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.

“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.

“Everybody here helps each other,” Brown said, adding that is something Trump knows little about.

Throughout the city, there was a sense of real pain. Baltimore is accustomed to being painted as downtrodden and falling apart; whenever anything bad happens, people here say, the national media swoops in, scaring away tourists and investors. Now the president of the United States is reinforcing that perception on his Twitter feed.

“People tend to hear these hurtful words and internalize it,” said the Rev. Cleveland T.A. Mason, a Baptist minister who was meeting with faith leaders Monday at the New Shiloh Baptist Church, where Freddie Gray was eulogized four years ago. “These things that are being said by the president of the United States are more hurtful because of who he is.”

City boosters are pushing back. On Monday, after the hashtag #WeAreBaltimore started trending on Twitter, a website by that name — already in the works before Trump’s tweets — went live earlier than planned. “We are more than alright,” its home page says.

Cummings — a son of South Carolina sharecroppers who moved to Baltimore to be preachers — has represented Baltimore for more than 20 years. After the 2015 unrest, he went onto the streets of West Baltimore, where he lives, to try to keep the peace. His district also includes some white suburbs, and in 2018, he won reelection with 76% of the vote.

As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, a role that gives him the authority to investigate the president, he is a powerful and vocal critic of Trump. In Baltimore, Cummings is revered; the president, by contrast, is reviled. Trump took just 10% of the vote in Baltimore in 2016.

In West Baltimore, the kerfuffle around Trump’s tweets was tempered by an acknowledgment that any criticism of Charm City was going to have some truth to it.

On a street corner a few blocks from the Penn-North metro station, where the CVS drugstore has been rebuilt and two police cars sat on the plaza, Isaiah Lee was helping his uncle at the street stand in a vacant lot strewed with trash.

“Look at where we live at,” Isaiah said. “I mean, Baltimore may be not that great, but Baltimore is not what you think it is.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/us/politics/trump-baltimore.html" id="aef8427c-7b97-3616-a96a-e58e9d4a0cf4">The New York Times</a>.

Baltimore to Trump: You Lost Your Authority to Criticize

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.

“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 on Twitter then.

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 even if their city has its struggles, Trump has worn out his right to point them out.

“This is the struggle that he doesn’t know anything about. He’s never been here, so he really doesn’t have anything to say,” the Rev. Timmie Lee from the Cornerstone Christian 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 Twitterstorm assailing the congressman — which continued into Monday with an attack on the Rev. Al Sharpton, the 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 stoking racial divisions 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 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 Scott said. “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.”

“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, a court reporter for a local radio station, even as he allowed that his city has entrenched problems. “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 murders 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 Baltimore is roughly $76,000. 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.

“He’s the president of the United States,” Brown said. “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.”

In West Baltimore, the kerfuffle around Trump’s tweets was tempered by an acknowledgment that any criticism of Charm City is going to have some truth to it.

On a street corner just a few blocks from the Penn-North metro station where a drugstore was looted and burned during the Freddie Gray riots, Isaiah Lee was helping his uncle at the street stand in a vacant lot strewn with trash.

“Look at where we live at,” Isaiah said. “I mean Baltimore may be not that great, but Baltimore is not what you think it is.”

Lawrence Lanahan, an author and journalist who recently published a book, “The Lines Between Us,” about Baltimore’s racial divide, said city residents were used to the treatment and were up to challenging Trump back.

“You’re just a fruitcake with a lot of Twitter followers,” Lanahan said to the president. “Baltimore is a real place with real people that the dark side of American history has punished for decades, and if you are going to get a couple of yuks out of that and move on, then most people will tell you to” not bother.

He said something more colorful than “not bother,” however.

BALTIMORE — The last time President 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.

Trump’s weekend Twitterstorm assailing the congressman — which continued into Monday with an attack on the Rev. Al Sharpton, the civil rights leader who was headed to 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 stoking racial divisions as a path to reelection in 2020 would train his fire on Baltimore.

“Hold it, hold it, hold it,” Sanders insisted. “I’ve talked to Ilhan about twice in my life.”

His reaction reflects the broader Democratic Party’s conflicted embrace of Omar. That struggle has especially been apparent in the House, where Jewish Democrats have tangled with Omar and Democratic leaders have grappled with how to handle the freshman Democrat from Minnesota, who is one of the first two Muslim women elected to Congress.

When Omar, 36, pushed for a House rules change to permit her to wear her hijab on the House floor, she was heralded as a powerful symbol of the Democratic Party’s inclusiveness. But her support of the boycott Israel movement and her attacks on supporters of Israel have made her a complicated figure to defend. Democratic leaders, as well as many in the rank and file, are choosing their words with caution.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi denounced the president for invoking the “painful images of 9/11 for a political attack” without mentioning Omar, and waited until Sunday — two days after Trump’s tweet — to issue a statement saying she had asked the Capitol Police to assess the congresswoman’s safety. Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, the House Democratic leader, waited three days before calling on the president to apologize to Omar.

“They put us in photos when they want to show our party is diverse,” Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., the only other Muslim woman of Congress, wrote on Twitter, responding to someone who complained about Omar’s “lack of support” from the Democratic leadership. “However, when we ask to be at the table, or speak up about issues that impact who we are, what we fight for &amp; why we ran in the first place, we are ignored. To truly honor our diversity is to never silence us.”

In many respects, Omar, a Somali refugee whose family received asylum in the United States when she was a teenager, represents a new direction for the Democratic Party. Her allies on the left argue that Trump’s war with Omar is a defining issue for the party.

“This is a proxy for who counts as an American and who doesn’t, and that is a fight that the Democratic Party needs to be leading on,” said Waleed Shahid, spokesman for Justice Democrats, a liberal advocacy group that helped elect Omar. “The Democratic Party can’t run away from the fight regarding Ilhan Omar, because she represents the country. In the story between Make America Great Again or the new America we are becoming, she is a pivotal character.”

Trump appears to agree. Using Omar as his foil, he and his team are deploying the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim message for the 2020 re-election campaign that they used to ride to the White House in 2016. The congresswoman has said she has “experienced an increase in direct threats on my life” since the president’s tweet Friday.

“This is endangering lives,” she said in a statement Sunday night. “It has to stop.”

But centrist Democrats have a more complex relationship with Omar. Her leftist brand of politics does not go over well in the swing districts that delivered Democrats the House majority. Her views on Israel make many Jews — an important component of the Democratic base — deeply uneasy. And her insinuations that U.S. policy toward the Jewish state is driven by money — “It’s all about the Benjamins baby,” she wrote on Twitter — have drawn charges of anti-Semitism, prompting her to apologize.

So while Omar’s more moderate colleagues have denounced the threats against her, they have been tepid in their remarks. Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a centrist Democrat from New Jersey and strong supporter of Israel, spoke carefully when asked about Omar.

“The response to different points of view in our country must never be threats of physical harm or violence,” he said.

But if the party is conflicted about Omar, it is not reflected in the fundraising report she filed this week with the Federal Election Commission.

During the first quarter of 2019, she raised $832,000, roughly half of which was from donors giving under $200. Overall, Omar took in nearly twice the median amount raised by incumbents who are in races rated a tossup by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, according to Michael Beckel, who analyzes money in politics for Issue One, a bipartisan group that advocates election overhaul.

The current controversy around Omar stems from remarks she made to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, describing how the group was founded after the Sept. 11 attacks “because they recognized that some people did something and that all of us were starting to lose access to our civil liberties.” (The group was actually founded in 1994.)

Last Tuesday, Rep. Daniel Crenshaw, a freshman Republican from Texas, seized on the “some people did something” phrase, and posted a tweet suggesting Omar was minimizing the attacks. Conservative news outlets — including The New York Post and Fox’s “Fox &amp; Friends,” Trump’s favorite television program — picked up on it. On Friday, Trump tweeted the edited video, which interspersed graphic images of the burning World Trade Center towers with a clip from Omar’s speech.

In an interview on Tuesday with CNN, Pelosi rejected the notion that Omar was anti-Semitic, and expressed concern for her well being, but she said she had not spoken to the congresswoman about the CAIR speech. “I don’t even know what was said,” Pelosi said. “But I do know what the president did was not right.”

Omar’s supporters say there is a danger to the Democratic split.

“Some of these institutional Democratic leaders can’t find, frankly, the spine to speak up quickly and strongly in defense of one of their colleagues,” said Zahra Billoo, a spokeswoman for CAIR. “If we don’t find alignment soon, knowing that Donald Trump is already passing Democratic candidates in his own fundraising, I worry that we are looking at a second term because the leaders of our party did not do the right thing.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/us/politics/ilhan-omar-democrats.html" id="a8d4383f-2bb5-3377-a1e0-6bcf6cb4f213">The New York Times</a>.

Democrats Tread Lightly in Defending One of Their Own

WASHINGTON — When President Donald Trump tweeted an edited video portraying Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., as playing down the 9/11 attacks, it took less than three hours for Sen. Bernie Sanders to rush to her defense and declare her “a leader with strength and courage.” But when a Fox News anchor described Sanders, I-Vt., on Monday night as “a staunch supporter” of Omar, the senator balked.

Trump appears to agree. Using Omar as his foil, he and his team are deploying the same anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim rhetoric for the 2020 re-election campaign that they used to ride to the White House in 2016. The congresswoman has said she has “experienced an increase in direct threats on my life” since the president’s tweet Friday.

Even Sanders — who hails from the same wing of the party as Omar — is taking care to put some distance between the two of them. When Sanders spoke Monday night, at a televised town hall meeting hosted by the Fox News Channel, Sanders, who if elected would be the nation’s first Jewish president, said, “I think that Ilhan has got to do maybe a better job in speaking to the Jewish community.”

For Democrats, Ilhan Omar Is a Complicated Figure to Defend

“April 15 is coming,” Sanders, whose refusal to release his full past returns has become an issue in the campaign, said in an interview in his office. “We wanted to release 10 years of tax returns. April 15, 2019, will be the 10th year, so I think you will see them.”

Told that he was being compared to President Donald Trump, who has refused to release his tax returns, Sanders got more specific: “On the day in the very immediate future, certainly before April 15, we release ours, I hope that Donald Trump will do exactly the same. We are going to release 10 years of our tax returns, and we hope that on that day Donald Trump will do the same.”

Sanders’ refusal to release his full tax returns was a relatively minor issue in the 2016 Democratic primaries, when Hillary Clinton goaded him to be more transparent. But Trump’s refusal to release his — and the subsequent effort by House Democrats to force the release — have raised the issue’s profile. Sanders has bristled at comparisons between his behavior and the president’s.

“Not being a billionaire, not having investments in Saudi Arabia, wherever he has investments, all over the world, mine will be a little bit more boring,” Sanders said.

Reminded that he is a millionaire, he did not shirk from the description.

“I wrote a best-selling book,” he declared. “If you write a best-selling book, you can be a millionaire, too.”

A number of Sanders’ rivals for the Democratic nomination, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, have already released their 2018 tax returns. Gillibrand has made 12 years of her returns public. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released 10 years of her returns last year.

Sanders, a Vermont independent, has repeatedly promised to do the same but has been evasive about his timing, prompting some speculation that he does not want voters to know what is in them. He has said he and his wife, Jane, who serves as an adviser to his presidential campaign, prepare the returns themselves, without an accountant.

In 2014, they released returns showing $205,617 in income, including $156,441 in wages and salary and $46,213 from Social Security benefits. A summary statement of their 2016 returns was much the same, with most of their income coming from Sanders’ $174,000 Senate salary. But that was criticized as not a full disclosure.

Sanders — whose trademark on the campaign trail is his attacks on the “millionaires” and the “billionaires” — consistently ranked among the least wealthy members of the Senate.

But since his 2016 run for the presidency, Sanders’ financial fortunes have improved. His 2017 Senate financial disclosure forms show he earned roughly $1.06 million that year, more than $885,000 from book royalties. His most recent book, “Where We Go From Here,” was published last year.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/us/politics/bernie-sanders-tax-returns.html" id="677cac49-c386-3ca9-a5db-02f9cbcdee2a">The New York Times</a>.

Sanders, Now a Millionaire, Pledges to Release Tax Returns by Monday

WASHINGTON — Sen. Bernie Sanders, whose $18 million fundraising haul has solidified his status as a front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Tuesday that he would release 10 years of tax returns by Tax Day on Monday and acknowledged that he has joined the ranks of the millionaires he has denounced for years.

A number of Sanders’ rivals for the Democratic nomination, including Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington, have already released their 2018 tax returns. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts released 10 years of her returns last year.

Sanders — whose trademark on the campaign trail is his Brooklyn, New York-accented rant against the “millionaihs” and the “billionaihs” — consistently ranked among the least wealthy members of the Senate.

The heated exchange came at the end of Wednesday’s explosive House Oversight Committee hearing featuring Michael Cohen. After Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., brought in a black political appointee of President Donald Trump’s in an effort to prove Trump is not racist, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., called it racist to “actually use a prop, a black woman in this chamber, in this committee.”

Meadows, red-faced and near tears, demanded that Tlaib’s words be “taken down” — struck from the record as a violation of House rules — and Cummings asked Tlaib to explain herself. She apologized. Then the questions began.

“Whose emotions do we put first?” said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a close ally of Tlaib’s who is on the oversight panel and witnessed the encounter. “We had to apologize for him getting hurt feelings over her saying and calling out a racist practice,” but Tlaib was also “hurt, and no apology was furnished to her.”

The Root, a website that focuses on race, went further: “Cummings’ handling of Tlaib yesterday is part of a larger problem the Democratic Party has with this new class of women of color: Democrats want women of color in Congress, but they can’t seem to handle their truth-telling,” wrote Terrell Jermaine Starr. He added, “He messed up and needs to apologize to Tlaib nonetheless — publicly. Otherwise, Republicans will take Meadows’ cue and cry a river of white tears each time a woman of color dares to call them out on their racism.”

The episode underscored who Cummings is and how he wants to run his committee. On Thursday, many of his colleagues — including Ocasio-Cortez — came to his defense, saying he handled a difficult situation well by preventing an important and historic hearing from going off the rails.

But outside the Capitol, the reviews were less kind. Critics were furious that Cummings had called Meadows “one of my best friends,” and resurfaced several 2012 campaign videos showing Meadows saying he intended to send President Barack Obama “home to Kenya, or wherever it is.”

Beyond that contretemps, the Cohen hearing served to shine a national spotlight on a new generation of outspoken young Democrats, many of them women of color, who are forcing pointed conversations about race and abandoning the unwritten protocols of decorum in the way their elders — who often agree with them — have not.

“You have to bear witness, bear witness to the truth,” said Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., a civil rights icon, who applauded young women of color for getting into what he likes to call “good trouble, necessary trouble.”

“This body is going to continue to change as more people of a diverse background come,” Lewis said. “America is changing. We all need to get on board.”

But a generational divide could be emerging, especially with some African-American elders who have been in the House for decades. “I think they certainly bring a different perspective in some ways,” said Rep. Danny K. Davis, D-Ill. "I think the wording sometimes is a little different. The level of what might be called ‘professional civility’ may be a little different, but I think the individuals are expressing in many ways the same feelings and are saying the same things.”

For the House Republican Conference, 90 percent of whom are white and male, some uncomfortable moments are inevitable. Meadows called the “birther” videos “old news” Thursday and said he had previously apologized. He also appeared to reconcile with Tlaib; the two shared a hug and a seemingly cordial talk on the House floor.

“She said she didn’t mean it yesterday, so there was no need to apologize,” he told reporters afterward. “I wanted her to know, and she wanted me to know, that our relationship is one that will hopefully provide real good results going forward.”

Meadows and Tlaib are political and cultural opposites. Meadows, 59, a well-to-do real estate developer, is chairman of the House Freedom Caucus and one of Trump’s most ardent defenders on Capitol Hill.

Tlaib, 42, made headlines on her first day in office after she was captured on video using an expletive to describe Trump as she spoke of her desire to impeach him. A lawyer and social justice advocate from outside Detroit, she is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants and one of the first two Muslim women in Congress.

She did not respond to a request for an interview Thursday. Cummings brushed aside questions. “I’m not going to talk about that,” he said. “I think we were able to resolve it. I think we ended up with civility.”

Congress, of course, has been grappling with issues of race for most of its existence, and certainly the debates during the civil rights era were pointed and passionate. But the rise of Trump, who has referred to a former black aide, Omarosa Manigault Newman, as “a dog” and declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the white supremacists’ march in 2017 in Charlottesville, Virginia, has made Washington’s conversation about race deeply personal for Tlaib and other lawmakers of color.

“As representatives of communities that are on the margins of how the president defines his vision of America, I think they bring an urgency and an emotional depth to their rhetoric that is not just academic,” said Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., who was also present for the Tlaib-Meadows exchange. “It’s lived experience.”

Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, a liberal organization that helped elect both Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez, described Tlaib as “one of a new generation of Democrats who is going to puncture the silence even when it’s uncomfortable.”

Meadows anticipated that Cohen, Trump’s former personal lawyer, would describe the president as racist, which is why he asked the Trump appointee, Lynne Patton of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, to attend. When it was his turn to speak, he asked her to rise, and then he spoke for her, saying that she disagreed with Cohen and that “there was no way that she would work for an individual who was racist.”

Tlaib was incredulous: “The fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself.”

Another Michigan Democrat, Rep. Brenda Lawrence, who is African-American, said it was “totally insulting” for Meadows to “prop up one member of our entire race.”

Rep. Ayanna S. Pressley, a freshman Democrat from Massachusetts who is black, asked Cohen whether it was possible for Trump to “have a black friend and still be racist,” to which he replied, “Yes.”

In fact, the only Democrats to call Meadows out were women of color. Men of color on the committee, such as Khanna and Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi of Illinois, held their tongues.

While Cummings may have wanted to put the matter to rest, the exchange was reverberating inside and outside the Capitol.

“I think that he handled it in the way that made sense for him and the committee in that moment,” said Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of Black PAC, which mobilizes black voters. “He is the chair of the committee, and a part of that role has to be to facilitate and mediate between members.”

Ocasio-Cortez agreed, saying she felt Cummings was “correct in the procedure” and was “trying to do everything in his power to protect” Tlaib from being reprimanded. But, she added, women of color often face disparate treatment at work.

“At the end of the day,” Ocasio-Cortez said, “one person got an apology, and one person didn’t, and two people were hurt.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/us/politics/race-divide-democrats-republicans.html" id="3fd3af18-585c-3040-a7ff-8dfd8ffa8e27">The New York Times</a>.

A Clash at the Cohen Hearing Reveals the Left's Racial Divide

WASHINGTON — As the child of former sharecroppers, Rep. Elijah E. Cummings of Maryland is no stranger to blunt conversations about race. But when a fiery freshman Democrat practically accused a conservative Republican of racism Wednesday, the uneasy truce that Cummings brokered put him in the center of a raw debate over race and gender in a changing House.

Fairfax, who has retained lawyers to assist him, has emphatically denied the allegation and argued that there is no corroborating evidence to support it.

Late Wednesday night, aides to a prominent Democratic Virginia congressman, Bobby Scott, said that the woman told him a year ago that she had made an allegation of sexual assault against Fairfax.

The woman identified herself on Wednesday as Vanessa C. Tyson, an associate professor of politics and expert in black history at Scripps College in California. She has also spent years advocating for victims of sexual assault and has spoken openly about being molested by her father when she was a child.

“What began as consensual kissing quickly turned into a sexual assault,” Tyson wrote, describing her encounter in a hotel room with the future lieutenant governor. “Mr. Fairfax put his hand behind my neck and forcefully pushed my head towards his crotch. Only then did I realize that he had unbuckled his belt, unzipped his pants, and taken out his penis.”

Scott issued a statement Wednesday afternoon saying that he has known Tyson as a friend for about a decade, and that she “deserves the opportunity to have her story heard.”

Late Wednesday night, aides to Scott confirmed that in late December 2017 or early January 2018, Tyson told him that she had made an allegation of sexual assault against Fairfax, in the course of giving Scott notice that she had given his name as a character reference to The Washington Post, which was investigating the allegation.

The congressman received “limited information” about the assault from The Post, but did not learn the full details until Tyson released her statement Wednesday, the aides said. The account of Scott’s aides was first reported by ABC News.

Separately, a political scientist at Purdue University in Indiana, Nadia E. Brown, said Tyson told her of the assault about a year ago, when they were working with a group of political scientists dedicated to combating sexual harassment.

Fairfax has adamantly denied Tyson's allegations; NBC News reported Wednesday that he used an obscenity to describe Tyson as he sought to discredit her during a private state Senate caucus meeting Monday.

Asked if Fairfax had used the expletive to refer to the woman, Larry Roberts, the chief of staff to Fairfax, said the lieutenant governor had used a profanity to describe the situation and his level of anger, but had not referred to the woman with the expletive reported by NBC. Roberts said he attended the meeting.

On Wednesday afternoon, Fairfax released a statement calling Tyson’s account “painful” to read, though he again denied that he had assaulted her.

“I take this situation very seriously and continue to believe Dr. Tyson should be treated with respect,” he said. “But, I cannot agree to a description of events that simply is not true.”

In her statement, Tyson offered a searing description of being sexually assaulted.

“He then forced his penis into my mouth,” the statement continued. “Utterly shocked and terrified, I tried to move my head away, but could not because his hand was holding down my neck and he was much stronger than me. As I cried and gagged, Fairfax forced me to perform oral sex on him.”

She said she did not tell anyone about the encounter with Fairfax for years because she felt “deep humiliation and shame,” and was reluctant to speak out amid the ongoing political controversy in Virginia because she feared being branded a liar. She identified herself as “a proud Democrat” and said she has no political motive for coming forward.

Tyson’s statement comes as Virginia is in turmoil over who will lead the state. Gov. Ralph Northam is facing calls for his resignation over a racist photo in his medical school yearbook; Fairfax is facing the accusations of sexual assault; and Attorney General Mark R. Herring, who would ascend to the governorship if both Northam and Fairfax were forced out, is under siege for acknowledging Wednesday that he put on blackface while a student at the University of Virginia in 1980.

In her statement, Tyson recounted that she met Fairfax in July 2004 when they were both working at the convention. They soon realized they had a mutual friend, and on the third day of the convention Fairfax suggested she get “some fresh air” by accompanying him on a quick errand to retrieve documents from his room in a nearby hotel.

Their previous interactions had not been flirtatious, she said, and so she agreed. Once in the room, he kissed her, she wrote, and “though surprised by his advance, it was not unwelcome and I kissed him back.” He then pulled her toward the bed, where the assault occurred, she wrote.

By the time she met Fairfax, Tyson wrote, she had been regularly volunteering at a rape crisis center; on her LinkedIn profile says she is a founding member of the Survivor Speakers Bureau at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. She said she felt the encounter with Fairfax “especially degrading” given her volunteer work.

“I did not speak about it for years, and I (like most survivors) suppressed those memories and emotions as a necessary means to continue my studies, and to pursue my goal of building a successful career as an academic,” she wrote.

In October of 2017, she wrote, she saw a photograph of Fairfax accompanying an article about his campaign to become lieutenant governor of Virginia. “The image hit me like a ton of bricks, triggering buried traumatic memories and the feelings of humiliation I’d felt so intensely back in 2004,” she wrote.

She told a few close friends of hers in Virginia what had happened, she said. In December of that year, she reached out to a friend at The Washington Post, which has said it declined to run the story in part because it was unable to corroborate her account. But when stories emerged about Northam last Friday, she wrote “I felt a jarring sense of both outrage and despair.”

She vented her frustration in a private Facebook post that did not identify Fairfax; she was then inundated with messages from reporters. When an online publication published her identity, Fairfax issued a statement calling her a liar, she wrote, which prompted her to consider whether to speak out.

“Mr. Fairfax’s suggestion that The Washington Post found me not to be credible was deceitful, offensive, and profoundly upsetting,” she wrote. She said she would not make any other statement and was speaking out only to clear her name, “and to provide what I believe is important information for Virginians to have as they make critical decisions that involve Mr. Fairfax.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/us/politics/vanessa-tyson-justin-fairfax.html" id="cf62e827-108d-3d44-adb7-ed8e85c1e4b4">The New York Times</a>.

Woman Who Accused Virginia's Lt. Governor Describes Assault in 2004

WASHINGTON — The woman who has accused Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of Virginia of sexual assault came forward Wednesday, issuing a statement through a law firm that described a 2004 encounter at the Democratic National Convention in Boston that, she said, began with kissing but quickly turned into an episode of forced oral sex.

The woman identified herself as Vanessa C. Tyson, an associate professor and expert in black history at Scripps College in California. She has also spent years advocating for victims of sexual assault and has spoken openly about being molested by her father when she was a child.

Fairfax has forcefully denied her allegations; NBC News reported on Wednesday that he used a profanity to describe Tyson as he sought to discredit her during a private state Senate caucus meeting Monday.

Asked if Fairfax had referred to the woman with the expletive, Larry Roberts, the chief of staff to Fairfax, said the lieutenant governor had used a profanity to describe the situation and his level of anger, but had not referred to the woman with the expletive reported by NBC. Roberts said he attended the meeting.

Fairfax did not have an immediate comment on Tyson’s statement. He issued a statement earlier Wednesday, repeating that the assault allegation against him was not true and that his encounter with Tyson had been consensual.

Tyson’s statement comes as Virginia is in turmoil over who will lead the state. Gov. Ralph Northam is facing calls for his resignation over a racist photo in his medical school yearbook; Fairfax is facing the accusations of sexual assault; and Attorney General Mark R. Herring of Virginia, who would ascend to the governorship if both Northam and Fairfax were forced out, is under siege for acknowledging on Wednesday that he put on blackface while a student at the University of Virginia in 1980.

By the time she met Fairfax, Tyson wrote, she had been regularly volunteering at a rape crisis center; on her LinkedIn profile says she is a founding member of the Survivor Speakers Bureau at the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center. She said she felt the incident with Fairfax “especially degrading” given her volunteer work.

Woman Accusing Justin Fairfax of Sexual Assault Comes Forward

WASHINGTON — The woman who has accused Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax of Virginia of sexual assault came forward on Wednesday, issuing a statement through a law firm that described a 2004 encounter at the Democratic National Convention in Boston that, she said, began with kissing but quickly turned into an episode of forced oral sex.

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.

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.

Sheryl Gay Stolberg

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