Justice Elena Kagan, then a young law professor, wrote a law review article calling Supreme Court confirmation hearings “a vapid and hollow charade.”

She would not say how she would rule in potential cases on abortion, the election and same-sex marriage — or a pending one on the Affordable Care Act.Judge Barrett’s stance was in line with the approach of nominees since Judge Robert H. Bork’s answers at his 1987 confirmation hearings helped doom his nomination.

“The approach was to avoid giving specific responses to any direct questions on legal issues likely to come before the court,” the memo said, “but demonstrating in the response a firm command of the subject area and awareness of the relevant precedents and arguments.”

Mr. Pence deployed a number of misleading or inaccurate arguments. He mischaracterized the White House event at which many officials appear to have been infected with the virus, overstated the likelihood that a vaccine will be in widespread distribution by the end of the year and exaggerated the impact of the limited travel ban imposed on China.

Ms. Harris overstated some of her arguments. She said the manufacturing sector is in a recession when it is not. She suggested that if elected, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. would repeal Mr. Trump’s tax cuts on Day One, a step that would actually require a time-consuming effort to pass new tax legislation in Congress — and in any case Mr. Biden has only proposed rolling back portions of the Trump tax cuts.

“The president said it was a hoax.”— Ms. HarrisThis is misleading. Ms. Harris is taking Mr. Trump’s comments out of context. He was speaking about the Democrats’ criticism of his administration’s response to the pandemic and comparing it to the “impeachment hoax,” not the virus itself.“Now the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus. You know that, right? Coronavirus. They’re politicizing it. We did one of the great jobs. You say, ‘How’s President Trump doing?’ They go, ‘Oh, not good, not good.’ They have no clue. They don’t have any clue,” Mr. Trump said at a February rally in South Carolina. “They tried anything, they tried it over and over, they’ve been doing it since you got in. It’s all turning, they lost, it’s all turning. Think of it. Think of it. And this is their new hoax,” he continued.

Reported crime of nearly every kind has declined this year amid the pandemic. The exception to that has been stark and puzzling: Shootings and homicides are up in cities around the country, perplexing experts who normally expect these patterns to trend together.

The president and others have blamed protests and unrest, the changing tactics of police, and even the partisan politics of mayors.

And programs devised to reduce gun violence — and that have proved effective in studies — have been upended by the pandemic. Summer jobs programs were cut this year. Violence intervention workers were barred from hospitals. Group behavioral therapy programs meant to be intimate and in-person have moved, often haltingly, online.

Top White House officials are blocking strict new federal guidelines for the emergency release of a coronavirus vaccine, objecting to a provision that would almost certainly guarantee that no vaccine could be authorized before the election on Nov. 3, according to people familiar with the approval process.

Facing a White House blockade, the Food and Drug Administration is seeking other avenues to ensure that vaccines meet the guidelines. That includes sharing the standards — perhaps as soon as this week — with an outside advisory committee of experts that is supposed to meet publicly before any vaccine is authorized for emergency use.

The Food and Drug Administration submitted the guidelines to the Office of Management and Budget for approval more than two weeks ago, but they stalled in the office of Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff. Their approval is now seen as highly unlikely.

“Going well, I think!” President Trump tweeted late Friday. Of all the confusing, confounding and contradictory words that have been spun out of the White House in recent days, that two-word caveat — “I think” — was instantly seized upon by the president’s allies and adversaries alike.

The absence of humility, Mr. Danforth said, can poison any chance for a collaborative culture.

He is hardly the first to suggest this. “Those who travel the high road of humility in Washington, D.C., are not bothered by heavy traffic,” said the former Senator Alan Simpson, Republican of Wyoming, in a 2018 eulogy for President George Bush. It is a familiar adage around the capital, if rarely heeded.

Of all the election misinformation this year, false and misleading information about voting by mail has been the most rampant, according to Zignal Labs, a media insights company.

Of the 13.4 million mentions of voting by mail on social media; news on television, print and online; blogs and online forums between January and September, nearly a fourth — or 3.1 million mentions — have most likely been misinformation, Zignal Labs said.

The misleading information about voting by mail was not uniform. It broke down into six main categories

President Trump’s tax returns portray a businessman who takes in hundreds of millions of dollars in some years yet racks up chronic losses.

The tax returns that Mr. Trump has fought to keep secret cast a harsh light on his finances, revealing a businessman who regularly reports losing so much money that he has gone for years paying little or no income taxes and today finds himself in a tightening financial vise.

For Mr. Trump, no endorsement was too small, and he rented out his name to everything from Oreo cookies and Domino’s Pizza to mattresses and neckties.

How does faith influence a person’s political views? How should we look at religiously devout people in public life?

I would say that coming to faith changed everything and yet didn’t alter my political opinions all that much. That’s because assenting to a religion is not like choosing to be a Republican or a Democrat. It happens on a different level of consciousness.

My point is there is no neat relationship between the spiritual consciousness and the moral and prudential consciousnesses. When it comes to thinking and acting in the public square, we believers and nonbelievers are all in the same boat — trying to apply our moral frameworks to present realities.

For more than 20 years, Metronome, which includes a 62-foot-wide 15-digit electronic clock that faces Union Square in Manhattan, has been one of the city’s most prominent and baffling public art projects.

On Saturday Metronome adopted a new ecologically sensitive mission. Now, instead of measuring 24-hour cycles, it is measuring what two artists, Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd, present as a critical window for action to prevent the effects of global warming from becoming irreversible.On Saturday at 3:20 p.m., messages including “The Earth has a deadline” began to appear on the display. Then numbers — 7:103:15:40:07 — showed up, representing the years, days, hours, minutes and seconds until that deadline.

“This is our way to shout that number from the rooftops.” Mr. Golan said just before the countdown began. “The world is literally counting on us.”

It’s complicated.By Mr. Schultz, a partner in a Washington law firm, was the deputy commissioner for policy at the Food and Drug Administration from 1994 to 1999.

The Food and Drug Administration is about to make the most momentous decision in its history: whether to authorize the early use of a vaccine to protect against the coronavirus without the normal safety and effectiveness protocols.

First, will use of a partially effective vaccine lead to risky behavior that outweighs the vaccine’s benefits? The F.D.A. has approved flu vaccines that have an effectiveness rate below 40 percent and has said that a coronavirus vaccine must be at least 50 percent effective. If the vaccine doesn’t fully protect those who take it, will it give users a false sense of security and lead to more risky behavior

Mr. West, the billionaire hip-hop artist and fashion mogul turned Christian revivalist, is not running for president, but “walking,” as he puts it.

His party is called the Birthday Party. His first piece of campaign art included pictures of that well-known populist Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue, and of the actress Kirsten Dunst, who was puzzled. (“What’s the message here,” she tweeted, “and why am I apart of it?”)

Because a variety of allies and supporters of President Trump are working on the ground to advance his campaign, many Democrats view his candidacy as a dirty trick by Republicans, a notion Mr. West has rejected.

In a recent panel discussion among four veteran Republican campaign managers, one acknowledged, “We’re going to lose the popular vote.” Another responded, “Oh, that’s a given.” The real question is will Mr. Biden win enough more votes than President Trump to overcome this year’s bias in the Electoral College.

If Mr. Biden’s margin drops to 1.5 million — about the populations of Rhode Island and Wyoming combined — forget about it. The chance of a Biden presidency in that scenario is less than one in 10.

It happened in 2016 to Hillary Clinton, who won nearly three million more votes than Donald Trump — a margin of more than two percentage points — but lost because of fewer than 80,000 votes in three states.

One opportunity for decisive action came Jan. 28, when his national security adviser, Robert C. O’Brien, told Trump that the coronavirus “will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency.”

The United States would still have made mistakes. We focused too much on ventilators and not enough on other things that might have been more useful, like face masks, blood thinners and high-flow nasal cannulas.

Trump called himself a wartime president, but he didn’t heed his generals and never ordered ammunition. In World War II, a Ford plant was configured to turn out one new B-24 bomber every hour, yet today we display none of that urgency even though Americans are dying from the virus at a faster pace than they fell in World War II.