Some on the right have first Black woman justice’s qualifications under a microscope. It’s not a new strategy.

WASHINGTON — When Thurgood Marshall arrived at the Capitol for his Supreme Court confirmation hearing on a July day in 1967, the 58-year-old lawyer was the most celebrated legal advocate in the civil rights movement. He had braved death threats and successfully argued more than two dozen cases before the Supreme Court, including decisions that ensured Black voters could cast primary ballots in Texas and ended government-mandated segregation in public schools.

But that wealth of experience and proof of surpassing talent did not stop Strom Thurmond, the segregationist senator from South Carolina, from treating Marshall like a none-too-bright schoolboy, as he quizzed the judge for an hour with more than 60 arcane historical and legal questions dating from events in the 19th century.

Who drafted the 13th Amendment? What was the name of the committee that reviewed the 14th Amendment in 1866, and who were its members? What was the objection to the first section of its original draft? Thurmond’s barrage of “gotchas” felt never-ending.

“I don’t know, sir,” Marshall replied again and again, as the senator pressed on.

The esoteric probing was Thurmond’s way of hinting that “Marshall wasn’t intellectually up to the job,” said Harvard Law School professor Mark Victor Tushnet, who clerked for Marshall and has written two books on him.

It was a strategy some other segregationist senators also deployed against Marshall at the time. And it’s one that, more than a half a century later, the first Black woman to be named to the Supreme Court may well face, too — though, likely, in an updated form. Thurmond’s unabashed racism has given way to something subtler, but no less insidious: The claim that a justice nominated in part because of his or her race is presumptively less qualified, that the bar must have been lowered.

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‘An amazing legacy’: Justice Breyer’s replacement could be a former clerk he considers family

WASHINGTON — She is one of the women President Biden is considering for his first Supreme Court nomination and brings with her some essential credentials: a sterling educational background, a distinguished track record on the federal bench, and a reputation for both brilliance and an even judicial temperament.

But there is one other line on her resume that could prove influential: She is part of the “family.”

That is, Ketanji Brown Jackson once worked for the man she may replace.

Jackson, 51, a highly respected D.C. Circuit Court judge who would become the first Black woman to serve on the Supreme Court if confirmed, spent a formative year clerking for retiring Justice Stephen G. Breyer more than two decades ago.

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The Senate failed to pass voting rights legislation. Where does that leave Democrats?

WASHINGTON — As Democrats’ hopes to pass landmark voting rights legislation once again died in the Senate this week, Massachusetts Representative Katherine Clark, one of the party’s leaders in the House, has been thinking a lot about the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

That’s the landmark bridge in Selma, Ala., where in 1965, civil rights activists, including the late Representative John Lewis, were beaten by state troopers for marching for the right to vote. The bridge rises steeply, obscuring the view of the other side until one reaches the middle. A person has to commit to climb up, as Lewis did at age 25, and keep going, Clark said, even as they see obstacles that lie ahead.

Lewis and the other activists “didn’t turn back in the middle when they were met with incredible violence,” Clark said in an interview on Wednesday, hours before the voting rights legislation stalled in the Senate. “They regrouped and restrengthened and came back across the bridge.”

Clark and her Democratic colleagues are trying to regroup and regain momentum following an emotional debate in the Senate that touched on racism and past civil rights struggles. In the end, Republicans filibustered the voting rights legislation and Democrats failed to convince their more moderate members to change the body’s rules to overcome that blockade, putting the passage of future Democratic-backed legislation in doubt.

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‘Jim Crow relic’: A short history of the filibuster

WASHINGTON — In July 1937, as Congress prepared to adjourn and leave the nation’s capital during the most sweltering weeks of summer, a pro-civil-rights senator turned to an arcane procedural maneuver in an attempt to force his chamber to take up an anti-lynching bill.

He launched a filibuster.

It worked. To end the lengthy, last-minute debate, the Senate leader agreed to bring the legislation to the floor upon the lawmakers’ return.

But the bill ultimately would meet its demise early the next year through the same means: a filibuster, this time by civil rights opponents, that spanned some six weeks. This one included late-night sessions, two failed votes to end debate, and a lawmaker who spoke for four days straight. The death of the legislation was a blow to the years-long struggle by Black activists to end one of the many violent tactics — in this case, murder by hanging — that white Southerners used to terrorize Black people and keep them from the ballot box.

This grim turn of events, historians and political scientists say, is essential in understanding the role of the filibuster in the struggle for civil rights. Dating to the 1800s, it has been used by lawmakers to both advance and thwart Black racial progress — but it is in the thwarting of that progress that it has been used with greatest frequency and success.

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A day of truth in a divided nation

WASHINGTON — A year ago, the US Capitol was a crime scene, where statues of the Founding Fathers bore witness to the shattering glass and bloodshed of a failed insurrection.

On Thursday, President Biden stood in the great building and cast it as a battlefield in the fight for American democracy, condemning the former president as he did so. He and other Democrats sought to use the searing memories of Jan. 6 to beat back Donald Trump’s lies about what happened there, and to call for new protections of voting rights and elections.

“Those who stormed this Capitol, and those who instigated and incited, and those who called on them to do so held a dagger at the throat of America,” Biden said, depicting his predecessor more directly than ever as a sore loser and an ongoing threat.

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Pressley wants Americans to ‘stay uncomfortable’ with memories of Jan. 6

Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley is not ready to turn the page on the ugly chapter of American history that is the Jan. 6 attack on the US Capitol.

To her, Thursday’s anniversary is a mile marker on an uncompleted journey to repair the damage wrought by a mob of former president Donald Trump’s supporters. The insurrection was the culmination of far right and white supremacist extremism, fueled by four years of his bigotry and hateful rhetoric — and a backlash to a record turnout of voters from many marginalized communities that had propelled Joe Biden to the White House.

The assault on the nation’s democracy continues, Pressley said, as Republican legislators and candidates perpetuate the lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, while states controlled by the GOP pass laws to curb who can vote and when.

So as much as Pressley would like to move on one year after an attack that forced her to shelter in a barricaded Capitol Hill office, she cannot. “We cannot,” she said.

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‘I didn’t think I was going to go home that day’: Congressional staffers recall the lingering trauma of the Jan. 6 attack

WASHINGTON — Sarah Groh, chief of staff for Massachusetts Representative Ayanna Pressley, still does not know what happened to the panic buttons.

One year ago Thursday, when supporters of then-president Donald Trump stormed the US Capitol, Groh taped brown cardboard paper over the Boston Democrat’s nameplate outside her office in a nearby building so they could not target her. Then Groh, Pressley, and Pressley’s husband, Conan Harris, quickly piled water jugs and office desks and chairs against the door to barricade themselves inside.

Next, Groh pulled out gas masks and searched for the panic buttons attached to furniture throughout the office that allowed her to call Capitol Police at a moment’s notice. But they had been torn out. Every single one.

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‘They have a “fight” mentality’: Haitians seek safety and stability in Boston, with the help of volunteers

After gang members burned down a relative’s home in 2018, Jerry, 33, fled the danger of his native Haiti and has been trying to reach a stable life in the United States ever since.

He lived in Chile until he left this summer, riding buses with his wife, Admoline, 25, and their 2-year-old daughter, Amandjie, along the well-worn roads that wind through Bolivia and Peru. They hiked the Darién Gap, a remote strip of jungle and treacherous streams that connects Colombia and Panama.

On foot or by bus they continued northward through Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico — all the way to the edge of Texas, where, after they turned themselves in to US immigration agents, they waited and slept alongside other migrants, without blankets or shelter, under an old bridge spanning the border.

“It was difficult, traumatic,” Jerry said of the saga that eventually led him and his family to a friend’s home in Mattapan. He asked that only their first names be used for fear of US immigration authorities.

And yet, their journey isn’t over.

They are among 600 Haitian families who have arrived in Massachusetts since March as political, economic, and social conditions in Haiti have continued to deteriorate. The humanitarian crisis has been acutely felt in the state, home to roughly 46,000 Haitians and Haitian Americans, many concentrated in the Boston area — the third-largest Haitian diaspora population in the country behind Brooklyn, N.Y., and Miami.

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In Kevin McCarthy’s 8-hour tirade, a rambling attempt to show he can lead the rancorous Republicans

It was peak Kevin McCarthy — or at least, the Kevin McCarthy he set out to become the last time he was this close to being House speaker.

Over 8½ hours on the House floor one night and early morning this month, the California Republican and House minority leader unleashed an angry, pugilistic rant against President Biden’s roughly $2 trillion social spending and climate bill, seeking to paint it as wasteful government spending by out-of-touch Democrats. He fumed against gas prices, China, and inflation.

He hyped up fears of crime-ridden cities and undocumented immigrants and fentanyl. He bemoaned what he said would be the most expensive Thanksgiving ever for everyday Americans because of Democratic policies.

“It’s all right, I’ve got all night,” he said to groans from the chamber not long into his remarks around 8:30 p.m. on Nov. 18 as the House was on the verge of voting on the bill. McCarthy then continued to speak and point his finger into the air until 5:10 the next morning, his forehead shimmering under the glare of lights, his bleary-eyed colleagues behind him resisting the urge to nod off.

For McCarthy, the marathon speech — a record for the House — was a defining moment, a crucial chance to show that he can lead a House Republican caucus that over time has become more radical, combative, and adept at obstructionism and media manipulation. It also looked much like an audition for House speaker, should the Republicans win the majority of seats in next year’s election.

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Biden returns to New Hampshire for first time since his primary loss to tout his new infrastructure law

WOODSTOCK, N.H. — Standing before an aging, rusty steel bridge, President Biden on Tuesday declared that his newly signed $1.2 trillion infrastructure package would help expand New Hampshire’s high-speed Internet access, clean up its water supply, and repair its roads and bridges — such as the decrepit one serving as his backdrop.

“Folks, every mile counts, every minute counts in an emergency,” he told an audience of several dozen people in this secluded forest town, pointing to the 82-year-old bridge over the Pemigewasset River behind him and saying its deteriorating condition could slow down firefighters and emergency responders.

The state was the first stop in a series of nationwide events by Biden and top administration officials to promote the bipartisan infrastructure law — and in the process try to rebuild the popularity of his presidency and his party after a rough few months that have seen his approval rating plummet and the Democrats lose a governor’s seat in Virginia.

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Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont won’t seek reelection

Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont Democrat and the chamber’s most senior member, said Monday he will not seek reelection in 2022, opening a scramble to fill his seat in a narrowly divided Congress where the party is fighting to retain control after next year’s midterm elections.

Speaking at the State House in Montpelier, where he first launched his Senate career nearly half a century ago, Leahy, 81, said he was proud to be his state’s longest-serving senator and had worked to bring Vermont’s voice and values to the nation and the world. But he and his wife, Marcelle, had concluded it was time “to put down the gavel,” he said.

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In Charlottesville, a civil trial against white supremacists gives a nightmarish view of a deadly car attack — and the racist ideologies that fueled it

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — Marissa Blair and Marcus Martin married on a breezy, sunny day in May 2018 under an arbor draped with purple and lavender wisteria, the colors chosen in tribute to the friend they had lost nine months earlier.

At the time, they saw their union as an act of resistance, a tender coda to the hate and horror that shook the nation and their lives when, on Aug. 12, 2017, a self-avowed white supremacist intentionally plowed his car into social justice protesters, killing their friend Heather Heyer and injuring 35 people, including Martin.

But since that spring wedding, their marriage hasunraveled as they wrestled with the lasting trauma and physical effects of the car attack, they told jurors last week in a federal civil trial unfolding here against two dozen white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and organizations behind the deadly “Unite the Right” rally.

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As negotiations on Democrats’ social spending bill draw to a close, they tackle a final thorny issue: immigration

WASHINGTON — A trio of House Democrats on Thursday made a last-minute push to broaden provisions to help undocumented families in the party’s massive social spending and climate change legislation, worried the bill might be the last opportunity to deliver on President Biden’s campaign promises on immigration reform given a deepening partisan divide on the issue.

Currently, the bill would provide temporary protections and work permits to roughly 7 million people living in the United States without authorized status and who entered the country before Jan. 1, 2011. That includes 1.6 million people who arrived as children, a group known as “dreamers,” and 3.6 million day care workers, janitors, and farmworkers doing essential jobs during the pandemic.

The changes were welcomed by some immigrant rights advocates and lawyers who have been pressuring President Biden to stay true to his pledge to significantly expand opportunities for immigrants and refugees in the United States. But they are still less than what the White House has previously proposed, including its initial plan for permanent residency and citizenship for an estimated 11 million undocumented people.

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