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Mr. Biden’s immigration plan would provide a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants, and increase diversity visas and border-security funding. But, conceding the long odds of achieving such extensive changes, lawmakers are focusing on cobbling together a package of smaller bills that would legalize about eight million or fewer undocumented immigrants.

A team of immigration activists and researchers as well as congressional aides is exploring the question, digging into the best way to present their case to Ms. MacDonough, who declined to comment for this article. They have found past precedents, including one from 2005, in which changes to immigration policy were allowed as part of a budget-reconciliation package, and they are tallying up the budgetary effects of the immigration proposals — which total in the tens of billions.

“Before we can do anything meaningful on immigration, we’re going to have to deal with the current crisis at the border,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, who has been involved in the bipartisan talks. “I don’t think the public is going to tolerate us ignoring this crisis, and it’s just going to get worse unless we deal with it.”

To pull it off, Democrats would have to grapple with strict budget rules that limit what can be done under reconciliation.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month endorsed the idea of using reconciliation to push through an immigration measure, citing the “budget impacts of immigration in our country.” Senator Patty Murray of Washington, the No. 3 Democrat, came out in favor of the approach last week.

The pro-immigration group FWD.us hired Kevin Kayes, a former assistant Senate parliamentarian, to help hone the procedural argument in favor of allowing the maneuver this year.“Those provisions are the precedent for us,” said Kerri Talbot, the deputy director of the Immigration Hub. “A lot of things we’re trying to do now relate to what was approved in 2005.”

Twenty-two Democrats, including four senators, recently wrote a letter to Mr. Biden urging him to include an immigration overhaul in his infrastructure package. Many are worried that they will lose control of Congress in the 2022 midterm elections, and fearful that the Supreme Court will strike down former President Barack Obama’s protections for Dreamers.

Yet not all Democrats are likely to support a unilateral approach

For now, Senator Richard J. Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat who has for years pushed for a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, said that he was focused on passing a bipartisan immigration bill, and that Mr. Schumer had encouraged him to work to reach a deal with Republicans.

“The crisis at the border is undisputable — even the president admits that now — so if we can work on that, and then work on some of the path options that I’ve supported in the past, I’m guardedly optimistic,” he said.

The federal death chamber, at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., likely will be mothballed after Mr. Higgs’s execution. No further executions currently are scheduled, and Mr. Biden, who has called for the legal abolition of capital punishment, is unlikely to approve any others. With Mr. Higgs’s execution, 50 inmates will remain on the federal death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which is critical of capital punishment.

Mr. Higgs delivered a final statement before he was put to death. “The tone of his voice when he said his final words was calm but in substance Higgs was defiant,” according to an Associated Press pool report. “‘I’d like to say I am an innocent man,’ he said, mentioning the three women by name. ‘I did not order the murders.’”

Following the execution, the prison released a statement addressed to Mr. Higgs from Ms. Jackson’s younger sister, whom it did not identify by name. “When the day is over, your death will not bring my sister and the other victims back. This is not closure, this is the consequence of your actions,” it said.

The government, arguing that litigating the issue would needlessly delay Mr. Higgs’s execution, asked the Supreme Court to overrule the lower courts. Friday’s order did just that, directing “the prompt designation of Indiana” as the state whose death penalty procedures should be followed. The majority provided no legal explanation for the decision, but in prior cases some conservative justices have complained that condemned inmates game the system by filing last-minute appeals to prolong their lives.

On Tuesday, Biden is expected to follow his first-day actions by tackling family separation, the root causes of migration, and the legal immigration system.

The Senate is also expected to confirm Alejandro Mayorkas as Homeland Security secretary on Tuesday, after Monday night's vote was delayed due to weather.

Biden pledged to set up a task force focused on identifying and reunifying families separated at the US-Mexico border under the Trump administration's controversial "zero tolerance" policy.

The task force will be chaired by the Department of Homeland Security secretary and work across the US government, along with partners, to find parents separated from their children under the former administration. CNN previously reported that first lady Jill Biden is expected to take an active role in the task force.

It will be charged with identifying all children separated from their parents or legal guardians on the southern border, facilitating and enabling the reunification of children with their families,

Lawyers are unable to reach the parents of 611 children who had been split from their families by US border officials between 2017 and 2018, according to the latest court filing in an ongoing family separation case.

"The Biden administration is committed to remedying this awful harm the Trump administration inflicted on families," a senior administration official said, calling the policy a "moral failure" and "national shame."

"The goal of the task force is one to identify, but two to make recommendations as to how the families can be united, taking into account the menu of options that exist under immigration law," the official said.

The administration plans to provide aid to the region to support initiatives combating corruption and revive the Central American minors program that had been ended by Trump and allows certain at-risk youths to live in the US, according to a senior administration official.

The policy, informally known as "Remain in Mexico," has left thousands of asylum seekers waiting in dangerous and deplorable conditions on the border.

The Biden administration has stopped new enrollments into the program, but has not disclosed its plans to address the thousands of migrants still waiting in Mexico, saying only that they will be taken into account as new systems are put in place.

"The situation at the border will not transform overnight," a senior administration official said. "This is in large part due to the damage done over the last four years,

The order will also call for a series of actions to restore the asylum system, which was drastically changed over the last four years and made it exceedingly difficult for migrants to be granted asylum in the US.

Like the other executive orders, it also seeks to reverse Trump-era policies that targeted low-income immigrants, including calling for a review of the public charge rule which makes it more difficult for immigrants to obtain legal status if they use public benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers.

Throughout, he was enabled by influential Republicans motivated by ambition, fear or a misplaced belief that he would not go too far.

For every lawyer on Mr. Trump’s team who quietly pulled back, there was one ready to push forward with propagandistic suits that skated the lines of legal ethics and reason

That included not only Mr. Giuliani and lawyers like Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, but also the vast majority of Republican attorneys general, whose dead-on-arrival Supreme Court lawsuit seeking to discount 20 million votes was secretly drafted by lawyers close to the White House, The Times found.

With each passing day the lie grew, finally managing to do what the political process and the courts would not: upend the peaceful transfer of power that for 224 years had been the bedrock of American democracy.

The vote-stealing theory got its first exposure beyond the web the day before the election on Mr. Bannon’s show. Because of the Hammer, Mr. McInerney said, “it’s going to look good for President Trump, but they’re going to change it.” The Democrats, he alleged, were seeking to use the system to install Mr. Biden and bring the country to “a totalitarian state.”

with the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, backing him, Mr. Barr told the president that he could not manufacture evidence and that his department would have no role in challenging states’ results, said a former senior official with knowledge about the meeting, a version of which was first reported by Axios. The allegations about manipulated voting machines were ridiculously false, he added; the lawyers propagating them, led by Mr. Giuliani, were “clowns.”

Yet as the suits failed in court after court across the country, leaving Mr. Trump without credible options to reverse his loss before the Electoral College vote on Dec. 14, Mr. Giuliani and his allies were developing a new legal theory — that in crucial swing states, there was enough fraud, and there were enough inappropriate election-rule changes, to render their entire popular votes invalid.

As a result, the theory went, those states’ Republican-controlled legislatures would be within their constitutional rights to send slates of their choosing to the Electoral College.

Yet as the draft circulated among Republican attorneys general, several of their senior staff lawyers raised red flags. How could one state ask the Supreme Court to nullify another’s election results? Didn’t the Republican attorneys general consider themselves devoted federalists, champions of the way the Constitution delegates many powers — including crafting election laws — to each state, not the federal government?

In an interview, Mr. Kobach explained his group’s reasoning: The states that held illegitimate elections (which happened to be won by Mr. Biden) were violating the rights of voters in states that didn’t (which happened to be won by Mr. Trump).

The lawsuit was audacious in its scope. It claimed that, without their legislatures’ approval, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had made unconstitutional last-minute election-law changes, helping create the conditions for widespread fraud. Citing a litany of convoluted and speculative allegations — including one involving Dominion voting machines — it asked the court to shift the selection of their Electoral College delegates to their legislatures, effectively nullifying 20 million votes.

One lawyer knowledgeable about the planning, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said: “There was no plausible chance the court will take this up. It was really disgraceful to put this in front of justices of the Supreme Court.”

The next day, Dec. 9, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana sent an email to his colleagues with the subject line, “Time-sensitive request from President Trump.” The congressman was putting together an amicus brief in support of the Texas suit; Mr. Trump, he wrote, “specifically asked me to contact all Republican Members of the House and Senate today and request that all join.” The president, he noted, was keeping score: “He said he will be anxiously awaiting the final list to review.”

Some 126 Republican House members, including the caucus leader, Mr. McCarthy, signed on to the brief, which was followed by a separate brief from the president himself. “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!” Mr. Trump tweeted. Privately, he asked Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to argue the case.

By the time the bus pulled into West Monroe, La., for a New Year’s Day stop to urge Senator John Kennedy to object to certification, Mr. Trump was making it clear to his followers that a rally at the Ellipse in Washington on Jan. 6 was part of his plan. On Twitter, he promoted the event five times that day alone.

But talk at the rally was tilting toward what to do if they didn’t.“We need our president to be confirmed through the states on the 6th,” said Couy Griffin, the founder of Cowboys for Trump. “And right after that, we’re going to have to declare martial law.”

Though Ms. Kremer held the permit, the rally would now effectively become a White House production. After 12,000 miles of drumbeating through 44 stops in more than 20 states, they would be handing over their movement to the man whose grip on power it had been devised to maintain.

Mr. Barr had resigned in December. But behind the back of the acting attorney general, Jeffrey A. Rosen, the president was plotting with the Justice Department’s acting civil division chief, Jeffrey Clark, and a Pennsylvania congressman named Scott Perry to pressure Georgia to invalidate its results, investigate Dominion and bring a new Supreme Court case challenging the entire election. The scheming came to an abrupt halt when Mr. Rosen, who would have been fired under the plan, assured the president that top department officials would resign en masse.

But Mr. Cruz was working at cross-purposes, trying to conscript others to sign a letter laying out his circular logic: Because polling showed that Republicans’ “unprecedented allegations” of fraud had convinced two-thirds of their party that Mr. Biden had stolen the election, it was incumbent on Congress to at least delay certification and order a 10-day audit in the “disputed states.” Mr. Cruz, joined by 10 other objectors, released the letter on the Saturday after New Year’s.

The rally had taken on new branding, the March to Save America, and other groups were joining in, among them the Republican Attorneys General Association. Its policy wing, the Rule of Law Defense Fund, promoted the event in a robocall that said, “We will march to the Capitol building and call on Congress to stop the steal,” according to a recording obtained by the progressive investigative group Documented.

Mr. Stockton said he was surprised to learn on the day of the rally that it would now include a march from the Ellipse to the Capitol. Before the White House became involved, he said, the plan had been to stay at the Ellipse until the counting of state electoral slates was completed.

Defiantly, to a great roar from the plaza, Ms. Chafian cried, “I stand with the Proud Boys, because I’m tired of the lies,” and she praised other militant nationalist groups in the crowd, including the Oath Keepers and the Three Percenters.

Speakers including Mr. Byrne, Mr. Flynn, Mr. Jones, Mr. Stone and the Tennessee pastor Mr. Locke spoke of Dominion machines switching votes and Biden ballots “falling from the sky,” of “enemies at the gate” and Washington’s troops on the Delaware in 1776, of a fight between “good and evil.”“Take it back,” the crowd chanted. “Stop the steal.”

“What we do now is we take note of the people who betrayed President Trump in Congress and we get them out of Congress,” he said. “We’re going to make the Tea Party look tiny in comparison.”

or decades, the country’s leading oil and gas companies have understood the science of climate change and the dangers posed by fossil fuels. Year after year, top executives heard it from their own scientists whose warnings were explicit and often dire.

In 1979, an Exxon study said that burning fossil fuels “will cause dramatic environmental effects” in the coming decades.“The potential problem is great and urgent,” it concluded.

o investigate the lengths of the oil and gas industry’s deceptions – and the disastrous consequences for communities across the country – the Guardian is launching a year-long series tracking the unprecedented efforts to hold the fossil fuel industry to account.

the legal reasoning behind foreign court judgments are unlikely to carry much weight in the US and domestic law is largely untested. In 2018, a federal court knocked back New York City’s initial attempt to force big oil to cover the costs of the climate crisis by saying that its global nature requires a political, not legal, remedy.

Among them is a 1988 Exxon memo laying out a strategy to push for a “balanced scientific approach”, which meant giving equal weight to hard evidence and climate change denialism. That move bore fruit in parts of the media into the 2000s as the oil industry repositioned global heating as theory, not fact, contributing to the most deep-rooted climate denialism in any developed country.

Other climate lawsuits, including one filed in Minnesota, allege the oil firms’ campaigns of deception and denial about the climate crisis amount to fraud. Minnesota is suing Exxon, Koch Industries and an industry trade group for breaches of state law for deceptive trade practices, false advertising and consumer fraud over what the lawsuit characterises as distortions and lies about climate science.

Farber said cases rooted in claims that the petroleum industry lied have the most promising chance of success.“To the extent the plaintiffs can point to misconduct, like telling everybody there’s no such thing as climate change when your scientists have told you the opposite, that might give the courts a greater feeling of comfort that they’re not trying to take over the US energy system,” he said.

Year after year, Exxon scientists recorded the evidence about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. In 1978, its science adviser, James Black, warned that there was a “window of five to ten years before the need for hard decisions regarding changes in energy strategy might become critical”.

Exxon set up equipment on a supertanker, the Esso Atlantic, to monitor carbon dioxide in seawater and the air. In 1982, the company’s scientists drew up a graph accurately plotting an increase in the globe’s temperature to date.

“The 1980s revealed an established consensus among scientists,” the Minnesota lawsuit against Exxon says. “A 1982 internal Exxon document … explicitly declares that the science was ‘unanimous’ and that climate change would ‘bring about significant changes in the earth’s climate’.”Then the monitoring on the Esso Atlantic was suddenly called off and other research downgraded.

The public nuisance claim, also pursued by Honolulu, San Francisco and Rhode Island, follows a legal strategy with a record of success in other types of litigation. In 2019, Oklahoma’s attorney general won compensation of nearly half a billion dollars against the pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson over its false marketing of powerful prescription painkillers on the grounds it created a public nuisance by contributing to the opioid epidemic in the state.

newspapers to sow doubt. One in the New York Times in 2000, under the headline “Unsettled Science”, compared climate data to changing weather forecasts. It claimed scientists were divided, when an overwhelming consensus already backed the evidence of a growing climate crisis, and said that the supposed doubts meant it was too soon to act.

Exxon’s chairman and chief executive, Lee Raymond, told industry executives in 1996 that “scientific evidence remains inconclusive as to whether human activities affect global climate”.“It’s a long and dangerous leap to conclude that we should, therefore, cut fossil fuel use,” he said.Documents show that his company’s scientists were telling Exxon’s management that the real danger lay in the failure to do exactly that.

In 2019, Martin Hoffert, a professor of physics at New York University, told a congressional hearing that as a consultant to Exxon on climate modelling in the 1980s, he worked on eight scientific papers for the company that showed fossil fuel burning was “increasingly having a perceptible influence on Earth’s climate”.

Exxon worked alongside Chevron, Shell, BP and smaller oil firms to shift attention away from the growing climate crisis. They funded the industry’s trade body, API, as it drew up a multimillion-dollar plan to ensure that “climate change becomes a non- issue” through disinformation. The plan said “victory will be achieved” when “recognition of uncertainties become part of the ‘conventional wisdom’”.

The fossil fuel industry also used its considerable resources to pour billions of dollars into political lobbying to block unfavourable laws and to fund front organisations with neutral and scientific-sounding names, such as the Global Climate Coalition (GCC). In 2001, the US state department told the GCC that President George W Bush rejected the Kyoto protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions “in part, based on input from you”.

“Big oil was engaged in exactly the same type of behaviour that the tobacco companies engaged in and were found liable for fraud on a massive scale,” said Eubanks. “The cover-up, the denial of the problem, the funding of scientists to question the science. The same pattern. And some of the same lawyers represent both tobacco and big oil.”

"They view themselves as legal technicians. Their view is that they do not make policy, they apply the law," said University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley. "But the nature of the fights that are brought to the DC Circuit are often those that get the partisan blood boiling."

Confirmation controversy has only accelerated over time as the DC Circuit has become a stepping stone for the Supreme Court. Among the four current justices who came from the DC Circuit is Chief Justice John Roberts. (An earlier chief justice, Warren Burger, also first wore a black robe on the DC Circuit.)

The DC Circuit's portfolio has long put it at the center of disputes over potential White House wrongdoing, such as during Watergate in the Nixon years, the Iran-Contra scandal of the Reagan administration and Independent Counsel Ken Starr's investigation of President Bill Clinton. Now, it could help determine the fate of legal issues surrounding the House Democrats' impeachment inquiry and Trump's desire to withhold personal information and limit his allies from cooperating with investigators.

Even if a request for a full DC Circuit hearing would ultimately be denied, the Trump team might find it advantageous to request one, as going through that process could buy more time for Trump's larger effort to avoid disclosure of his records.

Tatel, at 77, is the liberal lion of the bench today. He authored a major voting rights opinion, involving Shelby County, Alabama, upholding a section of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that required states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing their election laws. Tatel deemed race discrimination in voting "one of the gravest evils that Congress can seek to redress," and wrote that Congress, when passing legislation against it, "acts at the apex of the power."

When Obama took the White House in 2009, Democrats held the Senate majority, but Republicans were sizable enough to block efforts to cut off floor debate on his DC Circuit nominees. In 2013, then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid persuaded the Democrats to change the filibuster rules, with the "nuclear option," so that a lower-court nominee could be confirmed with a simple majority of the 100 senators, rather than require at least 60 votes to close debate.

Pillard, now 58, was arguably the most liberal of the three. A Georgetown law professor, she had previously worked for the NAACP legal defense fund and had a deep record of advocacy for civil rights and women's rights. Pillard already is on the short list of liberals hoping that a Democrat wins the White House in 2020 and can fill a new vacancy on the high court.

Trump has filled two DC Circuit vacancies since taking office, the first with Gregory Katsas in 2017, and then Rao, who until her confirmation this year had been the Trump-appointed administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.

Such agreements would have made it less likely that videos involving the men became public. “Generally what settlements are about is getting peace,” Mr. Boies said

They were joined by Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

"Accordingly, we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not 'regularly given' and 'lawfully certified' (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed," the statement goes on to say.

President Trump and his legal team have targeted several states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, in their attempts to overturn the election. But their legal efforts all failed because they couldn't provide clear evidence of fraud or misconduct in the 2020 election.

Brooks has said that more than 30 members of Congress plan to challenge the results.

None of the lawmakers has provided evidence to back up their concerns.

"The courts and state legislatures have all honored their duty to hear legal allegations and have found nothing to warrant overturning the results," Murkowski said.

And on Saturday evening, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah harshly condemned the effort of fellow Republicans, calling it an "egregious ploy" that "dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic."

"Whether this is prosecutable is a different question from whether it's antithetical to the rule of law and the Constitution and democracy itself, and I would say clearly it is. It's very disturbing."

to help the White House make its case that the election results were fraudulent, a claim that has been disproven repeatedly.

"You would be respected if this thing could be straightened out before the election,

"You're not the only one, I mean, we have other states that I believe will be flipping to us very shortly."

Yet for Trump supporters, it's Raffensperger and his team who broke the law despite Trump's legal team repeatedly failing to prove any widespread election law or malfeasance.

claimed Trump, Meadows and Raffensperger were engaged in a confidential settlement conference related to two pending lawsuits the White House filed against Georgia over the election. He argues anything shared in the call was for those purposes.

Most of Trump's detractors on social media said the president's intentions were clearly to intimidate Georgia officials to change the state's election results.

The federal code also criminalizes actions that "knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a state of a fair and impartially conducted election process."

However, it is extremely unlikely that the House of Representatives would attempt another impeachment with so little time remaining in Trump's term.

anybody who solicits, requests or commands or otherwise attempts to encourage somebody to commit election fraud is guilty of solicitation of election fraud,"

There are worst-case scenarios, and the President’s conduct has made them less unthinkable than usual. But the chances of their coming to pass are remote. Benjamin Ginsberg, who represented the GOP candidate in the 2000 recount, cautions against hysteria. “The panic seems to me to be way overblown,” he says.

What exactly are the worst-case scenarios? They start with the absence of a clear outcome on election night. Many states will be dealing with a massive increase in mail and absentee ballots, which take longer to process than in-person votes: they have to be removed from their envelopes, flattened for tabulation and checked for signatures and other technical requirements before they can be counted.

Three states loom largest in this concern: Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. All three are key battlegrounds that have made a rapid and politically fraught push to expand voting by mail this year.

Other quirks, like a “naked ballot”–a legitimate ballot that a voter has failed to enclose in the required security envelope–may cause further uncertainty; a Pennsylvania court ruled this year that such ballots would not be counted in that state, which Trump won by just 44,000 votes. It all could add up to a presidential race that’s too close to call for days or weeks.

Current polls do not show a particularly tight race in those states, nor nationwide. And the polls have been far more stable, with far fewer undecided voters, than they were in 2016. Faster-counting states like Florida and Arizona, which have demonstrated the ability to rapidly tabulate large volumes of mail ballots, could well decide the election, rendering any uncertainty in the Rust Belt irrelevant.

The election’s outcome is unclear after days or weeks, and Trump is muddying the waters–lobbing lawsuits, disputing the count, accusing his opponents of cheating and convincing large swaths of the electorate that something untoward is going on behind the scenes.

Even if this happens, experts stress that Trump does not have the power to circumvent the nation’s labyrinthine election procedures by tweet. Elections are administered by state and local officials in thousands of jurisdictions, most of whom are experienced professionals with records of integrity.

There are well-tested processes in place for dealing with irregularities, challenges and contests. A candidate can’t demand a recount, for example, unless the tally is within a certain margin, which varies by state.

“While people may make claims to powers and make threats about what they may or may not do, the reality is that the candidates don’t have the power to determine the outcome of the election. It’s really important that voters understand that while a lot about our system is complicated, this isn’t a free-for-all.”

There’s a legal process to get there. The oft-invoked Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court case that resolved the 2000 standoff, was decided narrowly, specific to a particular situation in a particular place, notes Joshua Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law. “These things Trump is saying–toss all the ballots, end the counting–those are not legal arguments,” he says.

Some fear a scenario in which, after weeks of uncertainty, the time comes for states to name electors to the Electoral College, and Republican legislators try to appoint their own rosters, overruling their state’s voters and forcing courts or Congress to resolve the matter.

“It’s unthinkably undemocratic to hold a popular vote for President and then nullify it if you don’t like the result,” says Adav Noti, chief of staff at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. While the possibility can’t be entirely dismissed given Republicans’ fealty to Trump, judges would likely take a dim view of such an effort, not to mention the political storm that would ensue.

The past few years have convinced many Americans to expect the unlikely, haunted by failures of imagination past. But when it comes to post-election mayhem, people’s imaginations may be getting the better of them.

“But by amplifying it as if it’s realistic, you create a very real problem of people not having faith in the system by which we choose our leaders. And that’s really harmful.”

“You’ll see the same associate staffed on all the great cases and think, ‘Why am I not getting those same opportunities?’ ” said Duvol Thompson, a partner at Holland & Knight LLP. He recently helped compile a survey of 60 Black male lawyers that concluded: “The consistent challenge is attempting to rise through the ranks based on knowledge, experience and ability rather than being minimized, diminished or judged based on the color of our skin.”

When his Chicago-based company set out this spring to buy for-profit online educator Walden University in a $1.5 billion acquisition, Mr. Patterson recruited experienced Black law partners in the three specialty areas he needed: mergers and acquisitions, finance and regulatory law.

In any given year, a handful of the nation’s largest law firms have no Black partners. Elite law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, which has 500 lawyers, has had one Black partner in its centurylong history.

Attrition rates for minority associates were 22%, compared with 17% for white associates, according to a study this year by the NALP Foundation, an industry research group, and legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa.

“For a profession that’s supposed to be all about equality, opportunity and justice,” he said, “we should be first, not last.”

Children who set foot on U.S. soil without authorization have long been afforded additional legal protections

Under that law, Mexican children can be transferred to Mexican authorities after being screened to ensure they are not victims of trafficking or persecution.

The Trump administration has denounced this patchwork of legal safeguards, arguing the protections encourage children from poor and often violence-plagued areas of Central America to journey north with the help of smugglers.

Citing the pandemic, the Trump administration has argued that migrant children are not entitled to these safeguards, and that the laws that created them are effectively inoperative as long as the CDC's orders remain in place.

Citing the CDC order, U.S. authorities have pushed 6,500 unaccompanied children back into Mexico.

They are the migrant children found by an "underground railroad" network of immigration lawyers, human rights activists and child advocates who support humanitarian-centered border policies.

After months of claiming that any election outcome other than a victory for him would have to have been “rigged,” the president used his final days on the campaign trail to cast doubt on the very process of tabulating the count, suggesting without any evidence that any votes counted after Tuesday, no matter how legal, must be suspect.

Both sides expect Mr. Trump and his allies to try again to disqualify late-arriving ballots in the emerging center of the legal fight, Pennsylvania, after the state’s high court rejected a previous attempt and the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

“This is the most blatant, open attempt at mass disenfranchisement of voters that I’ve ever witnessed,” said Dale Ho, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union, which has litigated several major cases this year.

The Republican efforts moved to an even more aggressive footing on Sunday, after Mr. Trump made clear his intention to challenge an unfavorable outcome through a focus in particular on the mail-in vote, which both sides expect will favor Mr. Biden.

On Monday night, in an extraordinary moment that encapsulated the tenor of his presidency, Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter that the Supreme Court’s Pennsylvania decision would “allow rampant and unchecked cheating” and “undermine our entire systems of laws” and “induce violence in the streets,” drawing a warning on the platform that it was misleading.

Mr. Trump has spent the past few years appointing conservative judges, an effort that has affected the balance on several appellate panels that will be critical in swing-state voting fights while giving the Supreme Court a new, 6-to-3 conservative tilt.And he has another wild card in Mr. Barr.

This summer, Mr. Barr made a string of exaggerated claims about the problems with mail-in voting and opened the door to sending in federal authorities to stop voter fraud threats.

That situation has led Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general and a Democrat, to issue guidance that election officials should segregate any ballots that arrive after 8 p.m. Tuesday.“We made a careful decision to segregate those ballots in part to stave off possible future legal challenges from Donald Trump and his enablers,” Mr. Shapiro said.

“They’ll be fanned out across Pennsylvania, on Election Day, and prepared for whatever challenges to possibly come beginning at 8:01 when the polls close,” he said.

Defining executive underreach isn’t easy, since the executive is endowed with the discretion to opt for inaction. So the paper suggests this:Underreach occurs when domestic and international legal sources are widely seen to authorize, if not also encourage or oblige, an executive to tackle a particular sort of problem with particular sorts of tools and yet the executive declines to do so.

the paper notes that it occurs when the rationale for inaction is offered in naked and destructive bad faith, as Trump has been doing for months.

Authoritarian and autocratic impulses perhaps belong in a separate category from illiberal and anti-democratic ones. But there’s plenty of overlap: Wielding disinformation to supplant solutions in the public interest and prodding friendly governors into putting untold constituents at risk — all to serve the leader’s cultish political needs — surely partake from both.

In the leadership context, when incompetence and the distraction of narcissism do appear, they don’t necessarily hamper the realization of illiberal and anti-democratic tendencies. They are rooted in the same tangle of impulses, and mutually reinforce each other in a uniquely toxic way that compounds the wreckage.

He then unveiled a peculiar defense strategy, arguing that objecting to the outcome of an election and attempting to block certification is a regular practice in American politics.

"Please come to order," Biden said at the time. "The objection cannot be received."

But the Democrats' objections back then to some electoral votes came nowhere near the legislative or political effort to overturn the election that Trump and his Republican allies staged around the 2020 presidential election.

"To litigate questions of election integrity within this system is not incitement," van der Veen said. "It is the democratic system working as the founders and lawmakers have designed."

The House Democrats argue that Trump knowingly and willing whipped up a frenzied pro-Trump crowd and urged them to lay siege to the seat of American government to block lawmakers from certifying Biden's electoral victory and keep Trump in power.

House impeachment managers argued that if senators don't convict Trump, he may incite further violence.

17 Republicans would have to vote with all 50 Democrats to reach the two-thirds threshold to convict and effectively bar Trump from holding federal office in the future. That outcome, however, seems unlikely.

"Republicans are in a tough spot," Hasen said. "On one hand, you have the President, who is criticizing vote-by-mail and says it is prone to fraud. On the other hand, Republicans in California has long relied on a strong vote-by-mail operation to get out the Republican vote."

Padilla's office says state law only permits election officials -- not political parties -- to establish dropboxes for voters to return their ballots. Therefore, the GOP-installed boxes are illegal.

The memo also said Republicans violated laws on ballot collection, which is pejoratively called "ballot harvesting." California lets voters designate any "person" to return their ballot on their behalf, often a family member of a volunteer from a political campaign. But the GOP dropboxes eliminated this person-to-person part of the process, which is a key safeguard against fraud.

"You mean only Democrats are allowed to do this? But haven't the Dems been doing this for years? See you in court. Fight hard Republicans!" Trump tweeted Tuesday night, inaccurately describing state laws, which allow any party to collect ballots, as long as it is done in-person.

It's possible Republicans were just trying to test the waters of what they are legally permitted to do, like their recent efforts to send unauthorized poll watchers to voting sites in Philadelphia. Another more sinister possibility, experts said, is that they knew the dropboxes would cause issues, but are trying to sow chaos and weaken public confidence in the vote-by-mail process.

All 50 states prohibit private militias. They are illegal. Such organizations were banned starting with the Militia Act of 1903, and then amended by the National Defense Acts of 1920 and 1933.

So, to the media, by all means use the word militia for the National Guard, but don’t use it for vigilante groups that go by the name Oathkeepers or III%ers or the Wolverine Watchmen or any other name.

These groups use the name militia as a camouflage for their often violent and anti-democratic views. The term evokes the Minutemen of the Revolutionary War, citizen-soldiers who fought the British. But these guys are not heroes; they don’t deserve that historical cover.

In the middle of a national pandemic, in a nation riven by social justice protests, with historically high levels of unemployment, and with a contentious presidential election days away, we are at a moment that experts say is a perfect launchpad for acts of intimidation and violence by unlawful militias.

These groups saw Barack Obama not only as a Black man, but as a foreigner, an alien, un-American, and not of this country. This belief was aided and accelerated by the birther movement, whose primary promoter was none other than Donald J. Trump.

Oh, but doesn’t the 2nd Amendment protect them? Unlawful militias always cite the Second Amendment as providing the DNA of their founding and the justification for their continuation. This, too, is wrong.

For these unlawful militias, Election Day could become their Super Bowl. “Local officials, law enforcement, and voters,” says McCord, “need to know that groups of armed individuals have no legal authority under federal or state law to show up at voting locations claiming to protect or patrol the polls.”

The First Amendment’s provision of free speech and free assembly is not in conflict with the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms. Yes, burly white guys in camouflage can own guns, they can freely express their opinion that the federal government is going to confiscate their guns, they can “peacefully assemble” to protest that idea, they just can’t do so brandishing their guns and intimidating people, especially voters.

“twisted patriots.” They are overwhelmingly white men who appropriate Revolutionary War imagery to cloak their anti-government views.

These groups mushroomed in 1990’s after the federal government launched sieges in Ruby Rudge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas. But their appeal dimmed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, which killed 168 people.

it is regulated by the State. The Supreme Court, in 1886 and in the Heller decision of 2008 written by Justice Scalia, explicitly permits the states to prohibit “private paramilitary organizations.”

Trump’s role in the resurgence of unlawful militias is impossible to measure, but according to both Holt and McCabe, he is seen as a kindred spirit.

“there has been a major realignment of militia movement in the U.S. from anti-federal government writ large to mostly supporting one candidate.” That candidate is Donald Trump. When Trump tweeted “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!”; when he said the Proud Boys should “stand back and stand by”; when he expressed sympathy for Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year old vigilante charged with killing two protesters in Kenosha; when he smiled as his supporters cheered “Lock her up” about Gov. Whitman—after the kidnapping plot was revealed—he is seen as an inspirational figure and a cheerleader for violence.

With the election days away and a possible indeterminate or contested result, what can and should states do? It is a bedrock of our civil law that the government—and only the government—is able to legally and legitimately use force in the maintenance of public safety.

“Local authorities in all 50 states,” says McCord, “should know that the law empowers them to restrict paramilitary activity during public rallies and elections, while preserving the rights to free expression and peaceful assembly.”

Lankford noted that after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the bipartisan committee that investigated them found that the compressed time frame for the transition after the contested 2000 election may have contributed to the lack of preparedness for the attack.

In their report after the attacks, the commission said that the dispute over the election and the "36-day legal fight" following "cut in half the normal transition period." The loss of time, the commission said, "hampered the new administration in identifying, recruiting, clearing, and obtaining Senate confirmation of key appointees,"

The intermediary step by Republicans in the President's orbit illuminated the widening divide between the practical reality that Biden must be equipped with key national security knowledge to begin running the country in January and the political fiction being perpetrated by the President and his supporters.

Ohio's Republican Gov. Mike DeWine, who heads a state the President won last week, said on CNN's "New Day" that "we need to consider the former vice president as the President-elect."

Trump has showed little interest in addressing the most important issue facing the country: the record-breaking climb in US coronavirus cases.

The illusory quality of Trump's election fraud claims was once again underscored by a set of election integrity checks that are being conducted in Arizona, which CNN called for Biden late Thursday night.

post-election audits filed with the Arizona Secretary of State's office from more than half of Arizona's counties showed that there is no evidence of systematic voter fraud or major discrepancies that would affect the outcome of the race.

A group of national, state and private election officials said in a joint statement Thursday that there is no evidence that "any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."

"The November 3rd election was the most secure in American history. Right now, across the country, election officials are reviewing and double checking the entire election process prior to finalizing the result," the Election Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council and the Election Infrastructure Sector Coordinating Executive Committees said.

The most surreal feature of the suspended reality at the White House is still the behavior of the President himself. A leader who jealously dominated television coverage on the campaign trail and in office has not made public remarks for an entire week

"I'm worried about this virus, I'm not looking at what the merits of the case are. It would appear that Joe Biden is going to be the next president of the United States," DeWine said, adding that America needs to "come together as a country."

But the President's Twitter feed Thursday indicated that he was much more fixated on what he views as his mistreatment by Fox News, his once favored network, which he believes should be defending him more vociferously in the midst of the twilight zone that he has created by refusing to acknowledge Biden's victory.

The President, whom CNN quoted sources as describing as increasingly "dejected" on Thursday, continues to tweet falsehoods about election fraud.

there are few signs that his campaign has convinced any court to take his complaints seriously. In this odd limbo between defiance and admitting defeat, the President is wavering between fighting on and a recognition that his hold on power is coming to an end,

While his adult sons, Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, have urged their father to continue challenging the election results, his daughter Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner have taken a more measured approach, CNN reported Thursday, encouraging the President to think about potential damage to his legacy as they weigh their own post-White House ambitions.

In addition to Biden's win in Arizona, the President trails in Georgia, where a hand recount is beginning, by 14,000 votes -- a cushion for Biden unlikely to be overturned.

Meanwhile, Biden's political choreography -- which late Wednesday included the naming of Ron Klain as his White House chief of staff -- and his departure to his family beach house to decompress after the election is meant to signal that his ascent to power is assured.

In what may have been a signal to establishment Republicans -- in a venue that the President himself might take account of -- former George W. Bush strategist Karl Rove wrote in a Wall Street journal op-ed that the election will not be overturned whatever the result of Trump's legal gambits.

Lankford, who referred to Biden as President-elect at his church last week, has said he will intervene if the victorious Democrat remains unable to access intelligence briefings.

"I've been a little concerned about it," Senate Armed Services Chairman Jim Inhofe said of the Pentagon firings, adding he'd been told "now it's come to an end."

As Republican lawmakers stake out safe ground -- trying to appear that they are still supporting the President's legal pursuits while also signaling that the transition should begin -- some Democrats have been hammering their GOP colleagues for indulging the President's election fantasies.

"These Republicans are all auditioning for profiles in cowardice," Schumer said.

On Thursday, the US broke the record for Covid-19 hospitalizations for the third consecutive day, surpassing 67,000 hospitalizations.

The glimmer of hope on the horizon continued to be Pfizer's promising announcement earlier this week that their vaccine trial is more than 90% effective with officials widely expecting that the company will apply for emergency use authorization from the US Food and Drug Administration before the end of this month.

"By the end of March to early April, we think across all of the vaccines that we have invested in, we have enough for all Americans who wish to get vaccinated," Azar said.

"If you think of it metaphorically, you know, the cavalry is coming here," Fauci said, touting the major positive impact that the vaccines will have."If we could just hang in there, do the public health measures that we're talking about," Fauci said. "We're going to get this under control, I promise you."

Mr. Trump has repeatedly tried to pressure Republican state legislators and elections officials — who have the most influence over declaring the formal winner and allocating electoral votes — to deny victory to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. They have largely resisted him.

The 17 states behind the amicus brief represent a majority of the 25 Republican attorneys general across the country, and include Alabama, Florida, Kansas, Missouri, Louisiana and South Dakota. Notably, the two Republican attorneys general in the battleground states that Mr. Trump lost — Arizona and Georgia — are not part of the brief.

Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican and former attorney general of the state, seemed baffled by the legal maneuver, calling it “extraordinary” and “unprecedented.”“I’ve never seen something like this, so I don’t know what the Supreme Court’s going to do,” he said in Washington on Wednesday.