NEW YORK — Donald Trump will meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday morning, opening a new chapter in a fraught relationship roiled by skepticism from the Republican presidential nominee and his party over U.S. involvement in the Russia-Ukraine war.

The meeting will be their first since 2019 and will happen in the final stage of a U.S. presidential race that has put a spotlight on partisan divisions over the war.

Zelensky, who addressed the United Nations General Assembly this week, is in the United States appealing for more support in his country’s fight against Russia. He met separately on Thursday with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who is Trump’s opponent in the November election. The meetings were part of an unsuccessful push to persuade the White House to grant permission to fire American-made missiles farther into Russia. Instead, Biden announced the delivery of more military aid and new air defense capabilities.

A Trump victory in November would probably herald a shift in the U.S. posture toward the war in Ukraine. While Harris and Biden have sought to show support for Zelensky, Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), have both expressed deep skepticism about aid to Ukraine. The former president has repeatedly said that Russia’s invasion would have never happened if he were still president, and he has previously expressed admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin, calling some of his strategic decisions “savvy” and “genius.”

Trump said in a Thursday news conference that Zelensky had asked to meet with him. “It’s a shame what’s happening in Ukraine — so many deaths, so much destruction,” Trump said. He also claimed he could broker a deal between Zelensky and Putin “quite quickly,” but he declined to provide details of what that deal would entail. The Washington Post previously reported that Trump has privately said he could end the war by pressuring Ukraine to give up some territory.

Earlier this week, Trump sharply criticized Zelensky. “We continue to give billions of dollars to a man who refuses to make a deal,” Trump said during a campaign event in Mint Hill, N.C., appearing to fault Zelensky for the war, even though Russia was the aggressor.

Trump also blamed Biden and Harris for the conflict, claiming they “allowed this to happen by feeding Zelensky money and munitions like no country has ever seen before.” He claimed that Zelensky was “making little nasty aspersions toward your favorite president.”

During his U.S. visit, Zelensky has outlined a “victory plan” in an effort to further increase support for the war. While Biden on Thursday announced the delivery of more military aid and new air defense capabilities, he has resisted giving Ukraine authority for long-range strikes out of concern they could increase the risk of direct confrontation between Russia and the West.

Zelensky’s trip — which has included visiting a factory in Scranton, Pa., that makes shells for Ukraine’s war effort, alongside Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro (D) who has campaigned for Harris — has drawn criticism from Republicans. The tensions have run in both directions; Zelensky called Vance “too radical” in an interview with the New Yorker.

“Every time he came to our country, he’d walk away with $60 billion. He’s probably the greatest salesman on earth,” Trump said in North Carolina.

Trump and Zelensky have had a tense relationship dating back to 2019, when Trump, who was then president, withheld military aid to Ukraine in an effort to pressure Zelensky to dig up dirt about Biden’s son Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine. That effort led to the impeachment of Trump in the U.S. House on charges that he abused his office and obstructed Congress. (The Senate acquitted Trump.)

A transcript of Trump’s call with Zelensky showed that Trump had offered Zelensky support from the Justice Department to investigate Biden. In September 2019, Trump described the call as “perfectly fine and routine.”

More recently, Trump spoke on the phone with Zelensky in July 2024, shortly after the attempted assassination of the former U.S. president in Butler, Pa. “We agreed with President Trump to discuss at a personal meeting what steps can make peace fair and truly lasting,” Zelensky wrote on social media.

Trump, meanwhile, said he would “end the war” and predicted that Russia and Ukraine “will be able to come together and negotiate a deal that ends the violence.”

Vice President Kamala Harris is scheduled to call for tougher border security measures on Friday during a visit to the southern border, a trip that amounts to her latest attempt to directly confront some of her biggest political vulnerabilities.

In what her campaign is billing as a major speech in Douglas, Ariz., Harris is planning to emphasize her support for a bipartisan border security bill and decry Republican nominee Donald Trump’s central role in derailing it.

“The American people deserve a president who cares more about border security than playing political games,” she plans to say, according to an excerpt released by her campaign.

Her campaign is also releasing an ad that will air in Arizona and other battleground states. “She will secure our border,” the narrator states. “We need a real leader with a real plan to fix the border. And that’s Kamala Harris.”

Harris’s decision to visit the border, as Trump attacks her forcefully on immigration and polls show voters trust him more on the issue, marks a stark effort to address a political vulnerability head-on. Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), regularly criticize Democrats as being insufficiently tough on immigration, and President Joe Biden has suffered politically from scenes of chaos at the border, although crossings have fallen in recent months.

During her trip Friday, Harris plans to say forcefully that America needs to enforce its laws on the border, according to a campaign official. She will also recount her record as California attorney general, saying she prosecuted transnational gangs and criminal organizations that smuggled drugs or trafficked humans and guns across the border.

She will also visit Border Patrol agents and argue that they need more resources, and will promise that combating the flow of fentanyl across the board will be “a top priority” of her presidency. As part of that effort, she will propose adding new fentanyl-detection machines at ports of entry at the border and will press the Chinese government to do more to crack down on companies that make chemicals used in fentanyl.

“We do have a broken immigration system. And it needs to be fixed,” the vice president said during an interview Wednesday with MSNBC. She cited the bipartisan border bill, which would have significantly increased the number of border agents.

“Donald Trump got word of the bill, realized it was going to fix a problem he wanted to run on, and told them to kill the bill, don’t put it up for a vote,” Harris said. “He killed a bill that would have actually been a solution, because he wants to run on a problem instead of fixing a problem.”

She said that if she is elected, she would bring that legislation back and attempt to pass it. In a reflection of the sharp shift in the political landscape since Biden took office, Harris focused almost entirely on securing the border, nodding only briefly to the longtime Democratic aim of providing a way for undocumented immigrants already in the country to become citizens.

“We need a comprehensive plan that includes what we need to do to fortify not only our border, but deal with the fact that we also need to create pathways for people to earn citizenship,” she said.

Trump has routinely unleashed harsh rhetoric against the influx of immigrants, suggesting it is poisoning the American way of life. At a campaign rally Monday in Pennsylvania, Trump referred to the immigrant population in Springfield, Ohio, saying, “You have to get them the hell out.”

Trump and Vance have previously — and falsely — claimed that immigrants in the town have been stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets.

Early in the Biden administration, Harris was tasked with leading diplomatic efforts to tackle the “root causes” of immigration by improving conditions in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras. Although her mandate did not involve current border crossings, Republicans began referring to her as the “border czar” and sought to link her to the problems at the border.

Harris also made a trip to the border in June 2021, traveling to El Paso for a 4½-hour visit to tour operations.

OMAHA — Bored by politics until two months ago, Coral Meija said two things got her involved in this year’s election: Vice President Kamala Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket and, more importantly, two abortion-related measures on Nebraska’s November ballot.

“That is definitely No. 1,” said Meija, 23, gesturing to reveal that she is seven months pregnant, as she sat last Friday in a Mexican restaurant on the outskirts of town at a packed event for the local Democrat running for the U.S. House.

Combine those two factors with Nebraska’s quirky law giving Democrats a chance to nab one potentially game-changing electoral vote for president, as well as a crucial House race, and Omaha has turned into one of the most unlikely but hottest battlegrounds on the political map.

Just twice since the law changed in 1992 has red Nebraska awarded one of its five electoral college votes to the Democratic presidential candidate, and both times it came from Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which encompasses Omaha. Now, after Harris’s surge through the late summer, Democrats and Republicans alike see a chance for the Omaha area to vote for the Democratic candidate a third time — and maybe even swing the presidential election.

Under that not-completely-crazy possibility, Harris and former president Donald Trump could end up dividing up states so evenly that the electoral count could end up at 269 for Harris, 268 for Trump.

And then the final vote could be decided right here in Omaha.

“Well, we can be the tiebreaking vote for the presidency and people take it really seriously,” said state Sen. Tony Vargas (D), who is challenging the district’s four-term incumbent Rep. Don Bacon (R) in a race to help determine the House majority. “The energy is just incredible. And people take both these things very, very seriously, as a point of pride.”

Vargas was speaking Friday in his campaign headquarters, where he was mapping out ways in which his campaign and Harris’s Nebraska team can help each other. The congressional race has always been expected to play a pivotal role with the House, and now, with the possibility the 2nd district might hand Harris an electoral college vote, the Harris-Walz campaign is flooding the TV airwaves here.

Local Democrats have embraced “blue-dot energy,” planting simple white lawn signs with a blue circle to illustrate their liberal lean despite being surrounded by a deep-red, conservative area for hundreds of miles in any direction.

“We know that Harris has blocked $6 million on TV, and she’s spending it right now. We have zero on the other side. So what it does, it hurts our party in the Omaha area, up and down ballot,” Bacon said Saturday during a rally at a local police hall.

In fact, Bacon shortchanged the disparity. The Harris-Walz campaign is spending $6 million in ads in Omaha, according to AdImpact, an independent firm surveying political spending. But Biden had already spent about $4 million before he handed the reins to Harris, and liberal allies spent another $5 million.

All told, it’s about $15 million for the Democratic presidential ticket and less than $200,000 for the GOP nominee.

Trump’s campaign has simply surrendered this district, despite winning it in 2016 and losing to Biden here by just 6 percent in 2020. The state legislature even redrew it to be a little less favorable for Democrats.

Aside from a private fundraiser in late August attended by Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Trump’s running mate, the campaign has little presence in Omaha. His allies launched a ham-handed attempt to strong-arm state legislators into changing the law so that Trump could claim all five of Nebraska’s electoral votes in the winner-take-all model used by 48 other states, but that failed. Under current law, the winner of the state’s popular vote gets two electoral college votes, and its three congressional districts gets one vote each.

With Harris going all in, Republicans fear that Bacon and other down-ballot Republicans could pay the price.

By late June, Republicans in Washington had felt confident about Bacon’s campaign, in part because Biden had sagged far enough that Trump had a pretty good chance at winning the district and its electoral vote.

Now, Republicans and Democrats alike view Harris as the heavy favorite to come close to or even exceed Biden’s margin of victory in the state’s 2nd Congressional District.

And that makes Bacon more endangered than he has ever been.

“I bet you it costs me 2 or 3 points every four years,” he said of the Democratic effort to win the lone electoral vote. “It surely skews the spending in our district, which I obviously don’t like. But if you’re a Democrat, you love it.”

A retired Air Force brigadier general, Bacon, 61, is running as a mainstream conservative who is willing to break with his party, as a Republican who voted to certify Biden’s 2020 victory and one of 13 House Republicans who supported the 2021 infrastructure law.

Vargas, 40, an eight-year veteran of the legislature, served as a public school teacher and on the school board. He’s running to the political middle as a tax-cutter who wants a safe and secure border, embracing his heritage as part of the American Dream to appeal to the district’s moderate lean.

Bacon narrowly survived in 2022 when, by Vargas’s own admission, he ran an uneven campaign that raised too little money, ran too few negative contrast ads on Bacon’s record and failed to galvanize enough support in Black and Latino neighborhoods.

“We did well and over-performed in places that we didn’t expect to, but we really needed to make sure to do more to get more Democrats out to vote,” Vargas, whose parents immigrated from Peru, said.

Even though Vargas had a more professional campaign this time, that lack of voter enthusiasm persisted through most of the summer with Biden at the top of the ticket. “The party was sort of dead,” said Josh Rodriguez, 23, who works in accounting for Union Pacific, joining Meija’s table Friday.

“I accepted it,” Rodriguez said of Trump. “He was gonna win.”

That changed when Biden dropped out and Harris took the mantle, placing a woman with a chance to make history at the top of the ticket as Vargas tries to become the state’s first Latino member of Congress and abortion rights measures are on the ballot.

Nationally, Harris raced back into a competitive posture and pretty soon political commentators started saying Harris merely needed to win the “Blue Wall” — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — to win the electoral college.

But that was the 2020 version of a presidential victory map, when those three states added up to 44 electoral votes. Just winning those three and the other states that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had won added up to 271 votes back then.

After the decennial census in 2021, Michigan and Pennsylvania lost a vote each, dropping the Blue Wall margin to exactly 269 votes. Now, if Trump were to win the southern battlegrounds of Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina and Arizona, the race could end up tied 269-269 if he won the Omaha district, and result in Congress deciding the presidency.

If the Omaha district breaks for Harris, just as it did for Biden four years ago and Obama in 2008, she would win the presidency with 270.

“Kamala Harris definitely, definitely helped out,” Meija’s cousin Jesus Ruiz Flores said of the local energy.

Harris campaign officials privately feel strong about the race but take nothing for granted. When her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, held a rally outside Omaha last month, he leaned into the idea that this district could be critical.

“You know what I also know about this state? Nebraskans don’t fear the future, you make the future,” Walz, who was born and raised in rural Nebraska, told a crowd of several thousand.

Officially, Trump maintains that he can win the district. “I LOVE OMAHA, and won it in 2016,” he wrote on social media after the effort to change the law failed. “Looks like I’ll have to do it again!!!”

There’s little visual sign of a real effort. Maybe Trump’s advisers saw the writing on the wall, or the highway, a while ago and realized Omaha is not his type of town.

A drive along West Dodge Road out of Omaha’s downtown revealed several businesses with big signs promoting Bacon’s reelection as well as those of Sens. Deb Fischer (R) and Pete Ricketts (R) — but not Trump.

Nebraska presents as a deeply conservative state, having given Trump margins of almost 20 and 25 percentage points the past two elections. But voters have long favored conservatives who are temperamentally moderate in Congress, even as loud, far-right voices control state and county Republican committees. These leaders have issued symbolic penalties to Bacon and other Republicans for not being sufficiently supportive of Trump, infuriating mainstream GOP voters.

“The state and county party have alienated a lot of Republicans because they are hard core, what I call FRITO’s: Freaking Republicans in Trump only,” Tim Heller, 60, a life insurance executive, said at the police hall while wearing a Bacon T-shirt.

Depending on his mood, he might choose a different f-word to lead the FRITO’s acronym. “They’re focused on Trump and Trump alone and their tinfoil hat, election security issues,” said Heller, who backed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) in the GOP primary and will now support Trump.

In its almost 10 years of existence, the House Freedom Caucus, an ideological wellspring of Trumpism, has never claimed a member from Nebraska among its ranks. And Ricketts and Fischer, who faces a surprisingly strong challenge from an independent, are reliably quiet allies of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

The state’s political nature is a fountain of reformist ideas from both parties. In the early 1890s, William Jennings Bryan represented eastern Nebraska in the House for two terms, served as columnist for the Omaha World-Herald and then became a three-time Democratic presidential nominee, running on populist agrarian ideas.

And in 1934, Republican U.S. Sen. George Norris led the way to getting Nebraska to turn into a unicameral legislature, just a Senate, and a nonpartisan setup that has none of the usual party leadership structure that can whip up support for the governor or any leader. It takes a two-thirds supermajority of 33 votes to clear a filibuster in the 49-senator body.

Is there anyone cracking the whip and instilling discipline? “No, there’s not. It is a very foreign concept,” said state Sen. Machaela Cavanaugh (D), a third-generation politician in Omaha.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) learned this lesson the hard way last week when he parachuted into Lincoln, the state capital, to rally together a bunch of GOP state senators to try to convince them to change the law and award all five electoral votes to Trump, presuming he wins statewide again.

As Graham admitted Monday, after his bid fell apart, no one seemed capable of ordering these state senators to fall in line.

“It was interesting. They have a different system. Everybody’s like a mini-governor,” Graham told reporters back in the U.S. Capitol.

Bacon and Vargas are both now trying to position themselves as the sensible moderate while attacking the other as an ideological extremist. Bacon brings up Vargas’s past support for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), while Vargas hammers Bacon for embracing Trump’s recent endorsement.

The blue-dot energy clearly handed momentum to Vargas, whose road to Washington might be driven through that lone electoral vote.

“We do things differently in Nebraska,” Vargas said. “Nebraska is different and it’s okay that we’re different.”

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff has made more than 30 campaign stops in the five weeks since the Democratic National Convention, stumping for his wife in over a dozen states. This week in Texas, he swung through three cities, ate at Whataburger and boosted other Democrats on the ballot.

“It’s only been two months and a couple of days since President Biden decided not to seek reelection. This was an unprecedented situation,” he told a San Antonio audience on Monday, adding: “We needed somebody to step into the breach … and that person happened to be my wife, Kamala Harris.”

Meanwhile, former first lady Melania Trump has not been seen on the campaign trail in the 10 weeks since the Republican National Convention, where she did not speak. Known for keeping a low profile, she has been even less visible this election cycle than in 2016 or 2020. At an April fundraiser, one of the few political appearances she has made this year, she collected payment for speaking, CNN reported Monday.

Over the past few weeks, Melania Trump’s public presence has primarily been limited to social media, where she has released videos promoting her forthcoming memoir, due out Oct. 8. On Thursday morning, she is slated to sit for a TV interview — her first in more than two years, according to Fox News — to promote her book and discuss former president Donald Trump’s campaign.

“This is huge, because we don’t hear from Melania a lot,” “Fox & Friends” host Lawrence Jones said when co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who will conduct the interview, announced it on air.

The contrasts reflect the personalities of the candidates and their spouses — and highlight the facts of the race, which Vice President Harris joined in July after Joe Biden’s exit.

“The [Harris] campaign needs every available surrogate on deck to help get the message out,” said Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist. “The Harris and Walz camp have to reach as many voters as they can, so they’re expecting a lot out of the spouses.”

Trump, meanwhile, has no qualms about breaking with convention, and after two campaigns and one presidential term, he and his wife are known to Americans.

The differing strategies have also extended to the vice-presidential candidates.

Gwen Walz, wife of Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D), has appeared at 30 events across the country in the past month, the majority of them solo, according to the campaign. Though the wife of Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), Usha Vance, has also met voters on the trail, she has largely traveled with her husband rather than headlining independent engagements. The Trump-Vance campaign did not respond to requests for a full list of her events since the convention.

The contrast between the campaigns was evident at stops in New York last week.

At a Sept. 18 rally on Long Island, Trump described calling his wife to brag about his crowd sizes and ask her, “How great am I?” He also indicated he had not read her book because he was too busy.

“Go out and buy it,” Trump told supporters. “ … And if she says bad things about me, I’ll call you all up and I’ll say, ‘Don’t buy it; get rid of it.’”

The same night, Emhoff spoke during an event in Brooklyn, where he offered a retort to Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R), who had said Harris “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she doesn’t have biological children. (Harris is stepmother to Emhoff’s two children.)

“As if keeping women humble, whether you have children or not, is something we should strive for,” Emhoff said. “It is not.”

Politicians’ spouses have long held a unique role in campaigns, as they’re able to talk about the candidates in a way no one else can. That’s a role Emhoff has embraced. He has followed a fairly traditional playbook for a campaign spouse, analysts say, and he’s seen within the campaign as Harris’s chief validator.

Emhoff has appeared at 32 events in the five weeks since the Democratic convention, according to the Harris campaign. He gave a 14-minute speech at the convention, and has since made stops from Florida to Arizona. This week, he stopped by a Pennsylvania field office before heading to Texas.

Meanwhile, Melania Trump bucked tradition by declining to speak at the Republican convention, where she delivered remarks in 2016 and 2020. Though she has long preferred privacy, making her lack of participation unsurprising, experts said her absence is still notable.

“Had the Republicans nominated anyone else, there would’ve been the expectation that that person’s spouse be out and about, actively campaigning in the same kind of high-profile way that Doug Emhoff has been,” said Katherine Jellison, an Ohio University history professor who studies first ladies.

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment about Melania Trump’s involvement.

While her distance from Trump’s campaign isn’t seen as hurting her husband’s standing with his base, strategists said Melania might help him appeal to other blocs if she campaigned — especially as polls show the former president lagging Harris among female voters.

“He’s not polling well with suburban women in these toss-up states and having Melania out there talking about kitchen table issues could [help],” Bonjean said.

In her book promotion videos, Melania has sometimes commented on politics — blaming gas prices and global unrest on Biden administration policies — but also on subjects as varied as her nude modeling and her renovation of the White House Rose Garden. Last week, she also tweeted to promote her 2024 Christmas ornament collection and a “limited edition necklace celebrating Lady Liberty.”

With candidates at the top of the ticket facing the most public scrutiny, the spouses of vice-presidential nominees generally have more flexibility in how much to campaign, Jellison said, noting that neither party’s approach this election cycle has been atypical.

Gwen Walz has stumped in a dozen states, meeting with educators, military families and LGBTQ advocates. She talks about reproductive rights and school shootings, tells voters the story of how she and Walz met as teachers, and hands out her great-grandmother’s gingersnap cookies.

Usha Vance spoke at the Republican convention, introducing her husband and calling their relationship an “example of the American Dream.” In the 10 weeks since, she has traveled to some of his engagements, recently greeting voters at a North Carolina sports bar and attending a Georgia dinner where her husband spoke.

Whatever candidates’ spouses choose to do during a campaign has the potential to influence voters, experts said.

“It does matter a great deal,” said University of Pennsylvania art history professor Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, who has studied first ladies and their portraits. “We all hope, regardless of who that person is filling the job, that the person who is closest to them is being supportive.”

Meryl Kornfield contributed to this report.

A sweeping bill introduced by a Democratic senator Wednesday would greatly increase the size of the Supreme Court, make it harder for the justices to overturn laws, require justices to undergo audits and remove roadblocks for high court nominations.

The legislation by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) is one of the most ambitious proposals to date to remake a high court that has suffered a sharp decline in its public approval following a string of contentious decisions and ethics scandals in recent years. It has little chance of passing at the moment, since Republicans have generally opposed efforts to overhaul the court.

Wyden, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee, said the goal of the bill is to restore public confidence in a battered institution. He said he hopes to get parts of the bill passed, even if the whole package is not embraced by fellow legislators.

“It’s not an atomic secret that the process for selecting justices is politicized,” Wyden said. “You’ve got this thoroughly politicized process resulting in a Supreme Court that now frequently issues sweeping rulings to overturn laws and upend precedents. We are proposing a way to restore some balance between the three branches of government.”

The bill’s most significant measure would increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court from nine to 15 over the course of 12 years. The staggered format over two or three administrations is aimed at diminishing the chance that one political party packs the courts with its nominees.

Each president would approve justices in the first and third year of their terms during the rollout.

The bill would also require a ruling by two-thirds of the high court and circuit courts of appeals, rather than a simple majority, to overturn a law passed by Congress. Wyden said the current court has been too quick to discard precedent and curtail rights by narrow majorities.

The legislation would also require Supreme Court nominees to be automatically scheduled for a vote in the Senate if they have lingered in committee for more than 180 days.

The measure would prevent senators from blocking a president’s nominees by refusing to hold a vote on them, as then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) did following President Barack Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland in 2016.

McConnell held open the seat that had been occupied by conservative Justice Antonin Scalia until Donald Trump became president. Trump put forward Neil M. Gorsuch.

McConnell said Garland’s nomination came too close to the 2016 presidential election, but he later helped push through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett in the waning months of Trump’s presidency, after liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died. Democrats accused McConnell of hypocrisy.

The moves helped create the conservative supermajority that now dominates the court.

Another provision in Wyden’s bill would expand the number of federal judicial circuits from 13 to 15, adding more than 100 district court judges and more than 60 at the appellate level.

Supreme Court justices must report income, dividends, property sales and gifts among other things, but the bill would bolster financial checks, disclosures and other transparency measures. It would require the IRS to initiate an audit of the justices’ tax returns each year, release the results and make the tax filings public. Nominees to the court would have to disclose three years of tax returns.

Another measure would allow a two-thirds vote of the court to force a fellow justice to recuse from a case.

Each justice would be required to publicly release their opinions and disclose how they voted on issues considered on an emergency basis, sometimes referred to as the shadow docket. Such decisions, which have become more common and increasingly controversial in recent years, don’t identify how each justice voted.

Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute a former federal judge and a judicial ethics expert, said expanding the court to 15 justices might improve the administration of the high court and cool the rancorous politics around nominating justices.

“Canada is a fraction the size of United States in terms of population and it has 15 justices,” Fogel said. “Most of the larger democracies in the world have bigger apex courts than we do.”

He added that the current makeup of the Supreme Court “gives those justices an outsize amount of power. It makes each appointment a big to-do in terms of the confirmation process.”

Wyden’s bill, like others introduced by Democrats to bring changes to the Supreme Court, faces long odds of passing. Republicans, who control the House of Representatives, say the bills aren’t about reform but politics. They believe Democrats are trying to undermine a high court that has delivered conservatives a string of major victories in recent terms.

Other bills introduced by Democrats recently would add teeth to the Supreme Court’s ethics code, which has been widely criticized for lacking an enforcement mechanism. Another would cap gifts justices can receive at $50, the same limit members of Congress must abide by. Others would establish 18-year term limits for justices and try to drain politics from nominations to the high court.

Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) reintroduced a bill Wednesday that would give Congress greater latitude to check Supreme Court rulings.

In July, President Joe Biden sharply criticized the Supreme Court and announced he supported a binding ethics code and 18-year term limits for justices. Biden also called for a constitutional amendment that would prohibit blanket immunity for presidents, following a ruling by the Supreme Court in July that extended wide protection to former presidents against prosecution of official acts.

Liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson have also said publicly they support a binding ethics code, but Gorsuch has expressed skepticism. The other justices have not made their opinions known.

The calls for reform have followed a string of ethics controversies swirling around the justices, including failing to disclose lavish travel funded by wealthy benefactors, a spouse flying politically charged flags and a justice reportedly using court staff to promote a book.

A Gallup opinion poll from July showed public approval of the Supreme Court is near record lows, with only 43 percent of Americans approving and 53 percent disapproving.

Polls have found there is significant support for some Supreme Court overhauls. A USA Today/Ipsos poll from August found 75 percent of Americans supported a binding ethics code for justices and 61 percent supported 18-year time limits. The poll found only 40 percent approved of expanding the court from nine to 15 justices.

Supreme Court justices and federal judges are under new financial reporting rules that were announced Monday by the Judicial Conference’s Committee on Financial Disclosures. Members of the judiciary are not required to disclose stays at a personal residence of the host, even if the personal residence is owned by a corporate entity.

The rules change follows reports by ProPublica and other media outlets that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas for many years did not disclose private jet travel and luxury vacations funded by his friend and benefactor Harlan Crow, a Dallas billionaire.

ProPublica reported in 2023 that Thomas frequently vacationed at Camp Topridge, an invitation-only lakeside resort in Upstate New York where guests stay free. The resort is owned by Topridge Holdings LLC, a holding company owned by Crow. Under Monday’s updated personal hospitality exemption, Thomas would probably not have to report a stay at the resort or on Crow’s superyacht, the Michaela Rose, which is owned by another Crow holding company.

“This watered-down guidance protects Justice Thomas and his gaggle of fawning billionaires, not the American people,” a spokesperson for Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote in an email.

In early 2019, at the beginning of the 116th Congress, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) announced to the media that Rep. Steve King would not be seated on any committees, limiting his power. The move followed comments the Iowa Republican made to the New York Times a few days before in which he wondered how the terms “white nationalist” and “white supremacist” had become offensive.

“This is not the first time we have heard these comments,” McCarthy told reporters. ‘That is not the party of Lincoln, and it is definitely not America.” With the move, he said, “I think we spoke very loud and clear that we will not tolerate this type of language in the Republican Party.”

Even in 2019, with Donald Trump in the White House, McCarthy’s comments rang a little hollow. But particularly by current standards, McCarthy’s position was laudable. Here, at least, was a Republican leader willing to call out a legislator whose sympathies with White nationalism and anti-immigrant racism were obvious.

If anything, King was simply ahead of the curve within his party. He first rose to national attention with breathless jeremiads against immigration, including, at one point, presenting a model of a wall he suggested should be built on the border with Mexico. This may sound familiar.

In 2018, King expressed support for the “great replacement” theory, a claim advanced by White supremacists suggesting that there’s a plot to subvert countries through immigration. This idea, amplified on Fox News by Tucker Carlson, has now been embraced widely on the right and pops up regularly in rhetoric from prominent officials, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.).

That same year, King shared on social media a photo of a group of young immigrants who had been separated from their parents, declaring that they were “old enough to serve in the military.” Describing immigrants as “military-aged males” in an effort to amplify a perceived threat is now commonplace in Republican rhetoric.

King’s punishment (and eventual primary loss) did not curtail the rhetoric he presented. If anything, the trend on the right has been to see how far that rhetoric can go while still being defensible as not explicitly racist. Because the rhetoric has become more commonplace, though, what Republicans view as defensible has steadily crept further to the right. A party that’s centrally powered by White Americans’ perceptions of diminished status has given itself lots of space to lash out at those who aren’t White.

Which brings us at last to Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.).

On Wednesday afternoon, Higgins joined the Republican presidential nominee and his running mate in bashing immigrants from Haiti.

“Lol. These Haitians are wild,” he wrote on X, the social media company formerly known as Twitter that’s become a central vehicle for the aforementioned lashing out. “Eating pets, vudu, nastiest country in the western hemisphere, cults, slapstick gangsters … but damned if they don’t feel all sophisticated now, filing charges against our President and VP. All these thugs better get their mind right and their ass out of our country before January 20th.”

The “filing charges” comment related to a group in Ohio that is seeking to hold to account Trump and Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) (not “our” president and vice president at the moment) for their rhetoric targeting Haitian immigrants in the city of Springfield. But that’s beside the point, which is that nearly every other word in Higgins’s screed is explicitly racist and/or toxic.

This is not the first time we’ve heard such things from Higgins, to paraphrase McCarthy. Higgins is a former law enforcement officer who faced sanction for his treatment of an unarmed Black man he was detaining. In 2016, The Washington Post covered him after his viral videos calling out criminals drifted into his referring to Black suspects as “animals.”

Oh, and then there was the interview he granted a newspaper in his home state when former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke was seeking election as governor.

“Regardless of the fact that David’s a homeboy and all that, the boy’s a Nazi, and that’s a real problem,” Higgins said of Duke. Nonetheless, the reporter noted, Higgins voted for him.

After Higgins’s post about Haitians created a predictable uproar, Speaker Johnson spoke to reporters about the controversy.

“I just talked to him about it,” Johnson said. “He said he went to the back, and he prayed about it and he regretted it, and he pulled the post down. That’s what you want the gentleman to do.” He added that Higgins “probably regrets some of the language he used.”

Higgins didn’t seem to agree. Speaking to CNN, he leaned into his original comments.

“It’s all true,” he said of the post that included overtly false assertions. “I can put up another controversial post tomorrow if you want me to. I mean, we do have freedom of speech. I’ll say what I want.” He compared the post to “something stuck to the bottom of my boot: Just scrape it off and move on with my life.”

When Democrats called for Higgins to be censured, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) rose to his colleague’s defense. The post had (by then) been deleted, he insisted, and “if we want to go through everything the other side has said we’ll be happy to do it.”

Whataboutism, another prominent feature of the modern Republican Party. Good luck to Mr. Scalise in finding social media posts from Democrats as aggressively hostile and racist as Higgins’s.

Presumably part of the reason Johnson and Scalise circled the wagons is that they, like Higgins, are Louisianans. Part of it, too, is that their majority is extremely narrow, and aggravating any individual legislator is something they would rather avoid. But part of it, without a doubt, is that holding Higgins to account means holding the party to account and holding its leader, Donald Trump, to account. How do you say that Higgins’s language was unacceptable when Trump and Vance are making similar claims?

This is precisely why it’s important to intercept false, inflammatory and racist rhetoric early on. The more you allow it to seep into the conversation, the more you simply accept it and the further it ends up traveling.

Everyone agrees, at least for now, that the n-word counts as racist. Anything else, it seems, is excusable, if not defensible — at least when political power is on the line.