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Biden has become a scapegoat for the Democrats

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Biden has become a scapegoat for the Democrats

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Original Sin is an odd name for a book that turns out to cover 2023 to 2024. It implies that readers will be taken to the ultimate root of a problem — the problem being that Donald Trump is in the White House — when in fact the authors lead them along the trail of blame no more than two years back. That was when an aged Joe Biden resolved to run for president again. It was a heinous decision. The cover-up of his fragile state was worse. Peers who didn’t call on him to go until a televised debate exposed him last summer must reflect on their dereliction.

But this wasn’t the “origin” of anything. Biden has become a scapegoat for a much longer-standing Democratic problem, which is a tolerance of probable and often proven election losers.

If there was a sin, a Fall, it was the Democrats’ choice of Hillary Clinton as their presidential candidate in 2016. World history turned on that singular act of pigheadedness. Polls were telling the party that voters disliked her. She had already fluffed a huge lead over the young Barack Obama in the primaries of eight years earlier. True, her low reputation has never been fair. She isn’t a crook or much more of a hypocrite than other politicians, just one of life’s plodders. But the world is what it is. Democrats chose to ignore the objective fact of her unpopularity, and the outcome is a Trump era that was probably avoidable.

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The other event that led us to where we are today was the elevation of Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate in 2020. Given his age, the Democrats were all but naming a future president. Again, they were spoilt for clues about her limitations. She had been the first candidate of note to withdraw from the primaries. Those who outlasted her included the mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city.

Biden carries nominal blame for choosing her as running mate, but “choice” is a misleading word here. There was a tacit Democratic rule that a white man couldn’t run with another white man. So no Pete Buttigieg. The Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar was a strong performer but also caught up in the recent history and politics of the state in which George Floyd had just been killed, which all but ruled her out. Is there another party that boxes itself in like this?

All in all, Biden’s refusal to stand down in good time comes third in the list of Democratic follies over the past decade. The problem isn’t one man. The problem is a pattern of collective delusion about candidates that goes back to the previous century. Look at margins of defeat. Not since Barry Goldwater have the Republicans misjudged the fit of nominee and electorate quite as badly as the Democrats did with George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

In the 50-50 nation of today, the Democrats are always competitive. As a result, it is easy to miss the stunning narrowness of their candidates. Tim Walz was the first person on either the upper or lower half of a Democratic presidential ticket since 1980 who hadn’t gone to law school. There has been no southerner on the top since Al Gore at the turn of the millennium, despite the mistrust that Democrats must overcome there. Last November, in a contest that it rightly described as existential for the constitution, the party put up a pair from California (which hasn’t voted Republican since the 1980s) and Minnesota (which didn’t even vote Republican in the 1980s). This is a party that is always willing to meet conservative-minded swing voters one-tenth of the way.

To be bad at choosing a leader is to be bad at politics. Whatever else seems to matter in that trade, such as ideas and tactics, it flows from the paramount individual in a party. Good leaders will tend to get these things right. The likes of Harris, or Ed Miliband or Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, reliably won’t. If this logic seems circular — “winners win” — I’m afraid that is politics. There should be more research and commentary on what constitutes “it”, otherwise known as the X-factor, than on campaigns, manifestos and other outputs of politics, the study of which is an exercise in looking through a telescope from the wrong end.

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The question is why the Democrats in particular so often err at leadership selection. Perhaps parties of the left are necessarily softer on human weakness. The impulse that leads them to protect people without lucrative skills from market forces (a good thing) is the impulse that makes them coddle electoral no-hopers (a bad thing). That would explain why Labour in the UK has so often had the same problem: for each Dukakis, a Kinnock.

Or it might be that progressives, trained to think in terms of structural forces, regard an emphasis on individual talent as unintellectual. Increasingly, a Democrat is someone who pins the rise of Trump on academic abstractions — neoliberalism, oligarchy — but shirks the humdrum work of not choosing a great clucking turkey of a candidate every four years.

Either way, this problem predates and could postdate the Biden years. Even had he quit earlier, the Democrats would in all likelihood still have chosen Harris out of deference to seniority and those unwritten identity norms. With a longer campaign, and therefore more exposure of her mystifying syntax and opaque beliefs, I think she would have done even worse against Trump than she did. Original Sin exposes senior Democrats as people of titanic self-pity. “We got so screwed by Biden as a party,” says one grandee. “We got so screwed by the party as a world,” mumbled one reader.

janan.ganesh@ft.com

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

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Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

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The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

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“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

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Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

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