CHAPTER 5

OTHER
HOT-BUTTON ISSUES

“No nation can have the policy that whole classes of people are immune from immigration law or enforcement. It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, period.”

—President Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, to The New York Times, on the policy of separating families at the border, June 2018

American politics has been marked by a series of debates over social issues that have roiled the country, from the Know Nothing movement of the 1860s to the antiwar protests of the 1960s and beyond. One of the most intractable of those arguments has historically been over immigration, a debate that is inextricably snarled in questions of skin color, religion and place of origin. Women’s struggles for the vote and other rights equal to those of men have not yet ceased, with the country only recently grappling with questions of equal pay and sexual abuse in public and private spaces. Right-wing organizations used the legalization of marriage between same-sex partners to raise campaign money from their most loyal base. And in the early 21st century, the United States was one of the only developed nations that failed to regulate the epidemic of firearms.

Brothers, ages 4 and 3, from El Salvador, at a border patrol station in Brownsville, Tex., in 2014.

IMMIGRATION

AFTER 16 FUTILE YEARS, CONGRESS WILL TRY AGAIN TO LEGALIZE “DREAMERS”

By YAMICHE ALCINDOR AND SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, SEPTEMBER 5, 2017

For 16 years, advocates for legalizing young immigrants brought here illegally by their parents have tried to pass legislation to shield them from deportation. The bill was called the Dream Act, and in Congresses Democratic and Republican, and in the Bush and Obama administrations, whether by stand-alone bill or comprehensive immigration legislation, it failed again and again.

Now, with 800,000 lives in the balance and a fiercely anti-immigration current running through the Republican Party, lawmakers are being asked to try again—with a six-month deadline, to boot. The prospects for success after more than a decade of false starts would already be daunting, but President Trump may have made the odds even longer after he promised voters last year that Republicans would take a hard line on immigration, then punted the issue to Congress.

His invitation to lawmakers on Tuesday to “do something and do it right” for the so-called Dreamers will run into the headwinds of his own politics. On the other hand, lawmakers who for 16 years have been unwilling to grant legal status to a sympathetic group of unauthorized immigrants may find that taking their legal status away is even harder than conferring it.

“I’m hoping that this is a moment where we are forced to finally do something,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois and an original author of the Dream Act—the letters stand for Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors. “We want to call this bill for a vote on the floor of the House and the floor of the Senate. I am hoping that we will have enough votes to pass it.”

Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, said she believed there is “widespread bipartisan support for legislation that would provide some measure of protection to children who are brought to this country through no decision of their own.”

DACA recipients Sofia Ruales, 24, her sister Erica Ruales, 23, and their cousin Marlon Ruales, 23, at a gathering in New York City, September 5, 2017, listen to Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s announcement that the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program will be phased out. They were brought to the United States from Ecuador when they were small children. They later joined a group of Dreamers and supporters in a march to Trump Tower.

Before there was Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, there was Mr. Durbin’s Dream. In 2007, a version of the measure won the support of a majority of senators but fell victim to a bipartisan filibuster that included eight Democrats. Three years later, the bill passed the House but again did not get through the Senate.

And in 2013, language allowing Dreamers to stay in this country and work or attend school was included in a broader immigration package that passed the Senate with 68 votes—then failed in the House.

Frustrated after years of failings, President Barack Obama signed DACA as a temporary order in the hope that Congress would eventually pass the Dream Act and broader immigration changes. But with Republicans in control of both chambers of Congress, the Dream Act stalled once again.

The politics have clearly shifted on the issue—for both parties. With Mr. Trump scheduled to visit her state on Wednesday, Senator Heidi Heitkamp, a North Dakota Democrat who is facing a tough reelection bid, posted a lengthy statement on her Facebook page in which she echoed Mr. Obama’s assertion on Tuesday that ending the program was “cruel.”

Some Republicans have softened, as well. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, a Washington Republican who chairs the House Republican Conference, said in a statement that while she has long said she did not agree with the way Mr. Obama enacted his program, Congress “must protect” the Dreamers who are currently shielded from deportation.

She added, “That principle is fundamental for me.”

But hard-liners in the Republican conference remain unbowed. Representative Steve King of Iowa, one of the fiercest voices in his party against illegal immigration, tweeted that delaying an end to DACA so Republican leadership “can push Amnesty is Republican suicide.”

The Dream Act’s history is tortured. In 2001, a concerned guidance counselor for a frightened young woman whose family immigrated from South Korea reached out to Mr. Durbin for help. The young woman, Tereza Lee, was a pianist who was hoping to apply to top-ranked music schools, but the law said she would have to leave the United States for 10 years and apply for reentry. To help Ms. Lee, Mr. Durbin introduced the Dream Act.

Democrats had a hand in the legislation’s historical futility. For years, they used the Dream Act as a bargaining chip to push for broader immigration legislation, hoping a sympathetic group of young immigrants could help win a pathway to citizenship for the far broader pool of 12 million unauthorized immigrants. Now, most Democrats say there is no time for comprehensive immigration changes.

But Republican leaders indicated that they will need sweeteners, perhaps funding for a border wall or other measures to bolster border security.

“The process of taking care of the kids will be a negotiated process,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, who appeared with Mr. Durbin on Tuesday at a news conference to call for bipartisan action. “There are a lot of people who believe that a good marriage would be border security and Dream Act.”

Both Mr. Graham and Mr. Durbin made clear they could support such a marriage—albeit reluctantly, in the case of Mr. Durbin—but negotiations look inevitable. Others agreed.

“I think it’s an opportunity for us to deal with a myriad other issues that we need to deal with, with a broken immigration system,” said Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. Among those issues, he said, are border security, efforts by immigrants to overstay their visa and the so-called E-Verify system for employers to certify that their workers are in this country legally.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the number-two Republican, was definitive. “I think what President Trump did is appropriate, which is to kick it to Congress, and so we will take that up,” he said. “But there’s no way that it will stand alone.”

In the House, Republican moderates say they are willing to work with Democrats to enshrine the program in legislation—and to force Republican leaders to abandon their customary strategy of passing bills only with overwhelming Republican support—a “majority of the majority.”

“I believe the votes are there to pass some kind of a DACA program in the House,” said Representative Charlie Dent, Republican of Pennsylvania and a chairman of the so-called Tuesday Group of House moderates. “I’m not saying a majority of the majority, but there are 218 votes.”

Representative Mike Coffman, a Colorado Republican who represents a narrowly divided, heavily Latino district, said Monday that he planned to push a legislative maneuver to get a vote on a temporary extension of DACA that he wrote with Representative Luis V. Gutiérrez, Democrat of Illinois. The so-called discharge petition for the Bridge Act would force Republican leaders to bring the bill to the floor if it has 218 signatures.

“Democrats have to decide, O.K., do we allow the deportation of these young people because we don’t like a Republican taking leadership on this issue? Or do we go with a Republican-led initiative?” said Mr. Coffman, a top target for Democrats in next year’s midterm elections.

Mr. Gutiérrez weighed in for Mr. Coffman’s efforts. “I don’t care who gets the credit. There are 800,000 kids’ futures at stake,” Mr. Gutierrez said. “The only consideration we have is how do we legislatively fix this problem.”

It remains unclear if Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House Democratic leader, would back the Bridge Act, which would extend DACA for three years, and rally others to do the same.

But she has requested a meeting with Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who has the power to bring the Dream Act to a vote at any time and who said Tuesday he hoped to find consensus to ensure “that those who have done nothing wrong can still contribute as a valued part of this great country.”

NOTE: Like all immigration-reform attempts in this period, the effort to find a legal answer for the Dreamers failed when conservative Republicans and the entire Democratic caucus rejected yet another compromise. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s hard-line policies on immigration led to an uproar over the government’s decision to separate children from their undocumented immigrant parents and put them into literal cages in detention camps (see pages 235–237).

NEW ORDER INDEFINITELY BARS ALMOST ALL
TRAVEL FROM SEVEN COUNTRIES

By MICHAEL D. SHEAR, SEPTEMBER 14, 2017

President Trump on Sunday issued a new order indefinitely banning almost all travel to the United States from seven countries, including most of the nations covered by his original travel ban, citing threats to national security posed by letting their citizens into the country.

The new order is more far-reaching than the president’s original travel ban, imposing permanent restrictions on travel, rather than the 90-day suspension that Mr. Trump authorized soon after taking office. But officials said his new action was the result of a deliberative, rigorous examination of security risks that was designed to avoid the chaotic rollout of his first ban. And the addition of non-Muslim countries could address the legal attacks on earlier travel restrictions as discrimination based on religion.

Starting next month, most citizens of Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Chad and North Korea will be banned from entering the United States, Mr. Trump said in a proclamation released Sunday night. Citizens of Iraq and some groups of people in Venezuela who seek to visit the United States will face restrictions or heightened scrutiny.

“As president, I must act to protect the security and interests of the United States and its people.”

Mr. Trump’s original travel ban caused turmoil at airports in January and set off a furious legal challenge to the president’s authority. It was followed in March by a revised ban, which expired on Sunday even as the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments about its constitutionality on Oct. 10. The new order—Chad, North Korea and Venezuela are new to the list of affected countries and Sudan has been dropped—will take effect Oct. 18.

“As president, I must act to protect the security and interests of the United States and its people,” Mr. Trump said in the proclamation, which White House officials said had the same force as an executive order. He added that the restrictions will remain in effect until the governments of the affected nations “satisfactorily address the identified inadequacies.”

For Mr. Trump, whose efforts on health care, infrastructure improvements and tax reform are gaining little steam, the new order is a third attempt to make good on his campaign promise to respond to terrorist threats by tightening entry at the nation’s borders. In December 2015, he called for a complete ban on travel to the United States by Muslims “until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on,” though he later denied that he had sought a religious test on travel.

Officials described the new order as a much more targeted effort than the president’s earlier one. Each of the countries will be under its own set of travel restrictions, though in most cases citizens of the countries will be unable to emigrate to the United States permanently and most will be barred from coming to work, study or vacation in America.

Iran, for example, will still be able to send its citizens on student exchanges, though such visitors will be subject to enhanced screening. Certain government officials of Venezuela and their families will be barred from visiting the United States. Somalis will no longer be allowed to emigrate to the United States but may visit with extra screening.

Administration officials said that the new rules would not apply to legal permanent residents of the United States, and that visitors who currently hold valid visas from the countries listed will not have their visas revoked. That means that students already in the United States can finish their studies and employees of businesses in the United States who are from the targeted countries may stay for as long as their existing visas remain valid. People whose visas expire will be subject to the travel ban, officials said.

People seeking access to the United States as refugees are not covered by the proclamation, officials said. Entry of refugees is currently limited by the president’s original travel ban, and officials said the administration was preparing new rules for refugees that should be announced within days.

Reaction to the president’s announcement was swift, as some critics of the original travel ban expressed similar concerns about the president’s latest effort to bar potential terrorists and criminals.

“Six of President Trump’s targeted countries are Muslim. The fact that Trump has added North Korea—with few visitors to the U.S.—and a few government officials from Venezuela doesn’t obfuscate the real fact that the administration’s order is still a Muslim ban,” said Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

“President Trump’s original sin of targeting Muslims cannot be cured by throwing other countries onto his enemies list,” Mr. Romero said.

But administration officials—who have long rejected the characterization of the president’s travel restrictions as a “Muslim ban,”—noted that the latest effort also applies to non-Muslim countries and was based on a rigorous evaluation of each country’s security capabilities.

One official who briefed reporters on Sunday evening insisted that the president’s travel restrictions were “never, ever, ever” based on race, religion or creed.

In a statement released by the White House, Mr. Trump defended the new proclamation, saying that “we cannot afford to continue the failed policies of the past, which present an unacceptable danger to our country. My highest obligation is to ensure the safety and security of the American people, and in issuing this new travel order, I am fulfilling that sacred obligation.”

The president’s announcement comes after the administration conducted what it described as an in-depth, worldwide, 90-day review of the security measures in place in other countries to prevent terrorists or criminals from entering the United States by applying to emigrate or to visit with a tourist, work or education visa.

Mr. Trump called for the review—and a temporary ban on travel from several majority-Muslim countries—just days after being inaugurated. But a fierce legal challenge to the travel ban delayed the security assessment until the summer.

Officials said last week that most nations already met new, minimum standards for identifying and screening potential travelers and sharing investigative information with law enforcement agencies in the United States. Some nations that initially fell short of those standards agreed to implement changes to avoid travel restrictions.

But several countries either failed to meet those standards or flatly refused, officials said. Homeland Security officials recommended to Mr. Trump in a report last week that he impose the new travel restrictions on the residents of those countries. The president’s 15-page proclamation accepted the recommendations, spelling them out in detail.

The proclamation imposes the most severe restrictions on Syria and North Korea, which Mr. Trump says fail to cooperate with the United States in any respect. All citizens from those countries will be denied visas to enter the United States once the proclamation goes into effect. Most citizens of Chad, Libya and Yemen will be blocked from emigrating to or visiting the United States because the countries do not have the technical capability to identify and screen their travelers, and in many cases have terrorist networks in their countries, officials said.

Officials said Somalia did, barely, meet the security standards set by the United States, but will still be subject to a ban on emigration and heightened scrutiny for travel because it is a safe haven for terrorists. Officials said that Iran was uncooperative and would be subject to a broad travel ban, but Mr. Trump made an exception for student and exchange visas.

In Venezuela, Mr. Trump restricted only the travel of government officials and their families, writing in the proclamation that the ban was focused on that group because they were “responsible for the identified inadequacies” in sharing information about travelers.

A mother and daughter embrace at Logan Airport in Boston, February 5, 2017. The daughter, a resident of Atlanta, was emotional after her mother disembarked from a Lufthansa flight from Frankfurt, Germany, one of the first flights allowing people into America from seven Muslim-majority countries that were banned from traveling to the U.S. Many travelers rushed to make it into the United States before a court ruling to stay the restraining order on the travel ban.

Mr. Trump’s original travel ban prevented all travel from citizens of seven countries: Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. Iraq was later removed from a second version of the travel ban in March after American officials said it had improved its ability to screen passengers and share information with the United States. In the new security review, Sudan was deemed to meet the security standards and was removed from the list of countries with travel restrictions.

Homeland Security officials had described the previous ban as a temporary pause on travel from certain countries to allow for the review of security measures.

By contrast, the new travel restrictions will be in place indefinitely, officials said. The United States will consider lifting the restrictions on those countries affected only if they meet the new minimum standards, they said.

The president’s announcement could have a dramatic impact on the legal challenge to the previous travel ban, which is under consideration by the Supreme Court after the administration appealed lower court rulings that said the ban was unconstitutional and a breach of Mr. Trump’s authority.

Oral arguments in the case are scheduled for Oct. 10, but legal experts said that parts of the case could be moot because of the president’s decision to end that travel ban. Other parts of the case, including restrictions on refugees coming into the United States, were not affected by Sunday’s announcement.

A spokeswoman for the Justice Department said Sunday that the solicitor general would be submitting an update to the Supreme Court about the latest travel restrictions on Sunday evening. The spokeswoman said the administration would continue to defend the president’s “lawful authority to issue his executive order.”

But lawyers who filed challenges to the president’s previous travel ban left open the possibility that they would also challenge the new restrictions.

“This is an apparent effort to paper over the original sin of the Muslim ban, especially when just last week Trump said he wanted a ‘larger, tougher, more specific’ ban,” Mr. Romero said.

The original travel ban was met with angry denunciations from civil rights activists and others who said the president was violating the Constitution by specifically targeting Muslims. They also criticized Mr. Trump’s administration for abruptly imposing the ban, causing confusion at airports as visitors were turned away by border agents who had not been briefed on the new policy.

Administration officials said on Friday that the new policy was the result of months of deliberation that included the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the White House and other agencies involved in security and the border.

NOTE: Despite the public outcry against his racist immigration policies, Trump held fast to his determination to stop the flow of Muslims into the United States, and ultimately the increasingly Republican, conservative Supreme Court, upheld his ban in a 5-to-4 vote in late June 2018.

OPINION: THE TRUMP APOLOGISTSAND THE CRYING CHILDREN

By MICHELLE GOLDBERG, JUNE 18, 2018

Apparently there are some people close to Donald Trump with the capacity for shame. Not decency or courage, of course, but at least furtive recognition that they’re complicit in something vile.

Over the last few days, stories of bureaucratic sadism have poured forth from America’s southern border. The Associated Press described a Texas warehouse where “hundreds of children wait in a series of cages” with up to 20 people inside. The New York Times reported on a mother deported to Guatemala without her eight-year-old son. In The Washington Post, the president of the American Academy of Pediatrics described a shelter for toddlers where staffers aren’t allowed to hug or hold the bereft children. ProPublica obtained a recording of small children wailing for their parents in a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, while a Border Patrol agent joked, “We’ve got an orchestra here.”

Migrants wait for asylum hearings outside the port of entry on the U.S. border in Tijuana, Mexico, June 2018.

As outrage has built nationally, several people associated with the White House stepped forward to dissemble. Kirstjen Nielsen, head of the Department of Homeland Security, sent out a series of tweets denying that the administration’s policy was in fact the administration’s policy. “We do not have a policy of separating families at the border. Period,” she lied.

Melania Trump’s spokeswoman put out a slippery statement distancing the first lady from the president’s actions and sowing confusion about their cause. “Mrs. Trump hates to see children separated from their families and hopes both sides of the aisle can finally come together to achieve successful immigration reform,” the statement said, as if her husband were not responsible for the separations.

On Meet the Press on Sunday, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president, claimed that “nobody” in the administration likes the policy. “You saw the president on camera, that he wants this to end,” she said.

It’s hard to tell if these women are engaged in deliberate gaslighting or frantic reputation maintenance. Perhaps Nielsen is worried about her post–White House prospects now that she’s best known for the systematic traumatization of children. Maybe Melania Trump realizes that being the trophy wife of a child-torturer is bad for her brand. (#BeBest!) Conway, whose husband has already staked out a position as a Trump critic, may think she has a road back into decent society when this Grand Guignol regime finally ends.

“It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, period.”

But no one should be able to squirm out of admitting that the evil practice of family separation is Donald Trump’s doing, abetted by everyone who abets him. Indeed, part of the madness of this moment is that while some Trump apologists—as well as Trump himself—deny their role in tearing families apart, others in the administration boldly own it. “It was a simple decision by the administration to have a zero-tolerance policy for illegal entry, period,” Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller told The Times.

Some of the president’s defenders insist he’s bound by a legal settlement mandating that children be held in the least restrictive setting possible. The only alternative to the current policy, they say, is what they call “catch and release,” a dehumanizing term borrowed from fishing to suggest that migrant families are simply being let go.

Senator Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, dispatched this argument in a Facebook post on Monday. “The administration’s decision to separate families is a new, discretionary choice. Anyone saying that their hands are tied or that the only conceivable way to fix the problem of catch-and-release is to rip families apart is flat wrong,” he wrote. Some in the administration, he added, “have decided that this cruel policy increases their legislative leverage.”

The administration’s justifications and denials are meant to obscure that fact. Consider Nielsen’s suggestion, during a speech on Monday, that the administration is worried about child smuggling: “We do not have the luxury of pretending that all individuals coming to this country as a family unit are, in fact, a family.”

The government has made this argument before, in one of the first family separation cases to go to court. Last November, a Congolese woman known in court filings as Ms. L and her then-six-year-old daughter arrived at a port of entry near San Diego, presented themselves to border agents and asked for asylum. Officers separated them—according to a lawsuit, Ms. L could hear her daughter in the next room, screaming—and the girl was sent to Chicago while her mother was held in California.

When the A.C.L.U. sued on Ms. L’s behalf, officials claimed they’d taken the girl because Ms. L couldn’t prove she was her parent. The judge in the case ordered a DNA test, which quickly demonstrated Ms. L’s relationship to her daughter. (In March, they were finally reunited.)

“The truth is they’ve been doing this all along for deterrence purposes, as sometimes they boldly said in the press,” Lee Gelernt, an A.C.L.U. lawyer who argued the case, told me. “But when confronted in a federal lawsuit, they tried to retroactively justify it by saying they couldn’t figure out whether it was the mother.” It’s hard to know who’s worse—the sociopaths like Miller who glory in the administration’s cruelty, or those who are abashed enough to lie about the filthy thing they’re part of, but not to do anything else.

NOTE: The policy of separating children from their parents was reversed by a federal judge in late June 2018, but the nation’s anguish over immigration continues at the time of this writing (see pages 226–229).

GUNS

END THE GUN EPIDEMIC IN AMERICA

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD, DECEMBER 4, 2015

All decent people feel sorrow and righteous fury about the latest slaughter of innocents, in California. Law enforcement and intelligence agencies are searching for motivations, including the vital question of how the murderers might have been connected to international terrorism. That is right and proper.

But motives do not matter to the dead in California, nor did they in Colorado, Oregon, South Carolina, Virginia, Connecticut and far too many other places. The attention and anger of Americans should also be directed at the elected leaders whose job is to keep us safe but who place a higher premium on the money and political power of an industry dedicated to profiting from the unfettered spread of ever more powerful firearms.

It is a moral outrage and a national disgrace that civilians can legally purchase weapons designed specifically to kill people with brutal speed and efficiency. These are weapons of war, barely modified and deliberately marketed as tools of macho vigilantism and even insurrection. America’s elected leaders offer prayers for gun victims and then, callously and without fear of consequence, reject the most basic restrictions on weapons of mass killing, as they did on Thursday. They distract us with arguments about the word terrorism. Let’s be clear: These spree killings are all, in their own ways, acts of terrorism.

No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

Opponents of gun control are saying, as they do after every killing, that no law can unfailingly forestall a specific criminal. That is true. They are talking, many with sincerity, about the constitutional challenges to effective gun regulation. Those challenges exist. They point out that determined killers obtained weapons illegally in places like France, England and Norway that have strict gun laws. Yes, they did.

But at least those countries are trying. The United States is not. Worse, politicians abet would-be killers by creating gun markets for them, and voters allow those politicians to keep their jobs. It is past time to stop talking about halting the spread of firearms, and instead to reduce their number drastically—eliminating some large categories of weapons and ammunition.

It is not necessary to debate the peculiar wording of the Second Amendment. No right is unlimited and immune from reasonable regulation.

Certain kinds of weapons, like the slightly modified combat rifles used in California, and certain kinds of ammunition, must be outlawed for civilian ownership. It is possible to define those guns in a clear and effective way and, yes, it would require Americans who own those kinds of weapons to give them up for the good of their fellow citizens.

What better time than during a presidential election to show, at long last, that our nation has retained its sense of decency?

FOR PARKLAND STUDENTS, A SURREAL JOURNEY FROM “NORMAL” TO A WORLDWIDE MARCH

By PATRICIA MAZZEI, MARCH 24, 2018

Little has returned to normal for the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School since Feb. 14, when a gunman killed 14 of their classmates and three staff members. They juggle homework with activism. They wince at loud noises. Sometimes, they sleep.

But to the huge crowds that greeted them in Washington on Saturday at a march to protest gun violence, the students were fearless celebrities.

“We’re here for you, Douglas!” a girl shrieked as five teenage boys from Stoneman Douglas and their history teacher made their way to the main stage.

“Go Douglas!” said the teacher, Greg Pittman.

As the crowd broke into applause, the boys remained stoic. They held up their poster boards—“It is a school zone, not a war zone,” read one—and looked straight ahead.

They were part of a group of 200 people from Stoneman Douglas, in Parkland, Fla., who were sponsored by Giffords, the gun control advocacy group, to come to the Washington march. An alumni group raised enough money to get more than 550 additional students to the rally, a spokeswoman for the group said. Others traveled to Washington on their own, some of them rooming with family and friends.

Despite their numbers, their steady presence in the news, their unmistakable influence on the national debate over guns, some of them were trying to be teenagers again. It hasn’t been easy.

The five boys did not organize the event on Saturday, called the March for Our Lives. They did not lose a relative in the shooting. They were not injured.

But their coach, Aaron Feis, was killed. Their school was forever changed. And now, they were in the nation’s capital, feeling hundreds of eyes on them as they walked down Constitution Avenue.

“There’s a lot of emotion,” said one, Adrian Kauffman, 16.

The five boys, all sophomores, refrained from endorsing a specific policy proposal or calling out politicians they dislike. They arrived to show strength in numbers, “so nothing like this happens again,” said Adam Hostig, 15.

“Most teenagers talk about drama about girlfriends and boyfriends,” said Zach Cooper, 16. “And we’re talking about bomb threats and guns.”

Parkland protestors were joined by thousands of student marchers in Washington, D.C., shown here, and thousands more around the country, for the March for Our Lives, March 24, 2018.

“Nonstop,” Adam said.

A police helicopter hovered overhead. Adam’s eyes darted up suspiciously.

“Even coming to an event like this, it’s scary,” Zach said.

None of them paid much attention to the politics of guns before the shooting, they admitted. “We got more informed,” said Evan Kuperman, 16.

The march will make it “feel like the people who died did not die in vain,” added Josh Funk, 16.

Amid their newfound activism, they have tried to return to lives that resemble those they had before their high school turned into a mass-murder scene.

“You get a sense of guilt trying to have fun,” Josh said. “But at the same time, you just want to be with friends and family all the time. To never miss a moment.”

In Washington this week, the Florida visitors sponsored by Giffords went to museums and shared late-night ice cream sundaes in a hotel ballroom with foosball tables and a Pac-Man machine. But they also roved the hallways of the Capitol, meeting with lawmakers and lobbying for action on gun violence. The House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, dropped in on their hotel. Some of them met former Vice President Joe Biden.

“I’ve gotten about nine hours of sleep in four days,” Aly Sheehy, an 18-year-old senior, said near midnight on Friday. “But being around other people that understand what I’ve gone through just recharges me.”

“On Sunday, we’ll all be exhausted,” she added. “But then we’ll go back. For something this important, I’ll make the time.”

“They definitely think we’re going to go away,” Jose Iglesias, a 17-year-old senior, said of politicians and skeptical adults. “We know what we’re doing. We have tactics. They think we’re just children.”

The students knew that interest in their cause might fade outside their own schools. They knew that for the grown-ups, the march, which was organized in a little more than a month, might seem like the culmination of their efforts. “It’s just the beginning,” Jose said.

On Saturday morning, he awoke early. “In my sleep, I called 911,” he said. “Really it was my alarm that kept going off.”

“I have flashbacks of running into a classroom,” said Sarah Pierre, 17, a senior.

“We know what we’re doing. We have tactics. They think we’re just children.”

Over breakfast, students made last-minute signs with Crayola markers. Natasha Martinez, a 17-year-old junior, got on FaceTime with her mother, who was attending the march back home in Parkland. Her mother worried that Natasha was underdressed for the Washington cold. “I’m wearing the thermal, a turtleneck, this hoodie I bought, and a coat,” Natasha insisted.

A friend sitting next to her, Isabel Chequer, a 16-year-old junior, waved at Natasha’s mother. “She has a special pass,” Natasha said, pointing at Isabel’s neck. “Injured club!” said Isabel, who was twice grazed during the shooting. She was one of 17 people hurt.

Isabel fears the shooting will make it impossible for her to watch action movies anymore, despite her interest in film. “I feel like I can’t see those movies again, like Black Panther or Annihilation, which makes me really sad, because I love movies so much,” she said. “It’s taken a little bit from myself.”

“I feel weird doing normal things,” her schoolmate Aly said.

Throngs of marchers soon took to the streets downtown. Students from Stoneman Douglas and other schools delivered speeches, some choked with emotion as they described living with violent memories, survivor’s guilt and the ever-present shadow of fear.

Samantha Fuentes, an 18-year-old senior who was shot in both legs during the shooting, went on stage to read a poem. Halfway through it, she appeared to get nervous and quickly ducked behind the podium. She stood back up as people rushed from backstage to help her. “I just threw up on international television, and it feels great,” she said with a laugh, before reading the rest of her poem.

It ended: “Will you give up? Or is enough enough?”

When the speeches—along with performances by Ariana Grande, Miley Cyrus and others—were finished, and the crowds began to disperse, the Stoneman Douglas students became tourists again, albeit ones who had moved thousands.

Amanda Lee, a 17-year-old junior who had been in one of the classrooms where shots were fired, left the rally with other students, pausing to snap pictures of the cherry blossoms that had started to bloom along the street.

Amanda said she had expected more of an actual march than speeches and a concert. But the magnitude of what they had accomplished in less than two months, she said, hit when she saw images of protests across the country and around the world.

“It sinks in,” she said. “And then you feel that you’ve done the impossible.”

NOTE: The murders in Parkland are just one example of the spreading epidemic of mass shootings by gunmen in American schools, workplaces, and public spaces. The attack was remarkable for the way it drove young people to engage in political protest, agitation, and activity in numbers not seen in the country for decades. But the implacable opposition of the gun lobby to any reform of firearm laws continues to block congressional action, and no real progress had been made as of this writing.

LGBTQ RIGHTS

THE SUPREME COURT: HOMOSEXUAL RIGHTS; JUSTICES, 6 TO 3, LEGALIZE GAY SEXUAL CONDUCT IN SWEEPING REVERSAL OF COURT’S ’86 RULING

By LINDA GREENHOUSE, JUNE 27, 2003

The Supreme Court issued a sweeping declaration of constitutional liberty for gay men and lesbians today, overruling a Texas sodomy law in the broadest possible terms and effectively apologizing for a contrary 1986 decision that the majority said “demeans the lives of homosexual persons.” The vote was 6 to 3.

Gays are “entitled to respect for their private lives,” Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said for the court. “The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime.”

Justice Kennedy said further that “adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons.”

While the result had been widely anticipated since the court agreed in December to hear an appeal brought by two Houston men who were prosecuted for having sex in their home, few people on either side of the case expected a decision of such scope from a court that only 17 years ago, in Bowers v. Hardwick, had dismissed the same constitutional argument as “facetious.” The court overturned that precedent today.

In a scathing dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia accused the court of having “taken sides in the culture war” and having “largely signed on to the so-called homosexual agenda.” He said that the decision “effectively decrees the end of all morals legislation” and made same-sex marriage, which the majority opinion did not discuss, a logical if not inevitable next step. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist and Justice Clarence Thomas signed Justice Scalia’s dissent.

While some gay rights lawyers said that there were still abundant legal obstacles to establishing a right either to gay marriage or to military service by gay soldiers, there was no doubt that the decision had profound legal and political implications. A conservative Supreme Court has now identified the gay rights cause as a basic civil rights issue.

Ruth Harlow, legal director of the Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund and the lead counsel for the two men, John G. Lawrence and Tyron Garner, called the decision “historic and transformative.” Suzanne Goldberg, a professor at Rutgers Law School who had represented the men in the Texas courts, said that the decision would affect “every kind of case” involving gay people, including employment, child custody and visitation, and adoption.

“It removes the reflexive assumption of gay people’s inferiority,” Professor Goldberg said. “Bowers took away the humanity of gay people, and this decision gives it back.”

The vote to overturn Bowers v. Hardwick was 5 to 4, with Justice Kennedy joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.

“Bowers was not correct when it wasdecided, and it is not correct today,” Justice Kennedy said. “Its continuance as precedent demeans the lives of homosexual persons.”

Darren Nimnicht (left); his partner, Tom Cicero (right); and members of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and the NYC Gay & Lesbian Anti-Violence Project celebrate the Supreme Court decision to strike down sodomy laws. Sheridan Square, New York City, June 26, 2003.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, who was part of the 5-to-4 majority in Bowers v. Hardwick, did not join Justice Kennedy in overruling it. But she provided the sixth vote for overturning the Texas sodomy law in a forcefully written separate opinion that attacked the law on equal protection grounds because it made “deviate sexual intercourse”—oral or anal sex—a crime only between same-sex couples and not for heterosexuals.

“A law branding one class of persons as criminal solely based on the state’s moral disapproval of that class and the conduct association with that class runs contrary to the values of the Constitution and the Equal Protection Clause,” Justice O’Connor said.

Texas was one of only four states—Kansas, Oklahoma and Missouri are the others—to apply a criminal sodomy law exclusively to same-sex partners. An additional nine states—Alabama, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Utah and Virginia—have criminal sodomy laws on their books that in theory, if not in practice, apply to opposite-sex couples as well. As a result of the majority’s broad declaration today that the government cannot make this kind of private sexual choice a crime, all those laws are now invalid.

Twenty-five states had such laws at the time the court decided Bowers v. Hardwick. The Georgia sodomy law the court upheld in that case was overturned by a state court ruling in 1998. Some of the other state laws have been repealed and others invalidated by state courts.

In the Texas case, Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Garner were discovered by the Houston police while having sex in Mr. Lawrence’s apartment. The police entered through an unlocked door after receiving a report from a neighbor of a “weapons disturbance” in the apartment. The neighbor was later convicted of filing a false report.

The men were held in jail overnight. They later pleaded no contest, preserving their right to appeal, and were each fined $200. The Texas state courts rejected their constitutional challenge to the law.

Asked today for the Bush administration’s reaction to the ruling, Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, noted that the administration had not filed a brief in the case. “And now this is a state matter,” he said. In fact, the decision today, Lawrence v. Texas, No. 02-102, took what had been a state-by-state matter and pronounced a binding national constitutional principle.

The delicacy of the moment for the White House was apparent. Groups representing the socially conservative side of the Republican Party reacted to the decision with alarm and fury. On the other hand, important Libertarian groups had supported the challenge to the Texas law. Justice Thomas, who is often in sympathy with Libertarian arguments, wrote a brief separate dissenting opinion today with a nod in that direction.

He said he would vote to repeal the law if he were a member of the Texas Legislature. “Punishing someone for expressing his sexual preference through noncommercial consensual conduct with another adult does not appear to be a worthy way to expend valuable law enforcement resources,” Justice Thomas said, but added that he could not overturn the law as a judge because he did not see a constitutional basis for doing so.

Charles Francis, cochairman of the Republican Unity Coalition, a group of gay and heterosexual Republicans seeking to defuse the issue within the party, said today, “I hope the giant middle of our party can look at this decision not as a threat but as a breakthrough for human understanding.” The group includes prominent Republicans like former president Gerald R. Ford, David Rockefeller and Alan K. Simpson, the former senator from Wyoming, who is its honorary chairman. No member of the Bush administration has joined the group, Mr. Francis said.

As the court concluded its term today, the absence of any sign of a retirement meant that the issue was not likely to surface in judicial politics anytime soon. There was a tense and ultimately humorous moment in the courtroom this morning when, after the announcements of decisions, Chief Justice Rehnquist brought the term to a close with his customary words of thanks to the court staff.

“The court today notes the retirement,” he then said drily as those in the audience caught their breath, “of librarian Shelley Dowling.” A collective sigh and audible chuckles followed as the marshal, Pamela Talkin, banged her gavel and the nine justices left the bench, all of them evidently planning to return when the court meets on Sept. 8 for arguments in the campaign finance case.

Earlier, as Justice Kennedy was reading excerpts from his decision, the mood in the courtroom went from enormous tension and then—on the part of the numerous gay and lesbian lawyers seated in the bar section—to visible relief. By the time he referred to the dignity and respect to which he said gays were entitled, several were weeping, silently but openly.

The majority opinion was notable in many respects: its critical dissection of a recent precedent; its use of a decision by the European Court of Human Rights, supporting gay rights, to show that the court under Bowers v. Hardwick was out of step with other Western countries; and its many citations to the court’s privacy precedents, including the abortion rights cases.

The citations to Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood v. Casey appeared particularly to inflame Justice Scalia. If Bowers v. Hardwick merited overruling, he said, so too did Roe v. Wade. He also said that laws against bigamy, adultery, prostitution, bestiality and obscenity were now susceptible to challenges. The majority opinion did not precisely respond to that prediction, noting instead that the right claimed by Mr. Lawrence and Mr. Garner did not involve prostitution, public behavior, coercion or minors.

The fundamental debate on the court was over the meaning of the Constitution’s due process guarantee, which Justice Kennedy said was sufficiently expansive so that “persons in every generation can invoke its principles in their own search for greater freedom.”

SENATE REPEALS BAN AGAINST OPENLY GAY MILITARY PERSONNEL

By CARL HULSE, DECEMBER 18, 2010

The Senate on Saturday struck down the ban on gay men and lesbians serving openly in the military, bringing to a close a 17-year struggle over a policy that forced thousands of Americans from the ranks and caused others to keep secret their sexual orientation.

By a vote of 65 to 31, with 8 Republicans joining Democrats, the Senate approved and sent to President Obama a repeal of the Clinton-era law, known as “don’t ask, don’t tell,” a policy critics said amounted to government-sanctioned discrimination that treated gay and lesbian troops as second-class citizens.

Mr. Obama hailed the action, which fulfills his pledge to reverse the ban. “As commander in chief, I am also absolutely convinced that making this change will only underscore the professionalism of our troops as the best-led and best-trained fighting force the world has ever known,” Mr. Obama said in a statement after the Senate, on a 63 to 33 vote, beat back Republican efforts to block a final vote on the repeal bill.

The vote marked a historic moment that some equated with the end of racial segregation in the military.

It followed a comprehensive review by the Pentagon that found a low risk to military effectiveness despite greater concerns among some combat units and the Marine Corps. The review also found that Pentagon officials supported Congressional repeal as a better alternative than a court-ordered end. Supporters of the repeal said it was long past time to end what they saw as an ill-advised practice that cost valuable personnel and forced troops to lie to serve their country.

“We righted a wrong,” said Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, the independent from Connecticut who led the effort to end the ban. “Today we’ve done justice.”

Before voting on the repeal, the Senate blocked a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for certain illegal immigrants who came to the United States at a young age, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements including passing a criminal background check.

The 55 to 41 vote in favor of the citizenship bill was 5 votes short of the number needed to clear the way for final passage of what is known as the Dream Act. The outcome effectively kills it for this year, and its fate beyond that is uncertain since Republicans who will assume control of the House in January oppose the measure and are unlikely to bring it to a vote.

The Senate then moved on to the military legislation, engaging in an emotional back and forth over the merits of the measure as advocates for repeal watched from galleries crowded with people interested in the fate of both the military and immigration measures. “I don’t care who you love,” Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, said as the debate opened. “If you love this country enough to risk your life for it, you shouldn’t have to hide who you are.”

Mr. Wyden showed up for the Senate vote despite saying earlier that he would be unable to do so because he would be undergoing final tests before his scheduled surgery for prostate cancer on Monday.

The vote came in the final days of the 111th Congress as Democrats sought to force through a final few priorities before they turn over control of the House of Representatives to the Republicans in January and see their clout in the Senate diminished.

It represented a significant victory for the White House, Congressional advocates of lifting the ban and activists who have pushed for years to end the Pentagon policy created in 1993 under the Clinton administration as a compromise effort to end the practice of banning gay men and lesbians entirely from military service. Saying it represented an emotional moment for members of the gay community nationwide, activists who supported repeal of “don’t ask, don’t tell” exchanged hugs outside the Senate chamber after the vote.

Repeal will “finally end a policy which has burdened our armed services.”

“Today’s vote means gay and lesbian service members posted all around the world can stand taller knowing that ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ will soon be coming to an end,” said Aubrey Sarvis, an army veteran and executive director for Servicemembers Legal Defense Network.

The executive director of the Log Cabin Republicans, a gay group that challenged the policy in federal court, thanked Republicans senators for participating in a historic vote. The director, R. Clarke Cooper, who is a member of the army reserve, said repeal will “finally end a policy which has burdened our armed services for far too long, depriving our nation of the talent, training and hard-won battle experience of thousands of patriotic Americans.”

A federal judge had ruled the policy unconstitutional in response to the Log Cabin suit, but that decision had been stayed pending appeal.

Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center in California, a research institute at the University of California in Santa Barbara that studies issues surrounding gays and lesbians in the military, said that the vote “ushers in a new era in which the largest employer in the United States treats gays and lesbians like human beings.”

In a statement on the group’s website, Mr. Belkin said: “It has long been clear that there is no evidence that lifting the ban will undermine the military, and no reason to fear the transition to inclusive policy. Research shows that moving quickly is one of the keys to a successful transition. If the president and military leadership quickly certify the end of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell,’ they will ensure an orderly transition with minimal disruption.”

Organizations that opposed repeal of the ban assailed the Republican senators who defied their party majority.

The Center for Military Readiness, a group that specializes in social issues in the military and has opposed repeal, said the new legislation “will impose heavy, unnecessary burdens on the backs of military men and women.” It said the Senate majority voted with “needless haste” by not waiting for hearings into a recent Department of Defense study of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. Elaine Donnelly, president of the group, said that the Pentagon’s survey indicated that 32 percent of Marines and 21.4 percent of Army combat troops would leave the military sooner than planned if “don’t ask, don’t tell” were repealed.

Kris Mineau, president of the Massachusetts Family Institute, said senators like Scott Brown, a Republican from Massachusetts, “broke trust with the people” by voting on repeal before the federal budget was resolved and “have put the troops at risk during wartime.”

During the debate, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona and his party’s presidential candidate in 2008, led the opposition to the repeal and said the vote was a sad day in history. “I hope that when we pass this legislation that we will understand that we are doing great damage,” Mr. McCain said. “And we could possibly and probably, as the commandant of the Marine Corps said, and as I have been told by literally thousands of members of the military, harm the battle effectiveness vital to the survival of our young men and women in the military.”

He and other opponents of lifting the ban said the change could harm the unit cohesion that is essential to effective military operations, particularly in combat, and deter some Americans from enlisting or pursuing a career in the military. They noted that despite support for repealing the ban from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, other military commanders have warned that changing the practice would prove disruptive.

“This isn’t broke,” Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma, said about the policy. “It is working very well.”

Other Republicans said that while the policy might need to be changed at some point, Congress should not do so when American troops are fighting overseas.

“In the middle of a military conflict, is not the time to do it,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss, Republican of Georgia.

Only a week ago, the effort to repeal the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy seemed to be dead and in danger of fading for at least two years with Republicans about to take control of the House. The provision eliminating the ban was initially included in a broader Pentagon policy bill, and Republican backers of repeal had refused to join in cutting off a filibuster against the underlying bill because of objections over the ability to debate the measure.

In a last-ditch effort, Mr. Lieberman and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, a key Republican opponent of the ban, encouraged Democratic Congressional leaders to instead pursue a vote on simply repealing it. The House passed the measure earlier in the week.

The repeal will not take effect for at least 60 days while some other procedural steps are taken. In addition, the bill requires the defense secretary to determine that policies are in place to carry out the repeal “consistent with military standards for readiness, effectiveness, unit cohesion, and recruiting and retention.”

Because of the uncertainty, Mr. Sarvis appealed to Mr. Gates to suspend any investigations into military personnel or discharge proceedings under the policy to be overturned in the coming months.

Mr. Lieberman said the ban undermined the integrity of the military by forcing troops to lie. He said 14,000 members of the armed forces had been forced to leave the ranks under the policy.

“What a waste,” he said.

NOTE: It took longer for the Pentagon to lift its discriminatory ban on transgender Americans serving in uniform (announced June 2016) once Donald Trump tried and failed to reverse the move—although transgender people who have tried to enlist continue to experience delays and obstacles in the acceptance of their applications.

G.O.P. HOPEFULS DENOUNCE MARRIAGE-EQUALITY RULING

By JEREMY W. PETERS, JUNE 26, 2015

Across the country, among people of all ages and religions, the acceptance of same-sex marriage has grown with stunning speed. But not in the leadership of the Republican Party.

There is a striking unanimity among the candidates who are running for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016: Not one supports allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry. And after the Supreme Court ruled on Friday that the Constitution guarantees a right to marriage for all couples, regardless of their sexual orientation, the degree of difference among the candidates was largely a matter of how aggressively they would continue to resist.

Many pledged to fight on, using language that was both biblical and bellicose, framing the debate over marriage rights as a choice between surrender and retreat, between the divine and the profane. Others vowed to keep the debate alive in a more measured and indirect way, by advocating for the rights of Christians and others who worry the ruling could force them to violate their religious beliefs.

But either way, the clash over same-sex marriage seems likely to smolder well into the 2016 primary season, despite the hopes of many less hard-line Republicans that a Supreme Court decision would allow the party finally to move past one of the most divisive aspects of the culture wars.

Stacey Allen and Sean Allen celebrate their wedding in Cincinnati, the day the Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage, June 26, 2015.

Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, said that while he was certain that “some cowardly politicians will wave the white flag,” he was determined not to bow to a decision he saw as illegitimate. “I will not acquiesce to an imperial court,” he said Friday.

Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said he would push for a constitutional amendment that would allow states to continue prohibiting same-sex marriage. “No one wants to live in a country where the government coerces people to act in opposition to their conscience,” he said. “We will continue to fight for the freedoms of all Americans.”

Others tried to shift the debate to the safer terrain of religious tolerance.

Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, was brief and more tempered. In a statement that ran just 82 words, he said that while he believed the court had erred, he urged respect for all couples, “including those making lifetime commitments.” He then said it was crucial “to protect religious freedom and the right of conscience and also not discriminate.”

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida also criticized the decision but added, “We live in a republic and must abide by the law.” The next president, he said, must focus on protecting “the First Amendment rights of religious institutions and millions of Americans whose faiths hold a traditional view of marriage.” (Mr. Bush and Mr. Rubio, unlike Mr. Walker, have said they do not support a constitutional amendment to reverse the court’s ruling.)

The varied reactions reflected the priorities of the Republicans seeking the presidency. Some, like Mr. Bush, are eyeing a general election in which hostility to same-sex marriage could present difficulties in winning competitive states. Others, like Mr. Huckabee, Mr. Walker and Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana—who said Friday that marriage was ordained by God “and no earthly court can alter that”—are focused on winning over social conservatives in early nominating states like Iowa and South Carolina. A few, like Mr. Rubio, seem equally mindful of both.

Overheated language on gay rights may rally a socially conservative base whose confidence deflated as one court after another, then finally the highest court, declared that banning same-sex marriage was unconstitutional. But it also ignores a reality on the ground in the states where the presidential contest will take shape next year.

Same-sex marriage has been legal in both Iowa and New Hampshire, which hold the first two nominating contests, since 2009. Yet resistance movements, to the extent that there ever were serious ones, have had no success. And many conservatives appear to have moved on.

“It’s not an issue anymore because we’ve evolved,” said John Reagan, a Republican state senator in New Hampshire.

“We saw nothing happened,” he added. “Our lives didn’t get worse. And we began to see people we knew in that situation and it made it more acceptable.”

With public opinion moving so unambiguously away from support for restricting marriage to heterosexual couples, the Republican National Committee has acknowledged that the party stands to continue to lose favor with voters, especially younger people who are overwhelmingly in favor of same-sex marriage. Its 2012 postelection assessment warned that if Republicans appear intolerant on gay rights, “voters will continue to tune us out.”

Yet acceptance of same-sex marriage inside the party continues to be outside the norm. The official party platform states that marriage between a man and a woman “must be upheld as the national standard, a goal to stand for, encourage and promote.”

There are no members of the senior Republican leadership in Congress who publicly support same-sex marriage. There is not a single openly gay or lesbian Republican lawmaker in the House or the Senate. Just one Republican governor, Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, signed a brief urging the Supreme Court to overturn laws banning same-sex marriage.

“I would have expected there to be at least one candidate who’s in favor,” said Mary Cheney, a daughter of former vice president Dick Cheney, who is a lesbian and has pushed Republicans to be more inclusive on gay rights. “At this point, I’m not really sure it’s an act of bravery to support marriage equality. The horse has already left the barn.”

Absent a surprise change of heart by one of the Republicans, the Democrats will look to use same-sex marriage to their advantage. Democrats see the issue as one that allows them to hold up their nominee as empathetic and compassionate, while portraying the Republican as retrogressive and out of touch. Hillary Rodham Clinton hinted at the party’s line of attack on Friday when she said, “As love and joy flood our streets today, it is hard to imagine how anyone could deny the full protection of our laws to any of our fellow Americans—but there are those who would.”

Many Republican strategists privately say they believe 2016 will be the last year their nominee can get away with not supporting gay marriage rights. The key question, they say, is whether by 2020 the damage to the party will already be done.

“It may be a fatal problem for them as the generation turns,” said Charles Francis, who served as chairman of the Republican Unity Coalition, an alliance of gay and straight Republicans that worked with the administration of President George W. Bush. But after Mr. Bush decided in 2004 to support a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Mr. Francis resigned.

“Republicans have had a few opportunities, a few exit ramps,” Mr. Francis said, “and they’ve steadfastly failed.”

WOMEN’S RIGHTS

ANOTHER AMENDMENT RATIFIED

AUGUST 19, 1920

There is still a bare possibility that the Tennessee legislature may reconsider its ratification of the suffrage amendment. It is probable, too, that the legality of its action—the Constitution of the state distinctly forbidding ratification in the way followed—will be challenged in the courts. But there is no doubt that its vote of yesterday will be almost universally taken as ending the long struggle for woman suffrage in this country. In the main, the result will be accepted in good American fashion. The minority will submit to what it does not like and has fought, and will try to make the best of it. What has now come about has long been felt, even by opponents of woman suffrage, to be certain, to be achieved in time. Already 16 of the 48 states had granted the full rights of voters to women. In addition, 24 states had by law given to women presidential suffrage. A movement gathering such momentum was bound to succeed in time.

Governor Edwin P. Morrow of Kentucky, surrounded by a group of women wearing “Votes for Women” sashes, signs the 19th Amendment, January 6, 1920. Kentucky was the 24th state to ratify.

It cannot be said that the Tennessee Legislature decided the question on its merits. The members were not swayed by suffrage arguments pure and simple. The contest became a competition between parties. Tremendous pressure from the outside was brought to bear upon the luckless legislature, and it was pressure of a partisan sort. President Wilson and Governor Cox made appeals in the name of the Democratic Party; Senator Harding and Chairman Hays sent messages to the Republican members of the legislature. It certainly is a tribute to the shrewdness of the women managing the campaign that they were able thus to induce the two parties to bid against each other for the honor—or partisan advantage—of having settled the suffrage question. And there was the adroit allurement dangled before Tennessee to become “the 36th state “and win all the glory of passing the suffrage amendment. Strictly speaking, of course, Tennessee’s decision was no more vital than the ratification by the first states, Wisconsin and Michigan, which acted more than a year ago. But the clever lady politicians made use of this and every other weapon upon which they could lay their hands and showed that they, at least, are not innocent of the wiles of politics. Veteran male political manipulators will take off their hats to them, in both admiration and envy.

There will naturally be an outburst of jubilation by suffragists over their hard-won victory. But that mood ought not to be lasting or dominant. It is a great experiment upon which the nation is entering. Its difficulties and dangers should be uppermost in the thoughts of serious-minded citizens of either sex. In winning over the country to woman suffrage a concrete state of facts has probably had more influence than abstract arguments about the inalienable rights of the individual, or about the nature of a democracy. We had a large and growing body of citizens who were dissatisfied with their political conditions. And in a democratic government it is expedient to eliminate such dissatisfaction, if it can be done without violating any vital principle. That, it would seem, has been the chief moving cause in bringing America round to the idea of woman suffrage. But discontent does not necessarily become intelligent by the act of being enfranchised, and the new political privileges now bestowed upon women carry with them the gravest responsibilities. It is no longer a question of sex, but of country and the common weal. And Americans, whatever their doubts and fears in all this matter have been, will hope that the new voters may blend easily in the already great electorate. For a time, our elections will be made more dubious and cumbrous, as they certainly will be more costly. But we do not doubt that the cheerful and indomitable American spirit will apply itself to making our institutions “work” as Gladstone phrased it, even under novel and arduous and what may almost seem revolutionary conditions.

SENATORS BAR WEAKENING OF EQUAL RIGHTS PROPOSAL

By EILEEN SHANAHAN, MARCH 22, 1972

The Senate, by unexpectedly large margins, defeated today attempts to dilute a constitutional amendment that would bar all legal forms of discrimination based on sex.

The key vote came on a proposal by Senator Sam J. Ervin Jr., Democrat of North Carolina, to permit continued exemption of women from the draft. It was defeated, 73 to 18. Other proposals failed by similar margins.

Ratification by three-quarters, or 38, of the states will be the next step if, as expected, the Senate passes the amendment tomor-row in a version identical with the one passed by the House last year.

The president’s signature is not required on a constitutional amendment. President Nixon, however, was believed to have contributed to the lopsidedness of today’s votes. Breaking an official silence of years on the subject, he endorsed the amendment over the weekend in a letter to Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania, the Republican floor leader.

The debate over exempting women from the draft was the most serious and prolonged of the day.

Despite the margins by which he was defeated today on all three of his proposed changes in the amendment, Senator Ervin served notice that he would propose more changes tomorrow.

It was not clear whether he hoped to win approval of one of his changes or possibly to delay a final vote until there were enough absentees to block passage of the amendment, which requires a two-thirds margin.

The two other changes that were voted on today would have barred women from assignment to combat units of the armed forces and would have kept on the statute books all laws “which extend protections or exemptions to women.”

The latter proposal is regarded by feminist groups as a virtual nullification of the equal rights amendment. It was rejected, 75 to 11. The vote on the combat proposal was 71 to 18.

The debate over exempting women from the draft was the most serious and prolonged of the day. No significant challenge was made to Senator Ervin’s argument that, once the amendment as in effect, women would have to be drafted if men were. Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, the chairman of the constitutional amendments subcommittee who is the chief sponsor of the amendment, conceded that the draft issue “is one of the most difficult with which to deal.”

But he argued that, at present levels of draft calls, fewer than 10 percent of the men in the draft pool are inducted and that the proportion of women would probably be even smaller. That would be the case, he said, because “sex-neutral” physical standards for draftees might exclude more women than men.

Women in Combat

Out of the present relatively small group of draftees, only 15 percent are assigned to combat, Senator Bayh argued. Woman draftees could be sent into combat if they met all the qualifications, he continued, but he said he felt their proportion would be even smaller.

Senator Bayh also argued that many women were serving in dangerous areas now.

“Ask a nurse in a hospital in Danang whether she is in combat zone,” he challenged.

If the time comes when larger numbers of draftees are needed than at present, he said, “I think most American women would say, ‘Count me in if my country needs me.’”

Senator Bayh also argued that being drafted was “not all a minus.” He pointed to educational and other benefits that veterans get and said the amendment would help more women become eligible for these benefits by putting an end to higher requirements for women volunteers for the armed forces than for men. For example, women are usually required to be high school graduates, and men are not.

Senator Ervin spoke of the hardships, dangers and horrors that women would face if they were drafted and sent into combat. He pleaded with the Senate not to pass the amendment without his provision “for the sake of gratifying the demands of a few business and professional women who think God made a serious mistake when He created two sexes instead of one.”

PENTAGON IS SET TO LIFT COMBAT BAN FOR WOMEN

By ELISABETH BUMILLER AND THOM SHANKER, JANUARY 23, 2013

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta is lifting the military’s official ban on women in combat, which will open up hundreds of thousands of additional front-line jobs to them, senior defense officials said Wednesday.

The groundbreaking decision overturns a 1994 Pentagon rule that restricts women from artillery, armor, infantry and other such combat roles, even though in reality women have frequently found themselves in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan; according to the Pentagon, hundreds of thousands of women have deployed in those conflicts. As of last year, more than 800 women had been wounded in the two wars and more than 130 had died.

Defense officials offered few details about Mr. Panetta’s decision but described it as the beginning of a process to allow the branches of the military to put the change into effect. Defense officials said Mr. Panetta had made the decision on the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

U.S. Marine Captain Emily Naslund, who commanded the Female Engagement Teams (F.E.T.s) throughout Helmand Province, aiming her weapon after shots were fired on the patrol of the FETs attached to the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment, in Southern Marja, Afghanistan, September 15, 2010.

Women have long chafed under the combat restrictions and have increasingly pressured the Pentagon to catch up with the reality on the battlefield. The move comes as Mr. Panetta is about to step down from his post and would leave him with a major legacy after only 18 months in the job.

The decision clearly fits into the broad and ambitious liberal agenda, especially around matters of equal opportunity, that President Obama laid out this week in his inaugural address. But while it had to have been approved by him, and does not require action by Congress, it appeared Wednesday that it was in large part driven by the military itself. Some midlevel White House staff members were caught by surprise by the decision, indicating that it had not gone through an extensive review there.

“The time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women.”

Mr. Panetta’s decision came after he received a Jan. 9 letter from Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who stated in strong terms that the armed service chiefs all agreed that “the time has come to rescind the direct combat exclusion rule for women and to eliminate all unnecessary gender-based barriers to service.”

A military official said the change would be implemented “as quickly as possible,” although the Pentagon is allowing three years, until January 2016, for final decisions from the services.

Each branch of the military will have to come up with an implementation plan in the next several months, the official said. If a branch of the military decides that a specific job should not be opened to a woman, representatives of that branch will have to ask the defense secretary for an exception.

“To implement these initiatives successfully and without sacrificing our war-fighting capability or the trust of the American people, we will need time to get it right,” General Dempsey wrote.

It will be carried out during what the administration describes as the end of the American combat role in Afghanistan, the nation’s longest war.

A copy of General Dempsey’s letter was provided by a Pentagon official under the condition of anonymity. The letter noted that this action was meant to ensure that women as well as men “are given the opportunity to succeed.”

It was unclear why the joint chiefs acted now after examining the issue for years, although in recent months there has been building pressure from high-profile lawsuits.

In November 2012 the American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit challenging the ban on behalf of four service women and the Service Women’s Action Network, a group that works for equality in the military. The A.C.L.U. said that one of the plaintiffs, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar, an Air National Guard helicopter pilot, was shot down, returned fire and was wounded while on the ground in Afghanistan, but could not seek combat leadership positions because the Defense Department did not officially acknowledge her experience as combat.

In the military, serving in combat positions like the infantry remains crucial to career advancement. Women have long said that by not recognizing their real service, the military has unfairly held them back.

The A.C.L.U. embraced Mr. Panetta’s decision with cautious optimism. Ariela Migdal, an attorney with the A.C.L.U.’s Women’s Rights Project, said in a statement that the organization was “thrilled” by the decision, but added that she hoped it would be implemented “fairly and quickly.”

By law Mr. Panetta is able to lift the ban as a regulatory decision, although he must give Congress a 30-day notice of his intent. Congress does not need to approve the decision before it goes into effect. If Congress disagrees with the action, members would have to pass new legislation prohibiting the change, which appeared highly unlikely.

Although in the past some Republican members of the House have balked at allowing women in combat, on Wednesday there appeared to be bipartisan endorsement for the decision, which was first reported by the Associated Press and CNN in midafternoon.

“It reflects the reality of 21st-century military operations,” Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.

Senator Patty Murray, Democrat of Washington and the chairwoman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, called it a “historic step for recognizing the role women have, and will continue to play, in the defense of our nation.”

Senator Kelly Ayotte, a New Hampshire Republican and a member of the Armed Services Committee, said in a statement that she was pleased by the decision and said that it “reflects the increasing role that female service members play in securing our country.”

Representative Loretta Sanchez, the California Democrat who has long pressed to have women’s role in combat recognized, said that she was pleased that Mr. Panetta was removing what she called “the archaic combat exclusion policy.”

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, a New York Democrat who has pushed for lifting the ban, called it “a proud day for our country” and an important step in recognizing “the brave women who are already fighting and dying.”

But the leadership of a conservative Christian group, the Family Research Council, immediately weighed in with its opposition, sending out a statement from Jerry Boykin, a retired three-star general with a long career in Special Operations Forces.

General Boykin said that “the people making this decision are doing so as part of another social experiment.” He especially criticized the concept of placing women into special forces units where “living conditions are primal in many situations with no privacy for personal hygiene or normal functions.” It remains unclear if women will be permitted to fight in special forces and other commando units.

Public opinion polls show that Americans generally agree with lifting the ban. A nationwide Quinnipiac University poll conducted a year ago found that three-quarters of voters surveyed favored allowing military women to serve in units that engaged in close combat, if the women wanted to.

Policy experts who have pushed the military to lift the ban said that it was striking that much of the impetus appeared to come from joint chiefs, indicating that the top military leadership saw that the time had come to open up to women.

“It’s significant that the change came from the uniformed side, rather than being forced on the uniformed side by the civilian leadership,” said Greg Jacob, the policy director of the Service Women’s Action Network.

Under current rules, a number of military positions are closed to women—and to open them, the services have to change the rules. Under Mr. Panetta’s new initiative, the situation is the opposite: Those combat positions would be open to women, and they could only be closed through specific action.

Capt. Emily Naslund, a marine officer who saw ground combat in Afghanistan in 2010, said Wednesday that she embraced the decision. “This is awesome,” she said.

NATIONAL GUIDELINES SET BY 7-TO-2 VOTE

By WARREN WEAVER JR., JANUARY 23, 1973

The Supreme Court overruled today all state laws that prohibit or restrict a woman’s right to obtain an abortion during her first three months of pregnancy. The vote was 7 to 2.

In a historic resolution of fiercely controversial issue, the court drafted a new set of national guidelines that will result in broadly liberalized antiabortion laws in 46 states but will not abolish restrictions altogether.

Establishing an unusually detailed timetable for the relative legal rights of pregnant women and the states that would control their acts, the majority specified the following:

For the first three months of pregnancy the decision to have an abortion lies with the woman and her doctor, and the state’s interest in her welfare is not “compelling” enough to warrant any interference.

For the next six months of pregnancy a state may “regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health,” such as licensing and regulating the persons and facilities involved.

For the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, the period during which the fetus is judged to be capable of surviving if born, any state may prohibit abortions, if it wishes, except where they may be necessary to preserve the life or health of the mother.

Today’s action will not affect existing laws in New York, Alaska, Hawaii and Washington, where abortions are now legally available in the early months of pregnancy. But it will require rewriting of statutes in every other state.

The basic Texas case decided by the court today will invalidate strict antiabortion laws in 31 states; a second decision involving Georgia will require considerable rewriting of more liberal statutes in 15 others.

Justice Harry A. Blackmun wrote the majority opinion in which Chief Justice Warren E. Burger and Justices William O. Douglas, William J. Brennan Jr., Potter Stewart, Thurgood Marshall and Lewis F. Powell Jr. joined.

Dissenting were Justices Byron R. White and William H. Rehnquist.

Justice White, calling the decision “an exercise of raw judicial power,” wrote that “the court apparently values the convenience of the pregnant mother more than the continued existence and development of the life or potential life which she carries.”

The court’s decision was at odds with the expressed views of President Nixon. Last May, in a letter to Cardinal Cooke, he opposed “liberalized abortion policies” and spoke out for “the right to life of literally hundreds of thousands of unborn children.”

But three of the four Justices Mr. Nixon has appointed to the Supreme Court voted with the majority, with only Mr. Rehnquist dissenting.

The majority rejected the idea that a fetus becomes “person” upon conception and is thus entitled to the due process and equal protection guarantees of the Constitution. This view was pressed by opponents of liberalized abortion, including the Roman Catholic Church.

Justice Blackmun concluded that “the word ‘person,’ as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn,” although states may acquire, “at some point in time” of pregnancy, an interest in the “potential human life” that the fetus represents, to permit regulation.

It is that interest, the court said, that permits states to prohibit abortion during the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, after the fetus has developed the capacity to survive.

In both cases decided today, the plaintiffs had based their protest on an assertion that state laws limiting the availability of abortion had circumscribed rights and freedoms guaranteed them by the Constitution: due process of law, equal protection of the laws, freedom of action and a particular privacy involving a personal and family matter. In its decision on the challenge to the Georgia abortion law, the high, court majority struck down several requirements that a woman seeking to terminate her pregnancy in that state would have to meet.

A group of anti-abortion demonstrators pose beside a bank of funeral flowers delivered to the assembly at the New York State Capitol in Albany, May 5, 1972.

Decision for Doctors

Among them were a flat prohibition on abortions for out-of-state residents and requirements that hospitals be accredited by a private agency, that applicants be screened by a hospital committee and that two independent doctors certify the potential danger to the applicant’s health.

The Georgia law permitted abortions when a doctor found in “his best clinical judgment” that continued pregnancy would threaten the woman’s life or health, that the fetus would be likely to be born defective or that the pregnancy was the result of rape.

The same Supreme Court majority, with Justice Blackmun writing the opinion again, emphasized that this medical judgment should cover all relevant factors—“physical, emotional, psychological familial and the woman’s age.”

In some of the 15 states with laws similar to Georgia’s, doctors have tended to take relatively narrow view of what constituted a woman’s health in deciding whether an abortion was legally justified.

The Texas law that the court invalidated entirely was typical of the criminal statutes passed in the last half of the 19th century prohibiting all abortions except those to save a mother’s life. The Georgia law, approved in 1972 and altered by the court today, was patterned after the model penal code of the American Law Institute.

In the Texas case, Justice Blackmun wrote that the constitutional right of privacy, developed by the court in a long series of decisions, was “broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy.

He rejected, however, the argument of women’s rights groups that this right was absolute “and she is entitled to terminate her pregnancy at whatever time, in whatever way and for whatever reason she alone chooses.”

“With this we do not agree,” the justice declared.

“A state may properly assert important interests in safeguarding health in maintaining medical standards and in protecting potential life,” Mr. Blackmun observed. “At some point in pregnancy, these respective interests become sufficiently compelling to sustain regulation of the factors that govern the abortion decision.”

The majority concluded that this “compelling” state interest arose at the end of the first three months of pregnancy because of the “now established medical fact” that until then, fewer women die from abortions than from normal childbirth.

During this three-month period, the court said, a doctor can recommend an abortion to his patient “without regulation by the state” and the resulting operations can be conducted “free of interference by the state.”

The “compelling state interest” in the fetus does not arise, however, until the time of “viability,” Justice Blackmun wrote, when it has “the capability of meaningful life outside the mother’s womb.” This occurs about 10 weeks before delivery.

In reading an abbreviated version of his two opinions to the court this morning, Justice Blackmun noted that most state legislatures were in session now and would thus be able to rewrite their states’ abortion laws to conform to the court’s decision.

Both of today’s cases wound up with anonymous parties winning victories over state officials. In the Texas case, “Jane Roe,” an unmarried pregnant woman who was allowed to bring the case without further identity, was the only plaintiff after the Supreme Court disqualified a doctor and a childless couple who said that the wife’s health would be endangered by pregnancy.

In the Georgia case, the surviving plaintiff was “Mary Doe,” who, when she brought the action, was a 22-year-old married woman 11 weeks pregnant with her fourth child.

SENATE REJECTS MEASURE TO BAN ABORTION AFTER 20 WEEKS OF PREGNANCY

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG, JANUARY 29, 2018

The Senate rejected a bill on Monday to ban most abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, a largely symbolic vote aimed at forcing vulnerable Democrats to take a stand that could hurt their prospects for reelection in states won by President Trump.

By a vote of 51 to 46, the measure fell well short of the 60-vote threshold required for the Senate to break a Democratic filibuster. The outcome was not a surprise, and the vote fell mostly along party lines.

The Senate voted on a similar measure in 2015. At that time three Democrats—Senators Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Joe Manchin of West Virginia—voted in favor of it. All three are up for reelection this year in states that Mr. Trump carried, and all of them voted in favor of the measure again on Monday. Two Republicans—Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska—voted against it.

The bill, which has the strong backing of the Trump administration, is identical to one that passed the House in October and similar to legislation that has been adopted in 20 states. It would make nearly all abortions after 20 weeks illegal; anyone who performed the procedure could face a potential prison term of five years, fines or both, though exceptions could be made when the life of the mother was at risk, or in cases of rape or incest.

“You’re on the right side of history. You’re where America will be. It’s just a matter of time before we get there.”

“To those who believe in this issue, we will be back for another day,” Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and the chief sponsor of the bill, said in advance of the vote. To his colleagues who supported the measure, he said: “You’re on the right side of history. You’re where America will be. It’s just a matter of time before we get there.”

The Senate floor debate offered supporters and opponents of abortion rights an opportunity to speak expansively about Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion—and they took it.

“Forty-five years after Roe v. Wade, abortions are safer today than getting your tonsils out,” declared Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts. “A lot of women are alive today because of Roe.” She called the ban “part of a broad and sustained assault by Republican politicians on women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies.”

But Senator Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina, said it was time for the Senate to act.

“The life of the unborn is a precious life, and we as members of the United States Senate and the U.S. Congress are tasked with making sure we protect all lives in America,” Mr. Tillis said, adding, “This is just a very important, precious, helpless part of the population.”

The 20-week ban, named the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, is central to the strategy of the antiabortion movement, which is newly emboldened under Mr. Trump. The president’s election in 2016 ushered in a wave of antiabortion victories in states like Ohio, where lawmakers adopted a 20-week abortion ban in December of that year.

“Forty-five years after Roe v. Wade, abortions are safer today than getting your tonsils out.”

Abortion foes say that if enough states pass such bans, Congress will be more likely to follow. They note that it took their movement 15 years to persuade Congress to outlaw the procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion. They see the 20-week abortion ban on a similar trajectory.

“We are building momentum for eventual federal legislation,” said Mallory Quigley, a spokeswoman for Susan B. Anthony List, a group that works to elect antiabortion candidates. She added, “We want to get vulnerable Democrats who are up for reelection this year on the record once again.”

Abortion rights advocates, meanwhile, say the opponents are badly misreading the political climate. In the era of the #MeToo movement, they say, Republicans will face a backlash for supporting a bill that prevents women from taking control of their own health care decisions.

“I think they fail to recognize the context of the moment and what they’re contending with,” said Ilyse Hogue, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, an abortion rights advocacy group. “We are seeing a rising up of women, unprecedented in my lifetime, and women who recognize that the role of abortion rights is so crucially important for women’s health.”

Jennifer Duffy, who tracks Senate races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, said vulnerable Republicans—she cited Dean Heller in Nevada—might have as much to lose in voting for the measure as vulnerable Democrats had in voting against it.

“Since when’s the last time we saw a Democrat pay for what is essentially a pro-choice vote?” Ms. Duffy asked. “It’s been a long time.”

Polling by the Pew Research Center shows that backing for abortion is as high as it has been in two decades. As of 2017, 57 percent of Americans said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while 40 percent said it should be illegal in all or most cases. But the issue animates social conservatives; 71 percent of conservative Republicans said abortion should be illegal in all or most cases, the Pew poll found.

The United States is one of just seven countries—including China and North Korea—that permit elective abortion after 20 weeks, a fact that backers of the failed measure brought up repeatedly on Monday.

“The United States keeps the company of countries like China and North Korea. They deny unborn children the most basic of protections,” Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, said on the Senate floor Monday. “This, folks, is not who we are as a nation.”

Supporters of the ban cite medical studies suggesting that fetuses can feel pain at 20 weeks. But the science surrounding fetal pain is complex. In a July 2013 memo, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists wrote that “the fetus does not even have the physiological capacity to perceive pain until at least 24 weeks of gestation.”

DEMOCRATS MAKE HILLARY CLINTON A HISTORIC NOMINEE

By PATRICK HEALY AND JONATHAN MARTIN, JULY 26, 2016

The Democratic convention formally nominated Hillary Clinton for president on Tuesday, making history by choosing a woman to be the first standard-bearer of a major political party, a breakthrough underscored by a deeply personal speech by Bill Clinton calling her “the best darn change-maker I have ever known.”

At 6:39 p.m., the hall erupted in cheers and joyful tears as South Dakota cast the decisive 15 votes to put Mrs. Clinton over the threshold of 2,382 delegates required to clinch the nomination.

A sea of delegates waved multicolored signs with Mrs. Clinton’s “H” campaign logo, while others fell into hugs and several women jumped up and down with elation.

Vince Insalaco, the chairman of the Democratic Party of Arkansas, where the Clintons built their public profile over two decades, said the choice of the first female presidential nominee was a historic moment. “I’m so proud to be a Democrat tonight,” Mr. Insalaco said, “and so proud that we can call this woman one of our own.”

Hillary Clinton at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 28, 2016; she is the first female presidential nominee of a major party.

Mrs. Clinton’s primary rival, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, played a symbolic role in hopes of unifying the party behind her. After Vermont arranged to go last in the roll call, Mr. Sanders joined its delegation to roars of “Bernie, Bernie” and called on the party to rally behind Mrs. Clinton.

But it was the appearance of Mr. Clinton, shortly after 10 p.m., that stirred the crowd most, as he set out to share a more personal side of the sometimes-reserved former secretary of state.

Unspooling memories of their 45 years together, Mr. Clinton used warm and detailed anecdotes to argue that the couple’s political enemies had spent decades creating a “cartoon” of his wife that he was now determined to puncture. Mrs. Clinton is among the most unpopular presidential nominees in modern history, and the former president appealed to the audience to see through the political attacks on her.

“One is real,” Mr. Clinton said of the divergent portrayals of his wife, “the other is made up.” He recalled the affection of Mrs. Clinton’s old friends, her empathy for those in need and the praise she had won from Republicans as a senator and as secretary of state.

“You nominated the real one,” Mr. Clinton said to a long burst of applause. Seeming to realize that he had been speaking for 38 minutes, he added in classically loquacious Bill Clinton fashion, “We have to get back on schedule.”

Mr. Clinton’s testimony was so personal that he even appeared to obliquely invoke problems in the couple’s marriage. “She’ll never quit when the going gets tough,” he said. “She’ll never quit on you.”

Earlier in the evening, several dozen Sanders delegates paraded off in a coordinated demonstration against Mrs. Clinton’s nomination. Some of them said beforehand that they were attending their first Democratic convention and felt no party loyalty or compulsion to fall in line behind Mrs. Clinton, whom they described as insufficiently progressive on new banking regulations, a $15 minimum wage, a ban on fracking and other issues.

“I’m just not there yet in terms of supporting Hillary, because her words are only her words, and I don’t fully trust that she’ll act on our agenda,” said Ingrid Olson, 38, a delegate from Iowa.

The final delegate count was 2,842 for Mrs. Clinton, 1,865 for Mr. Sanders and 56 “no votes.”

The scenes in the hall, and the huge street protests that continued through Tuesday night, were more fractious than those at the party’s gathering in Denver in 2008. Back then, Mrs. Clinton, defeated for the nomination, moved to stop the roll call and nominate Barack Obama. Her gesture, aimed at soothing the bitterness of the primary fight, helped her supporters make peace with Mr. Obama and embrace his barrier-breaking candidacy.

Mr. Sanders and Mrs. Clinton had their own brutal competition this year, and their policy differences were greater than those between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama—part of why many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters are reluctant to get behind her.

Mr. Clinton’s task was clear: to humanize his wife but also energize Democrats by flattering those in the hall and villainizing Donald J. Trump, the Republican nominee.

“She never made fun of people with disabilities,” Mr. Clinton said, referring to Mr. Trump’s mocking of a disabled reporter last year. “She tried to empower them based on their abilities.”

Yet as Mr. Clinton recounted his wife’s well-chronicled professional accomplishments, he also tried to paint a portrait of a mother who is not as well known. Recounting the day they moved their daughter, Chelsea, into her freshman dorm at Stanford University, Mr. Clinton recounted how Mrs. Clinton kept looking for “one more drawer to put that liner paper in,” reluctant to say goodbye to her only child.

The speech was extraordinary in its intimacy and in Mr. Clinton’s willingness to use their much-scrutinized marriage as a testament to her character. He began by recalling how he first met his future wife in 1971 at Yale Law School—he so nervous, she full of confidence—and spent almost 15 minutes describing courting her and proposing marriage three times before she said yes. At one point, trying to play a mind game, Mr. Clinton told her that she should move to Illinois or New York and run for office rather than marry him and have other young Democrats eclipse her.

“They mean well, and they speak well, but none of them are as good as you are,” Mr. Clinton told her about their political generation. “She said: ‘Are you out of your mind? Nobody would ever vote for me.’”

The convention underwent a notable shift as the evening went on: Mr. Sanders was barely mentioned, a deliberate decision by the Clinton campaign officials who organized the lineup of speakers. Advisers said that, with Mrs. Clinton now the nominee, they wanted to focus on her character and political record, and on taking the fight to Mr. Trump, rather than continuing to nod to Mr. Sanders and his primary fight.

The crowd was subdued for much of the evening, but in the most searing part, nine African American mothers whose children were killed by gun violence or in encounters with the police took the stage to chants of “Black lives matter.” The women, who have been campaigning for Mrs. Clinton for months, described how she had sat with them privately to hear their stories and worked with them to promote gun-control measures.

One of the mothers, Lucia McBath—whose 17-year-old son, Jordan Davis, was fatally shot after playing loud music in his car in 2012—said Mrs. Clinton “isn’t afraid to say black lives matter,” a phrase Mr. Trump and other Republicans have derided by saying that all lives matter. But Ms. McBath also said Mrs. Clinton knew that Americans needed to come together to keep children safe.

“We’re going to keep building a future where police officers and communities of color work together in mutual respect,” she said.

Convention organizers, apparently seeking a balance with the mothers, invited the Pittsburgh police chief, Cameron McLay, to speak earlier in the evening. But as Chief McLay spoke of fallen officers and called for a criminal justice overhaul, many in the hall carried on their conversations.

Democrats used Tuesday to appeal to some of their traditional constituencies, but they also highlighted Mrs. Clinton’s faith. A video was played in which she asked for a prayer and then joined a prayer circle, and an image on one of the screens for part of the evening showed a group of people laying hands on her.

It was a striking, and surely not accidental, contrast to the Republican convention last week, in which appeals to the faithful were somewhat muted and Mr. Trump scarcely mentioned faith in his acceptance speech. The hosannas for Mrs. Clinton were in marked contrast to the steady stream of boos that rained down at the mention of her name on Monday. Still, the party’s divisions remained in plain sight.

Many states announced that they had split their delegates by having representatives of Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders speak separately. And it was clear that some Sanders supporters were not ready to give up. Tim Vandeveer, the chairman of the Hawaii Democratic Party, announced that Mr. Sanders had won a majority of the state’s delegates, calling him “the leader of our revolution, which shall continue.”

Later, as the convention wound down after 11 p.m., black and white images of every previous president flashed on the screen, which finally seemed to crack as a smiling Mrs. Clinton suddenly appeared by video connection.

The hall broke out in applause and shouts of excitement as Mrs. Clinton acknowledged breaking the glass ceiling.

“If there are any little girls out there who stayed up late to watch,” she said, “let me just say, I may become the first woman president, but one of you is next.”

NOTE: It was not until 2008 that the Republican Party put a woman on its presidential ticket—Sarah Palin—and until 2016 that any party nominated a woman for president, Hillary Clinton. While there were many reasons for Clinton’s defeat as a candidate, the persistent sexism in American life was an important one.

HARVEY WEINSTEIN PAID OFF SEXUAL HARASSMENT ACCUSERS FOR DECADES

By JODI KANTOR AND MEGAN TWOHEY, OCTOBER 5, 2017

Two decades ago, the Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein invited Ashley Judd to the Peninsula Beverly Hills hotel for what the young actress expected to be a business breakfast meeting. Instead, he had her sent up to his room, where he appeared in a bathrobe and asked if he could give her a massage or she could watch him shower, she recalled in an interview.

“How do I get out of the room as fast as possible without alienating Harvey Weinstein?” Ms. Judd said she remembers thinking.

In 2014, Mr. Weinstein invited Emily Nestor, who had worked just one day as a temporary employee, to the same hotel and made another offer: If she accepted his sexual advances, he would boost her career, according to accounts she provided to colleagues who sent them to Weinstein Company executives. The following year, once again at the Peninsula, a female assistant said Mr. Weinstein badgered her into giving him a massage while he was naked, leaving her “crying and very distraught,” wrote a colleague, Lauren O’Connor, in a searing memo asserting sexual harassment and other misconduct by their boss.

“There is a toxic environment for women at this company,” Ms. O’Connor said in the letter, addressed to several executives at the company run by Mr. Weinstein.

An investigation by The New York Times found previously undisclosed allegations against Mr. Weinstein stretching over nearly three decades, documented through interviews with current and former employees and film industry workers, as well as legal records, emails and internal documents from the businesses he has run, Miramax and the Weinstein Company.

During that time, after being confronted with allegations including sexual harassment and unwanted physical contact, Mr. Weinstein has reached at least eight settlements with women, according to two company officials speaking on the condition of anonymity. Among the recipients, The Times found, were a young assistant in New York in 1990, an actress in 1997, an assistant in London in 1998, an Italian model in 2015 and Ms. O’Connor shortly after, according to records and those familiar with the agreements.

In a statement to The Times on Thursday afternoon, Mr. Weinstein said: “I appreciate the way I’ve behaved with colleagues in the past has caused a lot of pain, and I sincerely apologize for it. Though I’m trying to do better, I know I have a long way to go.”

He added that he was working with therapists and planning to take a leave of absence to “deal with this issue head on.”

Lisa Bloom, a lawyer advising Mr. Weinstein, said in a statement that “he denies many of the accusations as patently false.” In comments to The Times earlier this week, Mr. Weinstein said that many claims in Ms. O’Connor’s memo were “off base” and that they had parted on good terms.

He and his representatives declined to comment on any of the settlements, including providing information about who paid them. But Mr. Weinstein said that in addressing employee concerns about workplace issues, “my motto is to keep the peace.”

Ms. Bloom, who has been advising Mr. Weinstein over the last year on gender and power dynamics, called him “an old dinosaur learning new ways.” She said she had “explained to him that due to the power difference between a major studio head like him and most others in the industry, whatever his motives, some of his words and behaviors can be perceived as inappropriate, even intimidating.”

Though Ms. O’Connor had been writing only about a two-year period, her memo echoed other women’s complaints. Mr. Weinstein required her to have casting discussions with aspiring actresses after they had private appointments in his hotel room, she said, her description matching those of other former employees. She suspected that she and other female Weinstein employees, she wrote, were being used to facilitate liaisons with “vulnerable women who hope he will get them work.”

The allegations piled up even as Mr. Weinstein helped define popular culture. He has collected six best-picture Oscars and turned out a number of touchstones, from the films Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Pulp Fiction and Good Will Hunting to the television show Project Runway. In public, he presents himself as a liberal lion, a champion of women and a winner of not just artistic but humanitarian awards.

In 2015, the year Ms. O’Connor wrote her memo, his company distributed The Hunting Ground, a documentary about campus sexual assault. A longtime Democratic donor, he hosted a fund-raiser for Hillary Clinton in his Manhattan home last year. He employed Malia Obama, the oldest daughter of former president Barack Obama, as an intern this year, and recently helped endow a faculty chair at Rutgers University in Gloria Steinem’s name. During the Sundance Film Festival in January, when Park City, Utah, held its version of nationwide women’s marches, Mr. Weinstein joined the parade.

“From the outside, it seemed golden—the Oscars, the success, the remarkable cultural impact,” said Mark Gill, former president of Miramax Los Angeles when the company was owned by Disney. “But behind the scenes, it was a mess, and this was the biggest mess of all,” he added, referring to Mr. Weinstein’s treatment of women.

Dozens of Mr. Weinstein’s former and current employees, from assistants to top executives, said they knew of inappropriate conduct while they worked for him. Only a handful said they ever confronted him.

Mr. Weinstein enforced a code of silence; employees of the Weinstein Company have contracts saying they will not criticize it or its leaders in a way that could harm its “business reputation” or “any employee’s personal reputation,” a recent document shows. And most of the women accepting payouts agreed to confidentiality clauses prohibiting them from speaking about the deals or the events that led to them.

Charles Harder, a lawyer representing Mr. Weinstein, said it was not unusual to enter into settlements to avoid lengthy and costly litigation. He added, “It’s not evidence of anything.”

At Fox News, where the conservative icons Roger E. Ailes and Bill O’Reilly were accused of harassment, women have received payouts well into the millions of dollars. But most of the women involved in the Weinstein agreements collected between roughly $80,000 and $150,000, according to people familiar with the negotiations.

In the wake of Ms. O’Connor’s 2015 memo, some Weinstein Company board members and executives, including Mr. Weinstein’s brother and longtime partner, Bob, 62, were alarmed about the allegations, according to several people who spoke on the condition of anonymity. In the end, though, board members were assured there was no need to investigate. After reaching a settlement with Mr. Weinstein, Ms. O’Connor withdrew her complaint and thanked him for the career opportunity he had given her.

“The parties made peace very quickly,” Ms. Bloom said.

Through her lawyer, Nicole Page, Ms. O’Connor declined to be interviewed. In the memo, she explained how unnerved she was by what she witnessed or encountered while a literary scout and production executive at the company. “I am just starting out in my career, and have been and remain fearful about speaking up,” Ms. O’Connor wrote. “But remaining silent is causing me great distress.”

In speaking out about her hotel episode, Ms. Judd said in a recent interview, “Women have been talking about Harvey amongst ourselves for a long time, and it’s simply beyond time to have the conversation publicly.”

A Common Narrative

Ms. Nestor, a law and business school student, accepted Mr. Weinstein’s breakfast invitation at the Peninsula because she did not want to miss an opportunity, she later told colleagues. After she arrived, he offered to help her career while boasting about a series of famous actresses he claimed to have slept with, according to accounts that colleagues compiled after hearing her story and then sent on to company executives.

Harvey Weinstein is escorted into Manhattan Criminal Court on Centre Street, New York, for his arraignment on charges of rape and sexual assault, May 25, 2018.

“She said he was very persistent and focused though she kept saying no for over an hour,” one internal document said. Ms. Nestor, who declined to comment for this article, refused his bargain, the records noted. “She was disappointed that he met with her and did not seem to be interested in her résumé or skill set.”

The young woman chose not to report the episode to human resources personnel, but the allegations came to management’s attention through other employees.

Across the years and continents, accounts of Mr. Weinstein’s conduct share a common narrative: Women reported to a hotel for what they thought were work reasons, only to discover that Mr. Weinstein, who has been married for most of three decades, sometimes seemed to have different interests. His home base was New York, but his rolling headquarters were luxury hotels: the Peninsula Beverly Hills and the Savoy in London, the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc near the Cannes Film Festival in France and the Stein Eriksen Lodge near the Sundance Film Festival.

Working for Mr. Weinstein could mean getting him out of bed in the morning and doing “turndown duty” late at night, preparing him for sleep. Like the colleague cited in Ms. O’Connor’s memo, some junior employees required to perform those tasks said they were disturbing.

In interviews, eight women described varying behavior by Mr. Weinstein: appearing nearly or fully naked in front of them, requiring them to be present while he bathed or repeatedly asking for a massage or initiating one himself.

The women, typically in their early or middle 20s and hoping to get a toehold in the film industry, said he could switch course quickly—meetings and clipboards one moment, intimate comments the next. One woman advised a peer to wear a parka when summoned for duty as a layer of protection against unwelcome advances.

Laura Madden, a former employee who said Mr. Weinstein prodded her for massages at hotels in Dublin and London beginning in 1991, said he had a way of making anyone who objected feel like an outlier. “It was so manipulative,” she said in an interview. “You constantly question yourself—am I the one who is the problem?”

NOTE: Harvey Weinstein was arrested in May 2018 and indicted on first- and third-degree rape charges. Although many women went public with accusations against him, because of the statute of limitations, as of this writing criminal charges are confined to those filed by three women. Currently Mr. Weinstein continues to deny all allegations of nonconsensual sex, and has pled not guilty.

The accounts of the women who said he threatened, intimidated, abused, and raped them spawned what is popularly known as the #MeToo movement and started to force Hollywood and other industries to confront decades of unfair and abusive treatment of women. Dozens of prominent men were suddenly called to account for behavior that had previously gone unpunished, losing their jobs and sometimes facing criminal charges. It was the biggest moment in decades in women’s battles for equal rights and legal protections, creating a political momentum that energized women’s groups and women candidates in the 2018 midterm elections. At this writing, the long-term results are still very much in doubt.

GLOBAL WARMING

HOW G.O.P. LEADERS CAME TO VIEW CLIMATE CHANGE AS FAKE SCIENCE

By CORAL DAVENPORT AND ERIC LIPTON, JUNE 3, 2017

The campaign ad appeared during the presidential contest of 2008. Rapid-fire images of belching smokestacks and melting ice sheets were followed by a soothing narrator who praised a candidate who had stood up to President George W. Bush and “sounded the alarm on global warming.”

It was not made for a Democrat, but for Senator John McCain, who had just secured the Republican nomination.

It is difficult to reconcile the Republican Party of 2008 with the party of 2017, whose leader, President Trump, has called global warming a hoax, reversed environmental policies that Mr. McCain advocated on his run for the White House, and this past week announced that he would take the nation out of the Paris climate accord, which was to bind the globe in an effort to halt the planet’s warming.

“The entire climate change debate has now been caught up in the broader polarization of American politics.”

The Republican Party’s fast journey from debating how to combat human-caused climate change to arguing that it does not exist is a story of big political money, Democratic hubris in the Obama years and a partisan chasm that grew over nine years like a crack in the Antarctic shelf, favoring extreme positions and uncompromising rhetoric over cooperation and conciliation.

“Most Republicans still do not regard climate change as a hoax,” said Whit Ayres, a Republican strategist who worked for Senator Marco Rubio’s presidential campaign. “But the entire climate change debate has now been caught up in the broader polarization of American politics.”

“In some ways,” he added, “it’s become yet another of the long list of litmus test issues that determine whether or not you’re a good Republican.”

Since Mr. McCain ran for president on climate credentials that were stronger than his opponent Barack Obama’s, the scientific evidence linking greenhouse gases from fossil fuels to the dangerous warming of the planet has grown stronger. Scientists have for the first time drawn concrete links between the planet’s warming atmosphere and changes that affect Americans’ daily lives and pocketbooks, from tidal flooding in Miami to prolonged water shortages in the Southwest to decreasing snow cover at ski resorts.

That scientific consensus was enough to pull virtually all of the major nations along. Conservative-leaning governments in Britain, France, Germany and Japan all signed on to successive climate change agreements.

Constituents were genuinely threatened by policies that would raise the cost of burning fossil fuels.

Yet when Mr. Trump pulled the United States from the Paris accord, the Senate majority leader, the speaker of the House and every member of the elected Republican leadership were united in their praise.

Those divisions did not happen by themselves. Republican lawmakers were moved along by a campaign carefully crafted by fossil fuel industry players, most notably Charles D. and David H. Koch, the Kansas-based billionaires who run a chain of refineries (which can process 600,000 barrels of crude oil per day) as well as a subsidiary that owns or operates 4,000 miles of pipelines that move crude oil.

Government rules intended to slow climate change are “making people’s lives worse rather than better,” Charles Koch explained in a rare interview last year with Fortune, arguing that despite the costs, these efforts would make “very little difference in the future on what the temperature or the weather will be.”

Republican leadership has also been dominated by lawmakers whose constituents were genuinely threatened by policies that would raise the cost of burning fossil fuels, especially coal. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, always sensitive to the coal fields in his state, rose through the ranks to become majority leader. Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming also climbed into leadership, then the chairmanship of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, as a champion of his coal state.

Mr. Trump has staffed his White House and cabinet with officials who have denied, or at least questioned, the existence of global warming. And he has adopted the Koch language, almost to the word. On Thursday, as Mr. Trump announced the United States’ withdrawal, he at once claimed that the Paris accord would cost the nation millions of jobs and that it would do next to nothing for the climate.

Beyond the White House, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the House Science Committee, held a hearing this spring aimed at debunking climate science, calling the global scientific consensus “exaggerations, personal agendas and questionable predictions.”

A small core of Republican lawmakers—most of whom are from swing districts and are at risk of losing their seats next year—are taking modest steps like introducing a nonbinding resolution in the House in March urging Congress to accept the risks presented by climate change.

But in Republican political circles, speaking out on the issue, let alone pushing climate policy, is politically dangerous. So for the most part, these moderate Republicans are biding their time, until it once again becomes safe for Republicans to talk more forcefully about climate change. The question is how long that will take.

“With 40 percent of Florida’s population at risk from sea-level rise, my state is on the front lines of climate change,” said Representative Carlos Curbelo, Republican of Florida. “South Florida residents are already beginning to feel the effects of climate change in their daily lives.”

“The Turning Point”

It was called the No Climate Tax pledge, drafted by a new group called Americans for Prosperity that was funded by the Koch brothers. Its single sentence read: “I will oppose any legislation relating to climate change that includes a net increase in government revenue.” Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, was the first member of Congress to sign it in July 2008.

The effort picked up steam the next year after the House of Representatives passed what is known as cap-and-trade legislation, a concept invented by conservative Reagan-era economists.

The idea was to create a statutory limit, or cap, on the overall amount of a certain type of pollution that could be emitted. Businesses could then buy and sell permits to pollute, choosing whether to invest more in pollution permits or in cleaner technology that would then save them money and allow them to sell their allotted permits. The administration of the first President George Bush successfully deployed the first national cap-and-trade system in 1990 to lower emissions of the pollutants that cause acid rain. Mr. McCain pushed a cap-and-trade proposal to fight climate change.

“I thought we could get it done,” recalled Henry A. Waxman, a retired House Democrat who led the cap-and-trade push in 2009. “We just had two candidates from the Republican and Democratic parties who had run for president and agreed that climate change was a real threat.”

Conservative activists saw the legislative effort as an opportunity to transform the climate debate. With the help of a small army of oil-industry-funded academics like Wei-Hock Soon of Harvard-Smithsonian and think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, they had been working to discredit academics and government climate change scientists. The lawyer and conservative activist Chris Horner, whose legal clients have included the coal industry, gathered documents through the Freedom of Information Act to try to embarrass and further undermine the climate change research. Myron Ebell, a senior fellow with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, worked behind the scenes to make sure Republican offices in Congress knew about Mr. Horner’s work—although at the time, many viewed Mr. Ebell skeptically, as an extremist pushing out-of-touch views.

They had been working to discredit academics and government climate change scientists.

In 2009, hackers broke into a climate research program at the University of East Anglia in England, then released the emails that conservatives said raised doubts about the validity of the research. In one email, a scientist talked of using a statistical “trick” in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. The research was ultimately validated, but damage was done.

As Congress moved toward actually passing climate change legislation, a fringe issue had become a part of the political mainstream.

“That was the turning point,” Mr. Horner said.

The House passed the cap-and-trade bill by seven votes, but it went nowhere in the Senate—Mr. Obama’s first major legislative defeat.

Unshackled by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision and other related rulings, which ended corporate campaign finance restrictions, Koch Industries and Americans for Prosperity started an all-fronts campaign with television advertising, social media and cross-country events aimed at electing lawmakers who would ensure that the fossil fuel industry would not have to worry about new pollution regulations.

Their first target: unseating Democratic lawmakers such as Representatives Rick Boucher and Tom Perriello of Virginia, who had voted for the House cap-and-trade bill, and replacing them with Republicans who were seen as more in step with struggling Appalachia, and who pledged never to push climate change measures.

But Americans for Prosperity also wanted to send a message to Republicans. Until 2010, some Republicans ran ads in House and Senate races showing their support for green energy.

“After that, it disappeared from Republican ads,” said Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity. “Part of that was the polling, and part of it was the visceral example of what happened to their colleagues who had done that.”

What happened was clear. Republicans who asserted support for climate change legislation or the seriousness of the climate threat saw their money dry up or, worse, a primary challenger arise. “It told Republicans that we were serious,” Mr. Phillips said, “that we would spend some serious money against them.”

By the time Election Day 2010 arrived, 165 congressional members and candidates had signed Americans for Prosperity’s No Climate Tax pledge. Most were victorious.

“The midterm election was a clear rejection of policies like the cap-and-trade energy taxes that threaten our still-fragile economy,” said James Valvo, then Americans for Prosperity’s government affairs director, in a statement issued the day after the November 2010 election. Eighty-three of the 92 new members of Congress had signed the pledge.

Even for congressional veterans, that message was not missed. Representative Fred Upton, a Michigan Republican who once called climate change “a serious problem” and cosponsored a bill to promote energy-efficient light bulbs, tacked right after the 2010 elections as he battled to be chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee against Joe Barton, a Texan who mocked human-caused climate change.

Mr. Upton deleted references to climate change from his website. “If you look, the last year was the warmest year on record, the warmest decade on record. I accept that,” he offered that fall. “I do not say that it’s man-made.”

Mr. Upton, who has received more than $2 million in campaign donations from oil and gas companies and electric utilities over the course of his career, won the chairmanship and has coasted comfortably to reelection since.

Two years later, conservative “super PACs” took aim at Senator Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a senior Republican who publicly voiced climate concerns, backed the creation of a Midwestern cap-and-trade program and drove a Prius. After six Senate terms, Mr. Lugar lost his primary to a Tea Party challenger, Richard E. Mourdock. Although Mr. Lugar says other reasons contributed, he and his opponents say his public views on climate change played a crucial role.

“In my own campaign, there were people who felt strongly enough about my views on climate change to use it to help defeat me, and other Republicans are very sensitive to that possibility,” Mr. Lugar said in an interview. “So even if they privately believe we ought to do something about it, they’re reticent, especially with the Republican president taking the views he is now taking.”

Obama Feeds the Movement

After winning reelection in 2012, Mr. Obama understood his second-term agenda would have to rely on executive authority, not legislation that would go nowhere in the Republican-majority Congress. And climate change was the great unfinished business of his first term.

To finish it, he would deploy a rarely used provision in the Clean Air Act of 1970, which gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to issue regulations on carbon dioxide.

“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” he declared in his 2013 State of the Union address.

The result was the Clean Power Plan, which would significantly cut planet-warming emissions by forcing the closing of hundreds of heavy-polluting coal-fired power plants.

The end run around Congress had consequences of its own. To Republican (and some Democratic) critics, the Clean Power Plan exemplified everything they opposed about Mr. Obama: He seemed to them imperious, heavy-handed, pleasing to the elites on the East and West Coasts and in the capitals of Europe, but callous to the blue-collar workers of coal and oil country.

“It fed into this notion of executive overreach,” said Heather Zichal, who advised Mr. Obama on climate policy. “I don’t think there was a good enough job on managing the narrative.”

Republicans who had supported the climate change agenda began to defect and have since stayed away.

“On the issue of climate change, I think it’s happening,” Mr. McCain said in a CNN podcast interview last April. But, he said, “The president decided, at least in the last couple years if not more, to rule by edict.”

Mr. Obama’s political opponents saw the climate rules as a ripe opportunity. “When the president went the regulatory route, it gave our side more confidence,” Mr. Phillips said. “It hardened and broadened Republican opposition to this agenda.”

Starting in early 2014, the opponents of the rule—including powerful lawyers and lobbyists representing many of America’s largest manufacturing and industrial interests—regularly gathered in a large conference room at the national headquarters of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, overlooking the White House. They drafted a long-game legal strategy to undermine Mr. Obama’s climate regulations in a coordinated campaign that brought together 28 state attorneys general and major corporations to form an argument that they expected to eventually take to the Supreme Court.

They presented it not as an environmental fight but an economic one, against a government that was trying to vastly and illegally expand its authority.

“This is the most significant wholesale regulation of energy that the United States has ever seen, by any agency,” Roger R. Martella Jr., a former E.P.A. lawyer who then represented energy companies, said at a gathering of industry advocates, making an assertion that has not been tested.

Attorneys General Step In

Republican attorneys general gathered at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia in August 2015 for their annual summer retreat, with some special guests: four executives from Murray Energy, one of the nation’s largest coal mining companies. Murray was struggling to avoid bankruptcy—a fate that had befallen several other coal mining companies already, given the slump in demand for their product and the rise of natural gas, solar and wind energy.

The coal industry came to discuss a new part of the campaign to reverse the country’s course on climate change. Litigation was going to be needed, the industry executives and the Republican attorneys general agreed, to block the Obama administration’s climate agenda—at least until a new president could be elected.

West Virginia’s attorney general, Patrick Morrisey, led the session, The Dangerous Consequences of the Clean Power Plan & Other E.P.A. Rules, which included, according to the agenda, Scott Pruitt, then the attorney general of Oklahoma; Ken Paxton, Texas’ attorney general; and Geoffrey Barnes, a corporate lawyer for Murray, which had donated $250,000 to the Republican attorneys general political group.

That same day, Mr. Morrissey would step outside the hotel to announce that he and other attorneys general would sue in federal court to try to stop the Clean Power Plan, which he called “the most far-reaching energy regulation in this nation’s history, drawn up by radical bureaucrats.”

Mr. Pruitt quickly became a national point person for industry-backed groups and a magnet for millions of dollars of campaign contributions, as the fossil fuel lobby looked for a fresh face with conservative credentials and ties to the evangelical community.

“Pruitt was instrumental—he and A.G. Morrisey,” said Thomas Pyle, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries, an adviser to Mr. Trump’s transition team and the president of a pro–fossil fuel Washington research organization, the Institute for Energy Research. “They led the charge and made it easier for other states to get involved. Some states were keeping their powder dry, but Pruitt was very out front and aggressive.”

After the litigation was filed—by Mr. Morrissey and Mr. Pruitt, along with other attorneys general who attended the Greenbrier meeting—Murray Energy sued in the federal court case as well, just as had been planned.

In February 2016, the Supreme Court indicated that it would side with opponents of the rule, moving by a 5 to 4 vote to grant a request by the attorneys general and corporate players to block the implementation of the Clean Power Plan while the case worked its way through the federal courts.

Trump Stokes the Fires

When Donald J. Trump decided to run for president, he did not appear to have a clear understanding of the nation’s climate change policies. Nor, at the start of his campaign, did he appear to have any specific plan to prioritize a huge legal push to roll those policies back.

Mr. Trump had, in 2012, said on Twitter, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” But he had also, in 2009, joined dozens of other business leaders to sign a full-page ad in The New York Times urging Mr. Obama to push a global climate change pact being negotiated in Copenhagen, and to “strengthen and pass United States legislation” to tackle climate change.

However, it did not go unnoticed that coal country was giving his presidential campaign a wildly enthusiastic embrace, as miners came out in full force for Mr. Trump, stoking his populist message.

And the surest way for Mr. Trump to win cheers from coal crowds was to aim at an easy target: Mr. Obama’s climate rules. Hillary Clinton did not help her cause when she said last spring that her climate policies would “put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

In May 2016, Mr. Trump addressed one of the largest rallies of his campaign: an estimated crowd of over 10,000 in Charleston, W.Va., where the front rows were crammed with mine workers.

“I’m thinking about miners all over the country,” he said, eliciting cheers. “We’re going to put miners back to work.”

“They didn’t used to have all these rules and regulations that make it impossible to compete,” he added. “We’re going to take it all off the table.”

Then an official from the West Virginia Coal Association handed the candidate a miner’s hat.

As he put it on, giving the miners a double thumbs-up, “The place just went nuts, and he loved it,” recalled Barry Bennett, a former adviser to Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign. “And the miners started showing up at everything. They were a beaten lot, and they saw him as a savior. So he started using the ‘save coal’ portions of the speech again and again.”

Mr. Trump’s advisers embraced the miners as emblematic of the candidate’s broader populist appeal.

“The coal miners were the perfect case for what he was talking about,” Mr. Bennett said, “the idea that for the government in Washington, it’s all right for these people to suffer for the greater good—that federal power is more important than your little lives.”

Mr. Trump took on as an informal campaign adviser Robert E. Murray—chief executive of the same coal company that had been working closely for years with the Republican attorneys general to unwind the Obama environmental legacy.

Mr. Murray, a brash and folksy populist who started working in coal mines as a teenager, is an unabashed skeptic of climate science. The coal magnate and Mr. Trump had a natural chemistry, and where Mr. Trump lacked the legal and policy background to unwind climate policy, Mr. Murray was happy to step in.

“I thank my lord, Jesus Christ, for the election of Donald Trump,” Mr. Murray said soon after his new friend won the White House.

Mr. Trump appointed Mr. Ebell, the Competitive Enterprise Institute fellow who had worked for years to undermine the legitimacy of established climate science, to head the transition team at E.P.A. Mr. Ebell immediately began pushing for an agenda of gutting the Obama climate regulations and withdrawing from the Paris Agreement.

When it came time to translate Mr. Trump’s campaign promises to coal country into policy, Mr. Murray and others helped choose the perfect candidate: Mr. Pruitt, the Oklahoma attorney general.

Mr. Trump, who had never met Mr. Pruitt before his election, offered him the job of E.P.A. administrator—putting him in a position to dismantle the environmental rules that he had long sought to fight in court.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump wanted to be seen delivering on the promises he had made to the miners. As controversies piled up in his young administration, he sought comfort in the approval of his base.

In March, Mr. Trump signed an executive order directing Mr. Pruitt to begin unwinding the Clean Power Plan—and he did so at a large public ceremony at the E.P.A., flanked by coal miners and coal executives. Mr. Murray beamed in the audience.

Meanwhile, a battle raged at the White House over whether to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. Mr. Trump’s daughter Ivanka and his secretary of state, Rex W. Tillerson, urged him to remain in, cautioning that withdrawing could be devastating to the United States’ foreign policy credentials.

Murray Energy—despite its enormous clout with Mr. Trump and his top environmental official—boasts a payroll with only 6,000 employees. The coal industry nationwide is responsible for about 160,000 jobs, with just 65,000 directly in mining, according to the federal Energy Information Administration.

By comparison, General Electric alone has 104,000 employees in the United States, and Apple has 80,000. Their chief executives openly pressed Mr. Trump to stick with Paris, as did dozens of other major corporations that have continued to support regulatory efforts to combat climate change.

But these voices did not have clout in Washington, either in Congress or at the White House, when it comes to energy policy.

Mr. Trump’s senior adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, backed by Mr. Pruitt, told the president that pulling out of the deal would mean a promise kept to his base.

“It is time to put Youngstown, Ohio; Detroit, Michigan; and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania along with many, many other locations within our great country—before Paris, France,” Mr. Trump said in his Rose Garden speech on Thursday. “It is time to make America great again.”

The Science Gets Stronger

The recognition that human activity is influencing the climate developed slowly, but a scientific consensus can be traced to a conference in southern Austria in October 1985. Among the 100 or so attendees who gathered in the city of Villach, nestled in the mountains along the Drava River, was Bert Bolin, a Swedish meteorologist and a pioneer in using computers to model the climate.

Dr. Bolin helped steer the conference to its conclusion: “It is now believed that in the first half of the next century a rise of global mean temperature could occur which is greater than any in man’s history,” he wrote in the conference’s 500-page report.

While the politics of climate change in the United States has grown more divided since then, the scientific community has united: Global warming is having an impact, scientists say, with sea levels rising along with the extremity of weather events. Most of the debate is about the extent of those impacts—how high the seas may rise, or how intense and frequent heavy storms or heat waves may be.

In recent years, many climate scientists have also dropped their reluctance to pin significant weather events on climate change. Studies have shown that certain events—a 2015 Australian heat wave, floods in France last year and recent high temperatures in the Arctic—were made more likely because of global warming.

But in Congress, reluctance to embrace that science has had no political downsides, at least among Republicans.

“We don’t yet have an example of where someone has paid a political price being on that side of it,” said Michael Steel, who served as press secretary for the former House speaker John A. Boehner, the Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush and the current House speaker, Paul D. Ryan, during his 2012 run as Mitt Romney’s vice-presidential choice. Instead, the messages of Mr. Pruitt still dominate.

“It is now believed that in the first half of the next century a rise of global mean temperature could occur which is greater than any in man’s history.”

“This is an historic restoration of American economic independence—one that will benefit the working class, the working poor and working people of all stripes,” Mr. Pruitt said on Thursday, stepping to the Rose Garden lectern after Mr. Trump. “We owe no apologies to other nations for our environmental stewardship.”

American voters—even many Republicans—recognize that climate change is starting to affect their lives. About 70 percent think global warming is happening, and about 53 percent think it is caused by human activities, according to a recent study by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. About 69 percent support limiting carbon dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.

But most public opinion polls find that voters rank the environment last or nearly last among the issues that they vote on. And views are divided based on party affiliation. In 2001, 46 percent of Democrats said they worried “a great deal” about climate change, compared with 29 percent of Republicans, according to a Gallup tracking poll on the issue. This year, concern among Democrats has reached 66 percent. Among Republicans, it has fallen, to 18 percent.

Until people vote on the issue, Republicans will find it politically safer to question climate science and policy than to alienate moneyed groups like Americans for Prosperity.

The U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Healy encountered only small patches of sea ice in the Chukchi Sea off the coast of Alaska during the final days collecting ocean data for NASA’s 2011 ICESCAPE mission, which studied how changing conditions in the Arctic affect the ocean’s chemistry.

There will be exceptions. The 2014 National Climate Assessment, a report produced by 14 federal agencies, concluded that climate change is responsible for much of the flooding now plaguing many of the Miami area’s coastal residents, soaking homes and disrupting businesses, and Representative Curbelo is talking about it.

“This is a local issue for me,” Mr. Curbelo said. “Even conservatives in my district see the impact. It’s flooding, and it’s happening now.”

Mr. Curbelo helped create the House Climate Solutions Caucus, 20 Republicans and 20 Democrats who say they are committed to tackling climate change. Mr. Curbelo is confident that as the impact of climate change spreads, so will the willingness of his Republican colleagues to join him.

Outside of Congress, a small number of establishment conservatives, including a handful of leaders from the Reagan administration, have begun pushing Washington to act on climate change. Earlier this year, James A. Baker III, one of the Republican Party’s more eminent senior figures, met with senior White House officials to urge them to consider incorporating a carbon tax as part of a broader tax overhaul package—a way to both pay for proposed cuts to corporate tax rates and help save the planet. A Reagan White House senior economist, Art Laffer; a former secretary of state, George P. Shultz; and Henry M. Paulson Jr., George W. Bush’s final Treasury secretary, have also pushed the idea.

“There are members from deep-red districts who have approached me about figuring out how to become part of this effort,” Mr. Curbelo said. “I know we have the truth on our side. So I’m confident that we’ll win eventually.”

NOTE: President Donald Trump and his team systematically dismantled the environmental protections put into place in previous decades. Trump pulled the United States out of global efforts to combat climate change and named first one, then another, staunch allies of the fossil fuels industry to head the Environmental Protection Agency, which they proceeded to gut.