pressure to employees at facilities where union organizing is happening or suspected. A former Amazon executive previously told Recode that unionization was seen internally as “likely the single biggest threat to the business model.”
For Goodall, she says she began talking to fellow workers about the idea of organizing with a union soon after starting her job and eventually sought an election to be represented by the worker-led Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which won a historic vote at a giant Amazon warehouse in Staten Island, New York, in April 2022. Voting for around 400 eligible workers at Goodall’s facility near Albany, New York, began on Wednesday and will run through Monday, October 17. The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which oversees the voting, will tally results on Tuesday, October 18. With Amazon management applying heavy pressure inside the warehouse to make sure there’s no repeat of ALU’s first win in Staten Island, the next union victory will be the hardest.
“A victory for these workers would again be an upset,” said Rebecca Givan, a labor professor at Rutgers University. “It’s not just that when you overcome the odds in one workplace that it’s somehow easier.”
For Goodall, the reason to organize comes down to three simple words: quality of life.
“The top thing we are fighting for is quality of life,” Goodall told Recode in early October. “We are missing the mark on quality of life.”
That encompasses many things. Better wages, yes. New workers at the warehouse were paid $15.70 an hour until a $1.30 per hour raise was announced earlier this month. (Minimum wage in upstate New York is $13.20 an hour.) Safer working conditions — that too. (A fire in a cardboard compactor at the facility last week was one of four blazes across three Amazon warehouses within a few days. No employees were injured; night-shift workers were sent home, and employees working the following day shift were kept home with pay.) And better work accommodations for those with disabilities or those coming back to work after medical leave. The facility, known as ALB1, is an “XL” warehouse because, in Amazon’s words, the staff there “handles the big stuff — those unique customer orders that weigh over 50 pounds: big screen TVs, furniture, appliances, and more.”
“We want breaks consistent with the work that we are doing,” Goodall said. “We want to be able to afford to buy lunch and put gas in our cars.”
Amazon spokesperson Paul Flaningan said in a statement, “We’ve always said that we want our employees to have their voices heard, and we hope and expect this process allows for that.”
The election near Albany comes six months after the worker-led Amazon Labor Union secured its Staten Island victory, the first US union victory at a facility in Amazon’s history. But the battle against Amazon there is still ongoing. Amazon contested the union victory, claiming more than 20 issues with the union’s behavior, including harassment of voters and how the NLRB ran and staffed the election. An NLRB official who oversaw the objection hearing has recommended that all of Amazon’s objections be thrown out and that the Amazon Labor Union win be certified. That decision is now before an NLRB regional director, but Amazon CEO Andy Jassy insinuated at Code Conference last month that Amazon will continue to battle the NLRB on the issue and is not conceding defeat.
“I think that’s going to take a long time to play out because I think it’s unlikely the NLRB is going to [rule] against themselves,” Jassy said.
This election will also serve as another test of whether organizers can secure a second victory or whether the original historic win in Staten Island was rooted, at least in part, in the fact that the creators of the Amazon Labor Union had themselves all worked in the facility. A second ALU election at another Staten Island warehouse in May ended in a sizable defeat.
“In any of these elections, the odds are really stacked against the workers who are organizing,” Givan, the Rutgers professor said. “That’s true in any workplace but especially in these Amazon warehouses that have extremely high turnover and where the company has very deep pockets in terms of how much they can spend in their anti-union campaign.”
But workers are continuing to try. Earlier this week, Amazon workers at a warehouse in the crucial Inland Empire logistics region of Southern California filed a petition with the NLRB requesting to hold an election to unionize with ALU. If recent history is an indicator, they won’t be the last.
Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes is slated to speak at Penn State University later this month - an event that has sparked protest plans and a petition. He's seen here in 2019. (photo: Stephanie Keith/Getty)
Students have launched a petition and plan to protest the Oct. 24 event, seeking to block McInnes and another controversial far-right figure, Alex Stein, from speaking in State College, Pa.
Divisive figures spark a three-way debate
Free-speech guarantees, warns the Student Committee for Defense and Solidarity, should not entail "platforming fascists and promoting hateful, meritless disinformation with thousands of student-fee dollars."
But the university's leaders on Tuesday rejected calls to cancel the engagement or ban McInnes and Stein from campus. As they did so, Penn State officials stressed that the school doesn't agree with what it deemed the speakers' "repugnant and denigrating rhetoric."
The event's organizer, the conservative student group Uncensored America, says McInnes and Stein will use comedy to provide "a unique perspective" on issues such as immigration (McInnes is Canadian), political correctness and gender roles.
George Carlin. Dick Gregory. Gavin McInnes?
As it made its case to bring McInnes to campus, Uncensored America compared him to "many great comedians that have come before," according to the minutes of the group's meeting with the University Park Allocation Committee, the student-led group that considers requests to use student-derived funds for events.
The organizers cited McInnes' willingness to "push the boundaries of comedy in a thought-provoking manner" to change how people think.
But his many detractors say there's nothing funny about McInnes or the Proud Boys, whose members call themselves "Western chauvinists" and who have repeatedly been involved in violence. More than two dozen Proud Boy members, including several leaders, have been named in federal charges over the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, including accusations of seditious conspiracy.
"McInnes plays a duplicitous rhetorical game: claiming to reject white nationalism while espousing a laundered version of popular white nationalist tropes," says the Southern Poverty Law Center, which labels the Proud Boys a hate group.
Uncensored America has sought to de-emphasize McInnes' ties to the Proud Boys, saying he "stepped down and veered away" from the movement. But it also gave the upcoming event the provocative title, "Stand Back and Stand By" — emphasizing the Proud Boys by quoting former President Trump's famous 2020 message to the group.
McInnes will speak on Oct. 24
General admission to the event is free on a first-come basis, with students getting priority. But attendees can also buy tickets — including a $99 "Royalty" package that guarantees a spot up front and includes a chance to have dinner with McInnes and Stein.
The allocation committee approved $7,522.43 in funds for the "Stand Back and Stand By" event, including airfare for McInnes and Stein and a combined $6,500 in honorarium payments for the pair.
Discussing the funding request, the committee chair noted that their task was to focus on the budget, not the speakers' content or ideology. While the event is "clearly catered toward a particular demographic," they added, "It is not our job to infer what the implications of funding this event are going to be. It is just our job to use the information we have been given to inform our funding decisions."
On Oct. 24, the Student Committee for Defense and Solidarity plans to hold a protest outside the building where McInnes and Stein will speak. The university is encouraging people on campus to attend alternate events celebrating unity and propaganda awareness, including a speech by Al Tompkins of the Poynter Institute titled, "Fighting Truth Decay: How and Why Fakers Fake."
Penn State has dealt with similar uproar over guest speakers before, including an appearance last November by Milo Yiannopoulos, who was also brought in by Uncensored America.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis made Florida's congressional map far more favorable to Republicans. This may have violated the state constitution. (photo: Rebecca Noble/The New York Times)
DeSantis’ move, secretly aided by GOP-linked national operatives, came over the objections of the Republican-controlled state legislature.
DeSantis threw out the legislature’s work and redrew Florida’s congressional districts, making them far more favorable to Republicans. The plan was so aggressive that the Republican-controlled legislature balked and fought DeSantis for months. The governor overruled lawmakers and pushed his map through.
DeSantis' office has publicly stressed that partisan considerations played no role and that partisan operatives were not involved in the new map.
A ProPublica examination of how that map was drawn — and who helped decide its new boundaries — reveals a much different origin story. The new details show that the governor’s office appears to have misled the public and the state legislature and may also have violated Florida law.
DeSantis aides worked behind the scenes with an attorney who serves as the national GOP’s top redistricting lawyer and other consultants tied to the national party apparatus, according to records and interviews.
Florida’s constitution was amended in 2010 to prohibit partisan-driven redistricting, a landmark effort in the growing movement to end gerrymandering as an inescapable feature of American politics.
Barbara Pariente, a former chief justice of the state Supreme Court who retired in 2019, told ProPublica that DeSantis’ collaboration with people connected to the national GOP would constitute “significant evidence of a violation of the constitutional amendment.”
“If that evidence was offered in a trial, the fact that DeSantis was getting input from someone working with the Republican Party and who’s also working in other states — that would be very powerful,” said Pariente, who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Democrat Lawton Chiles.
A meeting invite obtained by ProPublica shows that on Jan. 5, top DeSantis aides had a “Florida Redistricting Kick-off Call” with out-of-state operatives. Those outsiders had also been working with states across the country to help the Republican Party create a favorable election map. In the days after the call, the key GOP law firm working for DeSantis logged dozens of hours on the effort, invoices show. The firm has since billed the state more than $450,000 for its work on redistricting.
A week and a half after the call, DeSantis unveiled his new map. No Florida governor had ever pushed their own district lines before. His plan wiped away half of the state’s Black-dominated congressional districts, dramatically curtailing Black voting power in America’s largest swing state.
One of the districts, held by Democrat Al Lawson, had been created by the Florida Supreme Court just seven years before. Stretching along a swath of north Florida once dominated by tobacco and cotton plantations, it had drawn together Black communities largely populated by the descendants of sharecroppers and slaves. DeSantis shattered it, breaking the district into four pieces. He then tucked each fragment away in a majority-white, heavily Republican district.
DeSantis’ strong-arming of his Republican allies was covered extensively by the Florida press. But until now, little has emerged about how the governor crafted his bold move and who his office worked with. To reconstruct DeSantis’ groundbreaking undertaking, ProPublica interviewed dozens of consultants, legislators and political operatives and reviewed thousands of pages of documents obtained through public records requests and from the nonpartisan watchdog group American Oversight.
DeSantis’ office did not respond to detailed questions for this story.
“Florida’s Governor fought for a legal map — unlike the gerrymandered plan the Governor rightly vetoed,” Adam Kincaid, executive director of the National Republican Redistricting Trust, whose top lawyer was hired by DeSantis’ office, said in an email to ProPublica. “If Governor DeSantis retained some of the best redistricting lawyers and experts in the country to advise him then that speaks to the good judgment of the Governor, not some alleged partisan motive.”
In four years as governor, DeSantis has championed an array of controversial policies and repeatedly used his power to punish his political opponents. A presumptive candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, he has often made moves that seemed tailored to attract headlines, such as his recent stunt sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. But it’s the governor’s less flashy commandeering of the redistricting process that may ultimately have the most long-lasting consequences.
Analysts predict that DeSantis’ map will give the GOP four more members of Congress from Florida, the largest gain by either party in any state. If the forecasts hold, Republicans will win 20 of Florida’s 28 seats in the upcoming midterms — meaning that Republicans would control more than 70% of the House delegation in a state where Trump won just over half of the vote.
The reverberations of DeSantis’ effort could go beyond Florida in another way. His erasure of Lawson’s seat broke long-held norms and invited racial discrimination lawsuits, experts said. Six political scientists and law professors who study voting rights told ProPublica it’s the first instance they’re aware of where a state so thoroughly dismantled a Black-dominated district. If the governor prevails against suits challenging his map, he will have forged a path for Republicans all over the country to take aim at Black-held districts.
“To the extent that this is successful, it’s going to be replicated in other states. There’s no question,” said Michael Latner, a political science professor at California Polytechnic State University who studies redistricting. “The repercussions are so broad that it’s kind of terrifying.”
Al Lawson’s district, now wiped away by DeSantis, had been created in response to an earlier episode of surreptitious gerrymandering in Florida.
Twelve years ago, Florida became one of the first states to outlaw partisan gerrymandering. Through a ballot initiative that passed with 63% of the vote, Florida citizens enshrined the so-called Fair Districts amendment in the state constitution. The amendment prohibited drawing maps with “the intent to favor or disfavor a political party.” It also created new protections for minority communities, in a state that’s 17% Black, forming a backstop as the U.S. Supreme Court chipped away at the federal Voting Rights Act.
Florida elected its first Black member of Congress, a former slave named Josiah Walls, in 1870, shortly after the end of the Civil War. But Florida rapidly enacted new voter suppression laws, and Walls soon lost his office as Reconstruction gave way to the era of Jim Crow.
Thanks to distorted maps, Florida did not elect a second Black representative to Congress until 1992. That year, a federal court created three plurality-Black districts in Florida — and then three Black politicians won seats in the U.S. House.
After the Fair Districts amendment became law in 2010, state legislators promised to conduct what one called “the most transparent, open, and interactive redistricting process in America.” Policymakers went on tour across the state, hosting public hearings where their constituents could learn about the legislature’s decision-making and voice their concerns.
The hearings also served a more nefarious purpose, a judge would later rule. They were instrumental in what state circuit judge Terry Lewis described as “a conspiracy to influence and manipulate the Legislature into a violation of its constitutional duty.”
For months, a team of state-level Republican operatives worked in secret to craft maps that favored the GOP, coordinating with both statehouse leadership and the Republican National Committee. Then they recruited civilians to attend the hearings and submit the maps as their own.
An email detailed the advice the operatives gave their recruits. “Do NOT identify oneself orally or in writing,” it read, “as a part of the Republican party. It is more than OK to represent oneself as just a citizen.”
It took years of litigation for the details of the scheme to come to light. But in 2015, the Florida Supreme Court responded with force. In a series of rulings that ultimately rejected the Republicans’ efforts, the court laid out the stringent new requirements under Fair Districts, making clear that partisan “practices that have been acceptable in the past” were now illegal in the state of Florida.
After ruling that the legislature’s process was unconstitutional, the court threw out the Republicans’ congressional district lines and imposed a map of their own. That is how Lawson’s district came to be.
“It was important,” Pariente, who authored the key opinions, told ProPublica, “to make sure the amendment had teeth and was enforceable.”
The amendment took on even greater significance in 2019, when the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling on redistricting.
The court’s decision in Rucho v. Common Cause barred federal court challenges to partisan gerrymanders. Writing for the 5-4 majority, Chief Justice John Roberts said it was not an issue for the federal judiciary to decide, but emphasized the ruling did not “condemn complaints about districting to echo into a void.”
In fact, the issue was being actively addressed at the state level, Roberts wrote. He cited Florida’s amendment and one of Pariente’s opinions. Responding to liberal justices who wanted to reject Rucho’s map as an unconstitutional gerrymander, Roberts wrote they could not because “there is no ‘Fair Districts Amendment’ to the Federal Constitution.”
In 2021, state legislative leaders were more careful.
The senate instructed its members to “insulate themselves from partisan-funded organizations” and others who might harbor partisan motivations, reminding legislators that a court could see conversations with outsiders as evidence of unconstitutional intent. The legislature imposed stringent transparency requirements, like publishing emails that it received from constituents. And they ordered their staff to base their decisions exclusively on the criteria “adopted by the citizens of Florida.”
The Senate leadership “explained to us at the beginning of the session that because of what happened last cycle, everything had to go through the process,” Sen. Joe Gruters, who is also chairman of the Florida Republican Party, told ProPublica.
In November, the state senate proposed maps that largely stuck to the status quo. Analysts predicted they would give Republicans 16 seats in Congress and Democrats 12.
“Were they the fairest maps you could draw? No,” said Ellen Freidin, leader of the anti-gerrymandering advocacy group FairDistricts Now. “But they weren’t bad Republican gerrymanders.”
DeSantis wasn’t satisfied. “The governor’s office was very pissed off about the map. They thought it was weak,” said a well-connected Florida Republican, who spoke on the condition of anonymity so he could be candid. “They thought it was ridiculous to not even try to make it as advantageous as possible.”
In early January, DeSantis’ deputy chief of staff, Alex Kelly, was quietly assigned to oversee a small team that would devise an alternative proposal, according to Kelly’s later testimony.
State employees often spend years preparing for the redistricting process — time that DeSantis did not have. As Kelly and his colleagues set to work, they brought in critical help from the D.C. suburbs: Jason Torchinsky, a Republican election attorney and one of the leading GOP strategists for redistricting nationwide.
On Jan. 5, Kelly and two other top DeSantis aides had the redistricting “kick-off call,” according to the meeting invite, which was provided to ProPublica by American Oversight. The invitation included Torchinsky and another guest from out of state: Thomas Bryan, a redistricting specialist.
In an interview with ProPublica, Bryan explained the connection between the national Republican Party and his work with DeSantis. “There’s a core group of attorneys that works with the party and then they work with specific states,” he said. “It’s not a coincidence that I worked on Texas, Florida, Virginia, Kansas, Michigan, Alabama.”
He added that the main lawyer he works with is Torchinsky: “Jason will say, ‘I want you to work on this state.’”
A top partner at a conservative law firm, Torchinsky has represented the RNC, the Republican Party of Florida and many of America’s most influential right-wing groups, such as the Koch network’s Americans for Prosperity.
He also occupies a central role in the Republican Party’s efforts to swing Congress in its favor in 2022. Torchinsky is the general counsel and senior advisor to the National Republican Redistricting Trust, the entity the Republican National Committee helped set up to manage the party’s redistricting operations.
The NRRT boasts millions of dollars in funding and a roster of prominent advisors that includes Mike Pompeo and Karl Rove. Earlier this year, Kincaid, the trust’s executive director, summarized its objective bluntly: “Take vulnerable incumbents off the board, go on offense and create an opportunity to take and hold the House for the decade.”
In a statement to ProPublica, Kincaid said that the trust is one of Torchinsky’s many clients and that the lawyer’s work in Florida was separate: “When I would ask Jason what was happening in Florida, he would tell me his conversations were privileged.” Kincaid added that he personally did not speak with anyone in the DeSantis administration “during this redistricting cycle.”
Torchinsky’s involvement in the creation of DeSantis’ map has not been previously reported. His role in the process appears to have been intimate and extensive, though the specifics of his contributions are largely unclear. He spent more than 100 hours working for the DeSantis administration on redistricting, according to invoices sent to the Florida Department of State.
Torchinsky held repeated meetings with DeSantis’ team as the group crafted maps and navigated the ensuing political battles, according to documents obtained by ProPublica. And he brought in other operatives who’d worked around the country in priority states for the national GOP.
A week after the kickoff meeting, Torchinsky scheduled a Zoom call between Kelly, Bryan and a second consultant, Adam Foltz.
Foltz and Bryan arrived in Florida just as they were becoming go-to mapmakers for the GOP. They appeared together in multiple states where the NRRT was directly involved last year, generating controversy in their wake.
In Texas, Foltz, Bryan and the NRRT’s leader, Kincaid, all worked behind the scenes helping draw maps, court records show. After they finished, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against the state of Texas, contending that the map violated the Voting Rights Act and illegally diluted Black and Latino votes. The case is still pending.
Last fall in Virginia, each party submitted three candidates to the state supreme court to guide the state’s redistricting process. The Democrats put forward three professors. Republicans submitted Bryan, Foltz and Kincaid. The court’s conservative majority rejected all three Republican nominees, citing conflicts of interest and “concerns about the ability” of the men to carry out the job neutrally.
In a statement, Kincaid said Foltz and Bryan are not partisan operatives and “the Virginia Supreme Court erred” in rejecting them. He also downplayed his own relationship to the consultants, saying they are not “employees or retained consultants” for his group.
“Adam and Tom are two of the best political demographers in the country,” Kincaid wrote. “It would only make sense that states looking for redistricting experts would retain them.”
Until last year, Foltz had spent his entire career working in Wisconsin politics, on state GOP campaigns and for Republican state legislators, according to court records. He was introduced to redistricting a decade ago when he spent months helping craft maps that became notoriously effective Republican gerrymanders. When he testified under oath that partisanship played no role in the Wisconsin process, a three-judge panel dismissed his claim as “almost laughable.”
Bryan was also a new figure on the national stage. Before 2020, he was a “bit player” in the redistricting industry, he said, running a small consulting company based in Virginia. He’d drawn maps for school districts and for local elections, but never for Congress, and he held a second job in consumer analytics at a large tobacco conglomerate.
“In 2020, my phone started going off the hook, with states either asking to retain me as an expert or to actually draw the lines,” Bryan told ProPublica. “I get phone calls from random places, and I’m on the phone with a governor.” While he mostly worked with Republicans, he was also retained by Illinois Democrats this cycle, according to court records.
Foltz and Bryan’s rapid ascension culminated in Florida. On Jan. 14, Torchinsky set up a third call with Foltz and Kelly. Then two days later, DeSantis released his map.
According to Kelly’s subsequent testimony, Foltz drew the map himself.
“I was completely blindsided,” said Rep. Geraldine Thompson, a Democrat on the House redistricting committee. “That is the purview of the legislature.”
Foltz declined an interview when reached by phone and did not respond to subsequent requests for comment. Kelly and Torchinsky, who went on to defend DeSantis in a lawsuit against the redistricting, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The House redistricting subcommittee later brought Kelly in to answer questions about DeSantis’ proposals. Before the deputy chief of staff testified, the Democrats’ ranking member moved to place him under oath. Republican legislators blocked the committee from swearing Kelly in.
In his opening statement, Kelly took pains to emphasize that the governor’s office colored within the lines of the Florida constitution.
“I can confirm that I've had no discussions with any political consultant,” he testified. “No partisan operative. No political party official.”
This appears to have been misleading. By the time he testified, Kelly had been personally invited to at least five calls to discuss redistricting with Torchinsky, Bryan or Foltz, records show.
Kelly mentioned Foltz only briefly in his testimony. Torchinsky and Bryan’s names didn’t come up.
DeSantis holds as much sway in Tallahassee as any governor in recent memory. But even after he publicly weighed in with a map of his own, Republicans in the legislature didn’t bow down. The state Senate refused to even consider the governor’s version. In late January, they passed their original plan.
DeSantis’ aides argued that Lawson’s district was an “unconstitutional gerrymander,” extending recent precedent that limits states’ ability to deliberately protect Black voting power.
Florida Republicans were skeptical. House Speaker Chris Sprowls told reporters that DeSantis was relying on a “novel legal argument” that lawmakers were unlikely to adopt.
“In the absence of legal precedent,” Sprowls said, “we are going to follow the law.”
On Feb. 11, DeSantis ratcheted up the pressure. He held a press conference reiterating his opposition to Lawson’s district. He vowed to veto any map that left it intact. But he still needed to win over Republican policymakers. Again, DeSantis’ top aides turned to Torchinsky.
In February, Torchinsky helped DeSantis’ staff pick out an expert witness to sell the governor’s vision to the legislature, according to emails provided to ProPublica by American Oversight. Once the group chose an expert, Torchinsky had a call with him in advance of his appearance.
With a deadline to prepare for the November midterms looming, the legislature moved toward compromise. In early March, it passed a new bill that was much closer to DeSantis’ version — but still kept a Democrat-leaning district with a large Black population in North Florida.
The governor’s attempts at persuasion were over.
On Mar. 28, Foltz and Kelly had another call, along with a partner at Torchinsky’s law firm. The next day, DeSantis vetoed the compromise plan.
Democrats were outraged; many Republicans were shocked. “A veto of a bill as significant as that was definitely surprising,” Gruters, the state senator and chair of the Florida GOP, told ProPublica.
Kelly soon submitted a slightly modified version of Foltz’s map to the legislature. This time, the legislature took DeSantis’ proposal and ran with it.
On Apr. 20, Rep. Thomas Leek, the Republican chair of the House redistricting committee, formally presented DeSantis’ plan before the general assembly. When his colleagues asked him who the governor’s staff consulted while drawing the map, Leek told them that he didn’t know.
“I can’t speak to the governor's entire process,” Leek said. “I can only tell you what Mr. Kelly said.”
The legislature had required everyone submitting a map to file a disclosure form listing the “name of every person(s), group(s), or organization(s) you collaborated with.” Kelly left the form blank.
The legislature voted on party lines and passed DeSantis’ proposal the next day. Anticipating litigation, they also allocated $1 million to defend the map in court.
Before DeSantis even signed the bill into law, a coalition of advocacy groups filed a lawsuit challenging the map in state court.
They soon scored a major victory. Circuit Court Judge J. Layne Smith, a DeSantis appointee, imposed a temporary injunction that would keep Lawson’s district intact through the midterm elections.
“This case is one of fundamental public importance, involving fundamental constitutional rights,” Smith wrote. His ruling cited the lengthy history of Black voter suppression in North Florida and across the state.
That victory was short-lived. Torchinsky’s firm quickly filed an appeal on DeSantis’ behalf. Then, in a unanimous decision in late May, the appellate court allowed DeSantis’ map to move ahead.
The higher court’s opinion was authored by Adam Tanenbaum, a familiar face in Tallahassee. Until DeSantis appointed him to the court in 2019, Tanenbaum was the Florida House’s general counsel, and before that he was general counsel to the Florida Department of State — both of which were parties to the case.
The very day Tanenbaum issued the opinion, he completed an application to fill a vacancy on the Florida Supreme Court, records show. In Florida, Supreme Court justices are appointed by the governor, in this case DeSantis.
Tanenbaum was not chosen for the position. He didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The broader case is still pending and is expected to eventually be decided by the state supreme court. Every justice on Florida’s supreme court was appointed by Republicans. The majority of them were chosen by DeSantis.
The deeply conservative body has already demonstrated its willingness to overturn precedent that’s only a few years old. DeSantis’ senior aides have indicated they hope it will do so here.
During his public testimony, Kelly was asked how Lawson’s district could be unconstitutional when it was recently created by Florida’s highest court.
Kelly responded tersely: “The court got it wrong.”
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Ofelia Platon, right, from Oaxaca, holding a sign while protesting before the cancellation of the Los Angeles City Council meeting Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2022, in Los Angeles. (photo: Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP)
The restaurant, Guelaguetza, has become an institution known for introducing Oaxaca's unique cuisine and culture to Angelenos, attracting everyone from immigrant families to Mexican stars to powerful city officials such as Martinez.
But now after a scandal exploded over a recording of Martinez making racist remarks about Oaxacans such as Lopez, the 37-year-old restaurateur and cookbook author said she feels a tremendous sense of betrayal.
Martinez resigned from her council seat Wednesday and offered her apologies. But the disparaging remarks still deeply hurt the city’s immigrants from Oaxaca, which has one of Mexico's large indigenous populations. Sadly, many said, they are not surprised. Both growing up in their homeland and after reaching the U.S., they say they've become accustomed to hearing such stinging comments — not only from non-Latinos but from lighter skinned Mexican immigrants and their descendants.
“Every time these people looked at me in my face, they were all lying to me,” Lopez said. “We should not let these people continue to lie to us and tell us we are less than, or we are ugly, or allow them to laugh at us."
Following Martinez' departure, two other Latino City Council members also are facing widespread calls to resign since the year-old recording surfaced of them mocking colleagues while scheming to protect Latino political strength in council districts. Martinez used a disparaging term for the Black son of a white council member and called immigrants from Oaxaca ugly.
“I see a lot of little short dark people,” Martinez said on the recording, referring to an area of the largely Hispanic Koreatown neighborhood. “I was like, I don’t know where these people are from, I don’t know what village they came (from), how they got here.”
Lopez said she heard such racist comments growing up in California but had hoped they would be a thing of the past and that young Oaxacan immigrants would not have to hear them.
“I want people to look at themselves in the mirror every day and see the beauty," she said.
Oaxaca has more than a dozen ethnicities, including Mixtecos and Zapotecs. The southern Mexican state is known for famously hand-dyed woven rugs, pristine Pacific tourist beaches, a smoky alcohol called Mezcal and sophisticated cuisine including moles — thick sauces crafted from more than two dozen ingredients.
Los Angeles is home to the country's largest Mexican population and nearly half the city of 4 million people is Latino, census figures show. Informal studies indicate that several hundred thousand Oaxacan immigrants live in California, with the largest concentration in Los Angeles, said Gaspar Rivera-Salgado, director of the University of California, Los Angeles Center for Mexican Studies.
Demeaning language is often used against Mexico's Indigenous people. It is“the legacy of the colonial period," Rivera-Salgado said of Spanish rule long ago.
Racism, and colorism — discrimination against darker-skinned people within the same ethnic group — run centuries deep in Mexico and other neighboring Latin American countries. A few years ago, Yalitza Aparicio, the Oscar-nominated actress in “Roma” who is from Oaxaca, faced racist comments in her country and derogatory tirades online over her Indigenous features after she appeared on the cover of Vogue México.
Odilia Romero said the scandal doesn't surprise her. The Oaxacan community leader is among many who had been pressing for the resignation of Martinez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, and the two other councilmembers on the recorded conversation.
Romero said she's also fielded calls since the scandal broke, including from someone urging her not to let the hurtful remarks distract from critical working aiding the immigrant community.
“That is a very paternalist comment,” said Romero, executive director of the group Comunidades Indigenas en Liderazgo or CIELO and a Zapotec interpreter. “How dare you tell us Indigenous people that we are not understanding. Of course we understand — we see this every day.”
Lynn Stephen, an anthropology professor at University of Oregon who researches Mexican migration and Indigenous peoples, said the concept of mestizaje — or being a mixed-race and non-racial unified nation — intended to erase Indigenous communities, not uplift them, and the discrimination persists to this day. It is carried to the United States with those who migrate, she said, while similar divisions also exist in other Latin American countries.
“These kinds of comments directed toward Indigenous people from non-Indigenous people from Mexico, Guatemala, etc., it’s a different kind of layer of racism,” Stephen said. “Folks from Oaxaca they have to contend with anti-immigrant and anti-Mexican backlash and racism often from non-Latino Americans, white Americans, sometimes other folks, and then within that, often where they’re living or in school.”
Ofelia Platon, a tenant organizer, went to the Los Angeles city council chambers recently to demand the officials step down. She said she hasn't experienced discrimination from within the Latino community as much as from outside it, but there's no place for such — especially coming from elected leaders the poor count on to help improve their lives.
“They think they have the power to step on people,” she said. “They’re two-faced.”
It's not just the hurtful remarks that sting Xóchitl M. Flores-Marcial, a Zapotec scholar and professor of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Northridge. She called it very telling about the officials who make decisions affecting her community. She said she grew up in the United States hearing hurtful words and still faces similar rejection whenever she travels to Oaxaca and people there are surprised she's the research team leader.
“It's so painful because those are consequential people,” she said. “This is hurting us — not just our emotions, but our actual life in terms of our jobs and our opportunities.”
Still she said she has hope for future generations in “Oaxacalifornia” — the tight-knit community that has maintained traditions while embracing life in Los Angeles.
IPCC author Julia Steinberger who joined a campaign of actions protesting Switzerland's upcoming plans to ration gas and power ahead of anticipated shortages this winter was detained. (photo: Renovate Switzerland)
IPCC author Julia Steinberger joined a campaign of actions protesting Switzerland's upcoming plans to ration gas and power ahead of anticipated shortages this winter.
The scientist, Julia Steinberger, is a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne and contributed to the 6th Assessment Report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, specifically its third chapter on emissions mitigation pathways that are still possible this century.
The protest was organized by Renovate Switzerland group, and advocated for improved energy efficiency in buildings. Activists glued themselves to the road as part of a blockade; it was the fifth action by the group in the last week, according to local news reports. In a video of the protest, Steinberger was carried off by police and placed in a van as she said in French, "non-violent civil action is important. We don't have much time left."
On its website, Renovate Switzerland paints a dire picture of the climate crisis. Its page on explaining the urgency behind climate protests opens up with a dark quote from the United Nations Secretary general, Antonio Guterres, who said in April that the IPCC report "is a litany of climate policies. It's a record of shame, cataloging the empty promises that set us firmly on the path to an unlivable world."
Renovate Switzerland also points to multiple IPCC reports, as well as a study that suggests that by 2070 some 3.5 billion people will be forced to migrate because of inhospitable living conditions thanks to climate change.
“This summer, Switzerland recorded the second hottest summer since measurements began in 1864. Record-breaking heat wave summers such as we have experienced this year will be the norm for an average summer by 2035,” the group's website states. “Such heat brings its share of disasters and suffering. In Switzerland, glaciers are disappearing at a breakneck pace, forests are burning or dying, agricultural land is drying up, harvests are failing, lakes and rivers are evaporating. Elsewhere in the world, millions of people are losing their place of residence or are already suffering from famine.”
In response to the Swiss government’s energy conservation plan in the face of gas and power shortages, Renovate Switzerland announced it will commit to protests to pressure Switzerland’s government to carry out an extensive housing renovation plan that would improve insulation and energy efficiency. “With regard to energy savings, [the government] discharges its responsibilities by counting on the small voluntary gestures of the population and businesses,” the group told local news.
"The thermal renovation of buildings… is logical, socially progressive… it creates jobs," Steinberger said at the protest in a video shared by Renovate Switzerland. "But the government does not do it. So we see that we are at an impasse."
The IPCC report, and the chapter worked on by Steinberger specifically, offer gloomy outlooks for the future beyond Switzerland. In it, scientists find that humanity will likely exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius within the next two decades unless steep cuts are made. By 2050, we can expect famines, droughts, and mass migrations as extreme weather events become more common.
Heatwaves, to take one example, already kill thousands and will only become deadlier as we surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. One recent UN and Red Cross report suggests that "projected future death rates from extreme heat are staggeringly high—comparable in magnitude by the end of the century to all cancers or infections diseases—and staggeringly unequal, with people in poorer countries seeing far greater levels of increase."
Over the years, IPCC reports have painted an increasingly grim picture for what needs to be done. Earlier this year, an author of the IPCC’s synthesis report—a compilation of what we’ve learned about climate change thus far—told The Atlantic that there are three broad buckets of scenarios to anticipate. One is that a third of Earth's total energy production goes towards removing carbon from the atmosphere while decarbonizing everything, a situation deemed nearly impossible. A second envisions that energy demand nearly collapses, decarbonization and carbon removal continue, and energy efficiency outpaces its historical rate of progress—all at the same time. The most likely one is that we fail to limit global temperature growth to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In the face of all this, then, it makes sense that Steinberger decided to join protests to block traffic. There’s a growing debate over the best way to pressure governments and corporate actors to act, from civil disobedience to destruction of fossil fuel infrastructure, but what is clear is that something needs to be done to mobilize more action lest we find ourselves in some of the worst climate scenarios.
A photo posted by Renovate Switzerland later showed Steinberger standing alongside fellow activists outside a police building. "Today's 7 sympathizers are free again, they're fine and will do it again as long as BR doesn't have a plan to #RenovateSwitzerland," the group said.
Steinberger did not respond to Motherboard’s request for comment.
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