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Texas Republicans are increasing their involvement in local races, hoping to do more to influence municipal and school board elections that have turned into political battlegrounds during the coronavirus pandemic.

The state Republican Party announced Monday it had formed a new Local Government Committee to work with county parties on backing candidates in nonpartisan local elections, where issues like mask mandates and the teaching of what some conservatives call critical race theory have become flashpoints.

"That's really been the match that totally" ignited this, said Rolando Garcia, a member of the State Republican Executive Committee who chairs the new group. "School board races have always been important, but it's been hard to get the attention and resources to them, and so they've been sleepy affairs."

The state GOP is emboldened by recent wins in places like Carroll Independent School District, where opponents of a district proposal to address racism in schools captured a majority on the school board last month. Republicans are also looking to build on victories like that of Javier Villalobos, a Republican who won his election earlier this year as the mayor of McAllen, which traditionally votes for Democrats.

"Democrats across the country see the importance of local elections in the fight for America, and so does the Texas GOP," Matt Rinaldi, chair of the Texas GOP, said in a statement.

The state Democratic Party has been supporting local nonpartisan candidates through a program, Project LIFT, that started in 2015. The program, which stands for Local Investment in the Future of Texas, recruits, trains and provides resources to people running for municipal offices and school board.

"We've got to take an aggressive approach in these races," said Odus Evbagharu, chair of the Harris County Democratic Party. "Our democracy's on the line, and it starts at our most local level."

In recent months, school boards have gained new attention in Texas and nationwide amid raging debates over pandemic rules. Even though Gov. Greg Abbott has banned public schools from requiring masks, some school boards have defied him and sought to mandate masks anyway, prompting legal action from the state.

This year, parents have turned their attention to the perception that "critical race theory" is being taught to their children and have pushed to remove books from school libraries that contain offensive content. Critical race theory is a concept teaches that racism is embedded in society, and while there is no evidence it is widely taught in K-12 schools in Texas, the Legislature passed a law aiming to crack down on it that went into effect Thursday. That law is behind a GOP state lawmaker's recent investigation into the types of books that school districts have.

Additionally, Abbott has been on a hunt to root out any "pornographic" material in public schools, telling the Texas Education Agency to investigate it last month.

Garcia is from Houston, where the Harris County GOP has already charged into local contests. The county party backed three challengers who ousted members of the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District school board in November. The county party has also endorsed three candidates in the Houston Independent School District school board runoffs that are happening Saturday.

For example, one of those candidates, Bridget Wade, opposes mask requirements for students and has said she is against schools teaching "our children that one race is better than the other."

Evbagharu said the party is "in it to win it" when it comes to the Houston ISD runoffs. He denounced the GOP crusade against critical race theory as "classroom censorship," saying Republicans are "trying to disrupt democracy and disrupt the way history is taught."

Garcia said the Local Government Committee is focused on educating county parties that they can indeed endorse in local nonpartisan races and then giving them guidelines on how to support a candidate if they do choose to endorse. Typically, a majority of precinct chairs must approve before a county party can formally support a candidate in a local election.

After a county party gets behind a candidate, the state party may come in with its aid like a mailer but Garcia emphasized that "these are conversations that each county party needs to have" first.

In the meantime, school boards are continuing to garner statewide GOP attention. Some Republican state lawmakers have called on the Texas Association of School Boards to sever ties with the National Associations of School Boards after it asked the Biden administration to look at recent parental hostility toward school board members as "domestic terrorism."

On Monday, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick called for the resignation of the co-chair of Fort Worth Independent School District's Racial Equity Committee after she shared personal information about parents who sued the district to stop its mask mandate. (Patrick referred to the committee member, Norma Garcia-Lopez, as a school board member, but the committee is separate from the school board and advises it.)

Disclosure: Texas Association of School Boards has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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Texas Republicans getting involved in local school board, city elections - The Texas Tribune

(Damon Winter | The New York Times)A congressional staffer works late on Capitol Hill as lawmakers voted on a continuing resolution to fund the federal government, Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. The current GOP attempts at extortion are both more naked and less rational than what happened during the Obama years, Paul Krugman writes.

By Paul Krugman | The New York Times

| Dec. 6, 2021, 8:00 p.m.

With everything else going on the likely imminent demise of Roe v. Wade, the revelation that Donald Trump knew he had tested positive for the coronavirus before he debated Joe Biden, and more I dont know how many readers are aware that the U.S. government came close to being shut down last weekend. A last-minute deal averted that crisis, but in any case another crisis will follow in a couple of weeks: The government is expected to hit its debt ceiling in the middle of this month, and failure to raise the ceiling would wreak havoc not just with governance but with Americas financial reputation.

The thing is, the federal government isnt having any problem raising money in fact, it can borrow at interest rates well below the inflation rate, so that the real cost of servicing additional federal debt is actually negative. Instead, this is all about politics. Both continuing government funding and raising the debt limit are subject to the filibuster, and many Republican senators wont support doing either unless Democrats meet their demands.

And what has Republicans so exercised that theyre willing to endanger both the functioning of our government and the nations financial stability? Whatever they may say, they arent taking a stand on principle or at least, not on any principle other than the proposition that even duly elected Democrats have no legitimate right to govern.

In some ways weve seen this movie before. Republicans led by Newt Gingrich partly shut down the government in 1995-96 in an attempt to extract concessions from President Bill Clinton. GOP legislators created a series of funding crises under President Barack Obama, again in a (partly successful) attempt to extract policy concessions. Creating budget crises whenever a Democrat sits in the White House has become standard Republican operating procedure.

Yet current GOP attempts at extortion are both more naked and less rational than what happened during the Obama years.

Under Obama, leading Republicans claimed that their fiscal brinkmanship was motivated by concerns about budget deficits. Some of us argued even at the time that self-proclaimed deficit hawks were phonies, that they didnt actually care about government debt a view validated by their silence when the Trump administration blew up the deficit and that they actually wanted to see the economy suffer on Obamas watch. But they maintained enough of a veneer of responsibility to fool many commentators.

This time, Republican obstructionists arent even pretending to care about red ink. Instead, theyre threatening to shut everything down unless the Biden administration abandons its efforts to fight the coronavirus with vaccine mandates.

Whats that about? As many observers have pointed out, claims that opposition to vaccine mandates (and similar opposition to mask mandates) is about maintaining personal freedom dont stand up to any kind of scrutiny. No reasonable definition of freedom includes the right to endanger other peoples health and lives because you dont feel like taking basic precautions.

Furthermore, actions by Republican-controlled state governments, for example in Florida and Texas, show a party that isnt so much pro-freedom as it is pro-COVID. How else can you explain attempts to prevent private businesses whose freedom to choose was supposed to be sacrosanct from requiring that their workers be vaccinated, or offers of special unemployment benefits for the unvaccinated?

In other words, the GOP doesnt look like a party trying to defend liberty; it looks like a party trying to block any effective response to a deadly disease. Why is it doing this?

To some extent it surely reflects a coldly cynical political calculation. Voters tend to blame whichever party holds the White House for anything bad that happens on its watch, which creates an incentive for a sufficiently ruthless party to engage in outright sabotage. Sure enough, Republicans who fought all efforts to contain the coronavirus are now attacking the Biden administration for failing to end the pandemic.

But trying to shut down the government to block vaccinations seems like overreach, even for hardened cynics. Its notable that Mitch McConnell, whom nobody could accuse of being a do-gooder, isnt part of the anti-vaccine caucus.

What seems to be happening instead goes beyond cold calculation. As Ive pointed out in the past, Republican politicians now act like apparatchiks in an authoritarian regime, competing to take ever more extreme positions as a way to demonstrate their loyalty to the cause and to The Leader. Catering to anti-vaccine hysteria, doing all they can to keep the pandemic going, has become something Republicans do to remain in good standing within the party.

The result is that one of Americas two major political parties isnt just refusing to help the nation deal with its problems; its actively working to make the country ungovernable.

And I hope the rest of us havent lost the ability to be properly horrified at this spectacle.

Paul Krugman | The New York Times(CREDIT: Fred R. Conrad)

Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, is a columnist for The New York Times.

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Paul Krugman: How saboteurs took over the Republican Party - Salt Lake Tribune

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Hello, and Happy Thursday,

Over the last few months, weve seen lawmakers in several states draw new, distorted political districts that entrench their political power for the next decade. Republicans are carving up Texas, North Carolina and Georgia to hold on to their majorities. Democrats have the power to draw maps in far fewer places, but theyve also shown a willingness to use it where they have it, in places like Illinois and Maryland.

But something uniquely disturbing is happening in Ohio.

Republicans control the legislature there and recently enacted new maps that would give them a supermajority in the state legislature and allow them to hold on to at least 12 of the states 15 congressional seats. Its an advantage that doesnt reflect how politically competitive Ohio is: Donald Trump won the state in 2020 with 53% of the vote.

Whats worse is that Ohio voters have specifically enacted reforms in recent years that were supposed to prevent this kind of manipulation. Republicans have completely ignored them. It underscores how challenging it is for reformers to wrest mapmaking power from politicians.

Its incredibly difficult to get folks to say, OK, were just gonna do this fairly after years and years and decades and decades of crafting districts that favor one political party, Catherine Turcer, the executive director of the Ohio chapter of Common Cause, a government watchdog group that backed the reforms, told me earlier this year. I did not envision this being as shady.

In 2015 and 2018, Ohio voters overwhelmingly approved two separate constitutional amendments that were meant to make mapmaking fairer. The 2015 amendment dealt with drawing state legislative districts and gave a seven-person panel, comprised of elected officials from both parties, power to draw districts. If the panel couldnt agree on new maps, they would only be in effect for four years, as opposed to the usual 10.

The 2018 amendment laid out a slightly different process for drawing congressional districts, but the overall idea was the same. Both reforms also said districts could not unfairly favor or disfavor a political party.

Something started to seem amiss earlier this fall when the panel got to work trying to create the new state legislative districts. The two top Republicans in the legislature wound up drawing the maps in secret, shutting their fellow GOP members out of the process. After reaching an impasse with Democrats, Republicans on the panel approved a plan that gives the GOP a majority in the state legislature for the next four years.

When it came time to draw congressional maps, things did not go much better. The panel barely even attempted to fulfill its mission, kicking mapmaking power back to the state legislature. Lawmakers there quickly enacted the congressional plan that benefits the GOP for the next four years.

The new map benefits the GOP by cracking Democratic-heavy Hamilton county, home of Cincinnati, into three different congressional districts, noted the Cook Political Report. It also transforms a district in northern Ohio, currently represented by Democrat Marcy Kaptur, the longest serving woman in Congress, from one Joe Biden carried by 19 points in 2020 to one Trump would have carried by 5 points.

The maps already face several lawsuits, and their fate will ultimately be decided by the Ohio supreme court. Republicans have a 4-3 advantage on the court, though one of the GOP justices is considered a swing vote. Well soon see if voter-approved reforms will be completely defanged.

Reader questions

Please continue to write to me each week with your questions about elections and voting at sam.levine@theguardian.com or DM me on Twitter at @srl and Ill try to answer as many as I can.

Few places better encapsulate the new Republican effort to undermine American elections than Wisconsin. Some Republicans there are calling for the removal of the non-partisan head of the states election commission.

Georgia saw a jump in the percentage of rejected mail-in ballot requests in one of the first elections after Republicans imposed new requirements. Many of those who had their ballot requests rejected didnt ultimately vote in person, according to the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

The Justice Department on Tuesday filed a statement of interest in voting rights lawsuits in Arizona, Texas and Florida. All three filings significantly defend the power and scope of section two of the Voting Rights Act, one of the most powerful remaining provisions of the 1965 civil rights law.

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A Republican power grab in Ohio might be the GOPs most brazen yet - The Guardian

Senator Josh Hawley is worried about men. In a recent speech at the National Conservatism Conference, he blamed the left for their mental health problems, joblessness, obsession with video games and hours spent watching pornography. The crisis of American men, he said, is a crisis for the American republic.

The liberal reaction was flippant. A CNN analysis mocked the speech, contrasting the decline of masculinity with real issues like the pandemic and inflation. The ReidOut Blog on MSNBCs website declared, Josh Hawleys crusade against video games and porn is hilariously empty. But the contempt and mockery his speech received was, at least in part, misplaced.

Mr. Hawley is not alone in sensing that masculinity is a popular cause; around the world, male politicians are tapping into social anxieties about its apparent decline, for their own ideological ends. The Chinese government, for instance, has declared a masculinity crisis, and it is responding by cracking down on gaming during school days and by investing in gym teachers and school sports.

There can be a homophobic and fascistic component to such calls: China has also barred sissy men from appearing on TV; in Brazil, President Jair Bolsonaro has said that masks are for fairies; and Mr. Hawley, in his speech, fueled anti-transgender prejudice by alluding to a bogus war on womens sports. Nothing justifies this hateful nonsense. But Mr. Hawley, for all his winking bigotry, is tapping into something real a widespread, politically potent anxiety about young men that is already helping the right.

American politicians have long fanned popular flames of masculine panic to advance their own agendas, and Mr. Hawley is a scholar of this tradition. In 2008, two years after graduating from Yale Law School, he wrote a smart, compelling book about a historical figure who also worried about masculinity. In Theodore Roosevelt: Preacher of Righteousness, published by Yale University Press, Mr. Hawley described how Roosevelt sought to imbue men with the fortitude the country needed to drive big national projects like war and territorial expansion.

Foregrounding the iconic virility of the cowboy and the soldier, he set out to inspire civic virtue in a citizenry that, he believed, had lost traditional manly virtues when people moved from farms to cities. Conquest would allow American men to shed the temptations of the slothful life and become a more manful race. Mr. Hawley seeks to carry on this tradition.

He is right about some things. Deindustrialization has stripped many men of their ability to earn a decent wage, as well as of the pride they once took in contributing to prosperous communities. Boys are sometimes overdisciplined and overmedicated for not conforming to behavioral expectations in school. And while more women than men are diagnosed with anxiety or depression, men are more likely to commit suicide or die of drug overdoses.

None of these problems are caused by liberals. But liberalism hasnt offered a positive message for men lately. In the media, universities and other liberal institutions, it sometimes seems that every man is potentially guilty of something. As Mr. Hawley puts it, men are being told by liberals that theyre the problem. Our side the progressive side has struggled to articulate what a nontoxic masculinity might look like, or where boys might look for models of how to become men.

This has set up an existential crisis for the left, threatening its ability to win elections. For years, young men have been flocking to the far right, finding its messages and disgruntled virtual communities on YouTube and Reddit. In 2016, Donald Trump won the male vote by 11 percentage points. And with his attacks on pornography and video games, Mr. Hawley could appeal to mothers, too, who know that, in excess, these arent signs of healthy social adjustment.

Like Roosevelt, Mr. Hawley knows how to exploit the cultural anxieties of ordinary people to advance his brand of politics. But he hasnt offered solutions to this masculinity crisis because neither he nor his party has any.

Men and boys need good jobs, affordable access to team sports, an education system sensitive to their social and emotional development, public parks, mental health support, access to substance abuse treatment and paternity leave. All of this requires public funding, which is far more likely to come from the left than the right. To thrive, many men also need the freedom not to be men at all, but rather to become sissies, scrawny historians or even women, a cultural evolution Mr. Hawley and his conservative ilk adamantly oppose.

In his book, Mr. Hawley rightly condemned Roosevelts racism and commitment to violent conquest, but he also wanted to salvage from Roosevelts legacy a vision of the common good, an insistence that we can live nobler and more meaningful lives. In his speech, Mr. Hawley tapped into this legacy: To each man, I say: You can be a tremendous force for good. Your nation needs you. The world needs you.

I dont hate this message, taken alone, for our sons. Who would? But that vision of shared purpose and civic virtue wont come from Mr. Hawley any more than funding for more public baseball fields will. He, after all, has opposed just about every common public project recently proposed, from the bipartisan infrastructure bill to the Build Back Better Act to the Green New Deal.

Meanwhile, the left will need to find a better way to talk to men; half of the population is far too many people to abandon to the would-be strongmen of the far right.

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Opinion | Josh Hawley and the Republican Obsession With Manliness - The New York Times

People were, like, shocked, Mr. Durr said. Theyd say, Nobodys ever been here.

Mr. Durr said he hoped to keep his job as a truck driver for the Raymour & Flanigan furniture chain, and the health insurance it provides, even after he is sworn in as a senator, a part-time position that pays $49,000. Lawmakers who took office after 2010 are not eligible for health coverage.

He rides a 2012 Harley-Davidson motorcycle, spoils his three pit bulls I call them my fur babies and, with his five siblings, takes care of his mother, a recent widow who lives next door.

Before joining the furniture company, he worked in construction and said he often held multiple jobs, including making pastries for Dunkin Donuts and working in a farm supply store. During two growing seasons, he drove trucks for East Coast Sod and Seed.

He was on time, said Andy Mottel, the manager of the Pilesgrove, N.J., farm, which transports sod across the country and provides the field grass for Yankee Stadium. He worked every day. He has that strong voice very knowledgeable about sports.

Mr. Durr completed his G.E.D. through Gloucester City High School, and he has made no secret of his unease with his sudden stardom. (I feel like Im about to throw up, he said the day Mr. Sweeney conceded.) He will be a member of the minority party in the State House, making it unlikely he will have significant power to steer or stonewall legislation.

When ticking off his legislative priorities, he mentions goals like bringing jobs here, bringing businesses here, and he is the first to say he has a lot to learn about how Trenton works. If its an issue that concerns New Jersey citizens, Im going fight for it, he said.

It was his fourth campaign for public office. He ran for State Assembly as an independent in 2017 and as a Republican in 2019, and he ran last year for Logan Township council.

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Edward Durr Jr.: The Trump Republican Whos Riding High in New Jersey - The New York Times