The Washington Post National Weekly - September 2, 2018

SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 2, 2018

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IN COLLABORATION WITH

ABCDE NATIONAL WEEKLY

Gun violence in New Orleans has compelled a high school football coach to do all he can to make sure his players don’t just win — they survive

‘our call is to save them’

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THE FIX

If Sessions falls, a storm ensues BY

A ARON B LAKE

P

resident Trump likes to talk about firing people. And apparently he’s been doing it again with Jeff Sessions.

Although that could be dismissed as Trump flying off the handle again, context is important. The context here is that Senate Republicans appear to be warming to the idea.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) once said there would be “holy hell” to pay if Trump fired his attorney general; now he says Trump is entitled to an attorney general he trusts. Others on the Senate Judiciary Committee also have given their tacit approval to a change — as long as it’s after the midterm elections. This could be actually happening now.

But doing it after the midterms solves only a political problem. It does nothing to temper the potentially game-changing effect on the Russia and related investigations. And that’s the big question that is likely to remain, given that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s and the Southern District of New York’s Michael Cohen cases aren’t done. Trump clearly wants an attorney general who will oversee these probes — unlike Sessions, who recused himself from Russia-related matters — and his actions suggest he wants someone who will do his bidding.

Replacing Sessions could, theoretically at least, give him both.

But it’s not quite so simple. And the whole thing could quickly devolve into a big political and legal battle.

There would be two main dominoes to fall after Sessions resigns or is removed: Trump may pick an acting attorney general, and he would nominate a full-time replacement, who would be subject to confirmation.

Both could conceivably take oversight of Mueller’s Russia investigation away from Dep-

KLMNO WEEKLY

JIM LO SCALZO/EPA-EFE/SHUTTERSTOCK

President Trump firing Attorney General Jeff Sessions looks more likely than ever.

uty Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein, and if they’re more loyal, logic suggests, they could run interference for Trump or even try to shutter Mueller’s probe.

Getting to that point, though, will require clearing several hurdles.

The first is whether Trump can even pick an acting AG. As you may recall from David Shulkin’s exit as veterans affairs secretary, there is an open question as to whether the Federal Vacancies Reform Act allows a president to temporarily replace a Cabinet official he has fired — as opposed to one who has resigned.

If Trump was able to pick a temporary replacement, it couldn’t be just anybody; it would have to be someone who has already been confirmed by the Senate or (less likely) a Justice Department employee with a high enough rank. The former would seem to afford more of a chance of inserting a loyalist.

Former deputy assistant attorney general Marty Lederman said these are probably the

This publication was prepared by editors at The Washington Post for printing and distribution by our partner publications across the country. All articles and columns have previously appeared in The Post or on washingtonpost.com and have been edited to fit this format. For questions or comments regarding content, please e-mail weekly@washpost.com. If you have a question about printing quality, wish to subscribe, or would like to place a hold on delivery, please contact your local newspaper’s circulation department. © 2018 The Washington Post / Year 4, No. 47

biggest questions when it comes to whether Trump can actually affect the course of the investigations he faces.

“Whomever Trump appoints as a so-called acting AG in the short term will probably have greater practical significance than whom he nominates for Senate confirmation,” Lederman said.

That’s in part because it would be the person who could take over immediately, and in part because it would be someone who wouldn’t be subject to political maneuvering. The full-time replacement, after all, needs to be confirmed.

And while Senate Republicans are warming to the idea of replacing Sessions, that doesn’t mean they will give Trump carte blanche. Given the GOP’s slim 50-to-49 Senate majority — soon to be 51 to 49 once the late senator John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) replacement is appointed — Trump would need to strike a balance between installing someone who could do what he wants and someone who can win over Senate Republicans who at least profess to want the opposite.

Whoever replaces Sessions, the big questions at that point would be whether that person would undo what Rosenstein has done, restrict Mueller’s authorities in some new way, or even retract Mueller’s appointment.

Ultimately, this boils down to how much Republicans are willing to put up with from Trump — and whether they feel they can stop him. Also, it will probably take only one or two of them to actually stand in his way.

Most times, they haven’t been prepared to actually fight him, or they’ve fought him only partially, succumbing to the politics of the day in the GOP. This situation could be different for a whole host of reasons, but as Graham demonstrated, we also haven’t seen anyone draw a true line in the sand and stick to it yet. n ©The Washington Post

ON THE COVER Running back Ronnie Jackson, center, hypes up the Edna Karr High football team during practice on Aug. 9. Photo by JAHI CHIKWENDIU of The Washington Post

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OPINIONS

KLMNO WEEKLY

TOM TOLES

On trade, closer to compromise DAVID IGNATIUS is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

The best thing that can be said about President Trump’s latest trade initiative is that it moves the United States back toward the kind of agreements Trump unwisely blew up when he became president.

So, two cheers for Trump’s revamped free-trade agreement with Mexico, announced Monday, and the one he may get soon with Canada. He wants to rebrand the package, of course, so that it’s not called NAFTA (“bad connotations!”). But the preliminary update includes labor and environmental standards somewhat like those that President Barack Obama wanted to add to NAFTA — and made the centerpiece of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which Trump scuttled.

Trump seems readier to compromise these days with Europe, too, another positive shift after 20 months of intermittent trade tantrums. He hasn’t yet embraced Obama’s broad, marketopening vision of a Trans-Atlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (or TTIP), but maybe Trump will get there eventually, too. In recent months, he has been talking about mutually abolishing tariffs, which would be a good start.

“You go tariff-free, you go

barrier-free, you go subsidy-free . . . I mean, that would be the ultimate thing,” Trump enthused in June at the Group of Seven summit, in between taking swings at his trading partners.

For once, he was entirely right.

The financial markets, which Trump touts as a proxy for success, were roaring this past week at the prospect that we may see new trade agreements. The virtuous economic cycle (solid expansion, wage growth and continued low inflation) may be good news for Trump, but it’s also good news for everyone else.

The real importance of Trump’s Mexico move is that it clears the debris so the White House can concentrate on the bigger battle worth fighting — for fairer trade with a rising China that has tried for decades to rig the game in its favor. Europe and other trading partners should be our natural allies in this negotiation, for they, too, have suffered from China’s selfish policies.

What Wall Street seems to be hoping is that Trump will resolve

the little trade spats and marshal his forces for the more consequential ones. Allianz economist Mohamed El-Erian said Monday on CNBC that he sees a 60 percent chance that Trump’s aggressive policies will produce “fairer trade” for the United States. The puzzle for investors, he cautioned, is “how much damage would we incur in the process of winning this.”

Trump has often misdiagnosed the China trade problem. It’s not the sheer size of the U.S. trade deficit with China — though that was a staggering $375 billion last year, or about 65 percent of the total U.S. trade deficit. This raw number disguises the fact that China’s current-account surplus has been declining sharply as a percentage of its overall economy, from 9.9 percent of its gross domestic product in 2007 to about 1.4 percent last year.

The China problem isn’t how much it sells us but how it won’t allow U.S. companies or investors fair access to its markets — and that it steals every bit of intellectual property that it can.

Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin made this case Tuesday on CNBC: “We need better market access to China. We need reciprocal trade. And these are issues that our allies in the G-7 agree with us on. . . . This can’t be a one-way

transaction where they have free trade here and we have no trade there.”

The Obama administration was heading in the right direction on this one, as well, by trying to negotiate a bilateral investment treaty with China that would open markets for American companies and protect them from theft. Trump chucked that, too, but he now seems to be reprising his own amped-up version.

Maurice Obstfeld, chief economist at the IMF, cautioned against “Pyrrhic” victories in trade in a recent Financial Times article. He explained: “The U.S. imports aluminum . . . which contributes to its trade deficit with China. But cheaper aluminum imports facilitate one of the U.S.’s biggest and most distinctive exports: aircraft.

Restricting aluminum imports would not only hurt aircraft exports, it would make the global division of labor less efficient.”

Trump was elected by a country that doubted the global trading system was benefiting the ordinary worker. The answer to that popular anger wasn’t to wreck the system but to fix it. Too often during his presidency, Trump has looked like a wrecker.

But this past week, on Mexico, he claimed the unusual and welcome role of repairman. n

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OPINIONS

BY SEAN DELONAS

A world without required degrees MEGAN MCARDLE is a Washington Post opinion columnist.

This should send a small shiver through the spines of anyone employed in academia: the recruiting site Glassdoor has published a list of companies that no longer require a college degree — including professional heavyweights Google, Apple and Ernst & Young. If firms like these no longer insist upon a sheepskin, it seems just possible that the decades-long trend of requiring more and more education to maintain a toehold in the middle class might reverse.

To be clear, we’re a long way from returning to the days when enrollments were tiny, and cutting-edge technology firms were founded by ambitious machinists rather than Harvard dropouts. But our reverence for the college diploma is a social norm, not an economic necessity, as economist Bryan Caplan cogently argued in his recent book, “The Case Against Education.” There are better ways, such as apprenticeships or management training programs, to sort out workers who are bright and conscientious — especially given the barriers this throws up for talented people without the financial or social capital to obtain a four-year degree.

The endless ratchet of diploma requirements for jobs that can be learned in other ways is a recipe for firms losing talent, and

workers, especially those from lower-income families, losing opportunities.

That world is apt to be hard, however, on people who work in higher education. Colleges and universities have largely evaded the economic disruption that has whipsawed the rest of us; there’s little threat from foreign competition or automation, and they control the main gateway to secure and remunerative work.

True, feckless graduate programs producing too many PhDs have led to ferocious competition for tenure-track jobs — but the competition is so fierce precisely because the work is so secure and attractive compared with the rest of the economy.

Those people will lose a lot if “everyone should go to college” stops being a universal mantra.

But they’re not the only ones who

BY ADAM ZYGLIS FOR THE BUFFALO NEWS

should be shaking. A lot of vital research goes on at those schools.

They’re also repositories of enormous left-wing cultural and political power that would be scattered if enrollments began to precipitously decline. Indeed, enrollments already are falling in the humanities, where most of that power is held.

What does feminism look like without a nationwide network of women’s studies departments organizing conferences and doing research? What would our current debate about racism look like without the vocabulary and theoretical work supplied by critical race theorists? What would the rest of left-wing politics look like if many academics had to get jobs that didn’t leave them so much time to think and write?

And more broadly, what would left-wing activism look like without the critical nexus of student groups that organize protests and indoctrinate future graduates?

In another era, the left might have looked to trade unions, or the media. But unionism, never particularly strong here, has been gutted by deindustrialization.

And journalism’s business model is crumbling under assault from the tech companies, which have grabbed all the advertising dollars. If cracks start appearing

in the university system, what, to coin a phrase, is left?

That probably sounds like a joyous prospect for conservatives, who endlessly bemoan left-wing cultural hegemony. Most of that energy would be better spent shoring up their own bases of power, such as churches.

The increasing interlinkage of partisan leanings and cultural identity has allowed both sides of the political spectrum to consolidate control over key cultural institutions, which they can leverage to foment policy change. But it’s also concentrated partisan power within those nodes, leaving both sides dependent on them — and vulnerable to their decline.

And while tearing down the other side’s redoubts may seem like a win for your own, recent experience should give everyone pause. As Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, a columnist at the Week, pointed out last year, liberals who thought they hated the Christian right were shocked to find that they disliked the post-Christian right even more. And in the twilight of the universities, conservatives might equally well find themselves trembling before an opposition that is no longer sheltered in institutions, nor constrained by institutional norms. n

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OPINIONS

No single Republican can fill McCain’s roles PAUL KANE covers Congress for The Washington Post.

Sen. Lindsey O. Graham tackled a question that many have asked since John McCain’s death: Who will fill the role of traditional conservative, particularly on national security, that has been held by the Arizona Republican for the past three decades? ¶ The answer, Graham said Tues­ day, is that no single individual can do it.

AARON BERNSTEIN/REUTERS

“The void to be filled by John’s passing is more than I can fill.

Don’t look to me to replace this man,” Graham (R-S.C.) said in a tearful 15-minute speech remembering his mentor, calling on others “to follow in his footsteps. If you want to help me, join the march.”

It’s a remarkable but painfully honest admission from a senator who spent the past 15 years as the junior partner in the fight to steer the nation to a more hawkish position on foreign policy and the Republican Party to a more welcoming stance toward women and minorities.

McCain filled so many spaces in the GOP’s intellectual firmament that, as Graham and other colleagues said, no single Republican is poised to fill that role. Democrats have grown increasingly concerned during President Trump’s tenure that the normally tough conservative voices on issues such as Russia, the Middle East and North Korea have fallen silent as the onetime reality-TV star has rewritten the GOP playbook.

As Trump has run roughshod over his own top advisers — ignoring bipartisan and independent views that Russia interfered in the 2016 elections to try to help him — many Republicans have tended to sit back and allow McCain to speak out for their worldview.

Even as he fought brain cancer in Arizona, absent from the Senate since December, McCain regularly stepped to the fore and

delivered the strongest condemnation of Trump’s courtship of Russian President Vladimir Putin through written statements.

Now, those same Republicans need to speak out more forcefully to honor their leader or else cede their party’s mantle to Trump’s worldview for decades to come.

“There’s no doubt he’s leaving a void, kind of an irreplaceable void,” Sen. Dan Sullivan (RAlaska) said Tuesday. Sullivan, a Marine infantry reserve officer, has been named the new chairman of the International Republican Institute, replacing McCain at an organization designed to promote democracy and human rights abroad.

It was the last step in a nearly four-year shepherding of Sullivan to get him to share McCain’s worldview. Two weeks after Sullivan was sworn into the Senate, McCain approached and told him that, as the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee, he could appoint members to the Naval Academy’s Board of Visitors and he wanted the freshman on the board.

Later that month, McCain told Sullivan that he wanted the newcomer to take a lead role on Asia-Pacific issues, a big deal for an Alaskan, and travel that part of the world on McCain’s famous congressional delegations.

“One quality of leadership is being a serious mentor, and there’s nobody who did that, who worked that, like McCain,” Sullivan said.

Many Republican lawmakers have held back criticism of President Trump, but Sen. John McCain regularly spoke out against his actions.

McCain’s committee now boasts eight members of the Republican 2014 class, some of the staunchest military hawks in the Senate.

The IRI’s new board includes Sullivan, Graham and three other recently elected senators, some of the last moves of a dying senator leaving his imprint on a new class.

But McCain’s biggest role, in terms of the Senate, might have been as a bipartisan dealmaker on some of the most contentious issues of the day.

That outreach across the aisle has been in steep decline in recent years, particularly among Republicans who have seen their colleagues face defeat or incredibly tough primaries because of their moderate views.

Graham has been on his own wild ride in his views toward the president, leaving some baffled and wondering if he had drifted away from McCain.

Originally the loudest congressional critic of Trump during 2016 — he ran against him in the presidential primary — Graham has grown closer to the president, speaks with him regularly and plays golf with him.

McCain brought up the issue in May during a visit that Graham initially believed would be his last conversation with his friend.

“Help him where you can; just don’t get sucked into all” these

investigations about Russia and 2016, McCain told Graham.

“Roger,” Graham replied.

He recounted that story in a news briefing after his floor speech Tuesday. “So I’m going to help him where I can and not get sucked into all the other drama,” Graham told reporters.

The late senator led three major efforts at overhauling immigration laws, but each ended in failure because Republicans walked away amid political uprising from their conservative base. Graham said McCain taught him a lesson that will determine when immigration legislation ever gets approved.

“The other side has to get something, too,” McCain told him, as Graham recounted during his floor speech.

As the South Carolinian spoke, nearly 20 senators from each party gathered in the chamber, most sitting around Graham regardless of their regular seats.

They knew he was McCain’s closest friend in the Senate and wanted to hear him out.

Graham stood next to McCain’s desk, draped in black with a vase of white roses on top. He ended with a final plea to join the march.

“There is a little John McCain in all of us,” he said, “and the little John McCain practiced by a lot of people can make this a really great nation.” n

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POLITICS ANALYSIS

Election night winners and losers BY

A MBER P HILLIPS

not lost hope that the state is trending in their favor.

T

he story of 2018 primaries is usually centered around President Trump. And there’s plenty of that narrative in last week’s gubernatorial, Senate and House primaries in Arizona, Florida and Oklahoma: For another week, Trump is in our winner’s column. But liberal Democrats are an even bigger winner.

Here are the winners and losers from some of the most consequential primaries of the year: Winners The liberal wing of the Democratic Party: Next to the upset win of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York in June, Andrew Gillum’s victory in Florida’s Democratic primary for governor is their biggest triumph of the election cycle.

The mayor of Tallahassee was up against the epitome of the party establishment in Gwen Graham, a moderate former congresswoman whose father was a popular governor of the state. But an infusion of millions from billionaires Tom Steyer and George Soros, plus an endorsement from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), ended up being enough to vault Gillum to victory.

Trump and his Twitter account: The tweet came in June and, like many of Trump’s recent endorsements in primary politics, it surprised political watchers. The president was not going with the Florida candidate who had been grooming himself for years to be governor, Adam Putnam. He liked the firebrand he saw almost daily on Fox News, Rep. Ron DeSantis.

Trump tweeted, “Congressman Ron DeSantis, a top student at Yale and Harvard Law School, is running for Governor of the Great State of Florida. Ron is strong on Borders, tough on Crime & big on Cutting Taxes - Loves our Military & our Vets. He will be a Great Governor & has my full Endorsement!”

A battle of ideologies: DeSantis literally filmed his toddler daughter building a border wall with blocks, while Gillum thinks the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should be abolished “in all forms.” The contrast

STEVE CANNON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Trump and liberal Democrats’ big victories set up epic battle of ideologies in Florida governor’s race between the nominees in one of the nation’s most-populous states couldn’t be clearer.

These are not the candidates that operatives in Washington on either side would have picked for a swing state where statewide races are often decided by a percentage point or two. Is it any surprise that in this hyperpartisan era, the candidates for one of the nation’s marquee governor’s races are so ideological?

Florida went for Trump by only a percentage point in 2016, but voters also haven’t elected a Democratic governor in 20 years.

Florida House Republicans: Florida will also be a battleground for control of the House, and Ground Zero is the Miami-area district, Florida’s 27th, that went for Hillary Clinton by 20 points but has been held by longtime GOP Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

She’s retiring, which gives Democrats one of their best pickup opportunities this cycle. That’s still the case, but Republicans say

they’ve found the candidate of 2018 in Cuban American TV journalist Maria Elvira Salazar, who won her primary Tuesday night.

Ros-Lehtinen said Salazar “could be the right candidate” to keep this Democratic-trending seat Republican. She’ll face Donna Shalala, a former Bill Clinton official and University of Miami president.

Arizona Republicans: Arizona’s governor’s race, where Gov. Doug Ducey (R) is running for reelection, is not among the most competitive races in the nation. But it could be if there’s a blue wave this November. Republicans trying to reelect Ducey breathed a sigh of relief Tuesday when Democrats nominated former state education official David Garcia to challenge him. Of the two main candidates, Garcia was the most liberal. He campaigned on universal health care and replacing ICE. Republicans think Ducey’s reelection is in good shape with Garcia’s win, while Democrats say they have

Andrew Gillum, with his wife, R. Jai Gillum, at his side, addresses his supporters after winning the Democratic primary for Florida governor on Tuesday.

Losers Democrats’ majority math: Top Republicans in the Senate were openly saying they would probably lose Sen. Jeff Flake’s seat if either of the super-Trumpian candidates, former state senator Kelli Ward or former sheriff Joe Arpaio, won the nomination.

Senate Republicans don’t have to fear that any longer, since their establishment pick, Rep. Martha McSally, won as Ward and Arpaio split the far-right vote. McSally had to sacrifice some of her general election strategy to do it (she deleted a video of herself praising DACA on YouTube). But she was able to buck the trend of members of Congress losing primaries for higher office, and now she’s set for a likely epic matchup against Rep. Kyrsten Sinema in a race that could decide control of the Senate.

Comebacks: Former Florida liberal firebrand congressman Alan Grayson, who lost a Senate nomination in 2016, tried again to get back to Washington by challenging Rep. Darren Soto (D) for his old seat.

Grayson called for impeaching Trump and tried to describe Soto as a conservative in disguise. His efforts fell flat, with voters in Florida’s 9th District choosing the current member of Congress by a 2-to-1 margin. Perhaps a lesson for Democrats debating nationally how far left to move on Trump?

The glass ceiling: Graham in Florida was hoping to add to the already record number of women who have won the nomination for governor this year. The race will instead be between two men.

Purely from the perspective of advocates for more gender diversity in politics, Graham’s loss is bad news. She would have had a real shot at winning the governor’s mansion, and nowhere is there a stronger gender disparity in U.S. politics than in governor’s mansions. Right now there are a grand total of six female governors.

Though, to end on a less dreary note, a woman is guaranteed to win Arizona’s open Senate seat. n ©The Washington Post

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POLITICS

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Judicial panel move roils N. Carolina

BY K IRK R OSS AND D AVID W EIGEL

in Raleigh, N.C.

N

orth Carolina Republicans plan to ask the Supreme Court to “step in” and preserve the state’s congressional map ahead of November’s midterm election, after a lower court ruled that the current map was unconstitutional.

“What the court suggests is simply impossible,” state House Speaker Tim Moore and state Senate President Phil Berger said in a statement. “[We’re] not aware of any other time in the history of our country that a state’s congressional delegation could not be seated, and the result would be unmitigated chaos and irreparable voter confusion.”

That confusion is the result of a lawsuit brought by voting advocates against the GOP-dominated General Assembly over maps the court ruled disenfranchise Democrats. In a 2-to-1 decision a special judicial panel found that the map’s partisan slant violated the First Amendment and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

“The Constitution does not allow elected officials to enact laws that distort the marketplace of political ideas so as to intentionally favor certain political beliefs, parties, or candidates and disfavor others,” Wynn wrote.

The Republican-drawn maps, which have created a 10-3 Republican delegation in a state that voted for President Trump by just 2.6 percentage points, have been challenged in court multiple times this decade. In 2016, courts forced Republicans to tweak the maps after determining that their redistricting commission had discriminated against black voters.

The new lawsuit was brought

by Common Cause and the League of Women Voters, nonpartisan groups that have rallied against maps that pack voters into gerrymandered districts.

The shape of North Carolina’s districts has ramifications outside the state, potentially deter-

CHUCK BURTON/ASSOCIATED PRESS

GOP leaders fear ‘chaos’ unless Supreme Court blocks ruling that struck down congressional map mining which party controls Congress in 2019. The current map splits the strongly Democratic city of Asheville into two Republican-leaning districts, held by Rep. Patrick T. McHenry and Rep. Mark Meadows — one a member of the House leadership team, the other the leader of the conservative House Freedom Caucus. Previous maps that kept Asheville intact made it the center of a Democratic-leaning district.

A different map could also complicate Republican efforts to hold the 2nd, 9th and 13th districts, all of which backed Trump by around 10 points in 2016. All include some increasingly Democratic suburbs, but they have stayed Republican because conservative rural areas were roped in.

Monday’s court victory was applauded by Democrats, who see more opportunities under a new map.

“Right now, millions of people across North Carolina are not

being heard because politicians rigged the system to benefit themselves at the cost of the people they’re supposed to represent,” said Dan McCready, the Democratic nominee in the Charlottebased 9th District.

The timing, however, poses a serious problem for Republicans.

Early voting was set to begin on Oct. 17, leaving just a few weeks for the state to create new maps or for a court-appointed master to draw them. A similar situation unfolded in Pennsylvania this past spring, when a court struck down a Republican map and drew a new one — more compact and competitive — when the GOP-run legislature and Democratic governor could not strike a deal.

In Pennsylvania, the spring primary was slightly delayed to let candidates file in the new districts. But with little time left before November, some in North Carolina have proposed replacing the November midterm with a

Voters leave a polling place in Charlotte after a May election. A special judicial panel found that legislative districts drawn by Republicans disenfranchise Democrats by violating the First Amendment and the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

primary election and paying for a new general election a few weeks later. If the House hangs in the balance — Democrats need to flip 23 seats to take over — a determination of who holds the chamber could be delayed.

“If it is possible to redraw the districts so we can have constitutional districts for the first time this decade, then I hope the court will do it, even if it means that the General Assembly will have to pay for a December election,” said state House Minority Leader Darren Jackson. “Otherwise, the Republicans are rewarded for bad behavior.”

Republicans have reeled at the suggestion of a delay. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court punted on two lawsuits against partisan gerrymanders, one that favored Republicans and one that favored Democrats. North Carolina Republicans, who are simultaneously facing legal challenges to get constitutional changes on the ballot this year, said the high court would probably put a stay on the order.

“This order would launch our elections system into mass chaos, and only serve to achieve partisan goals just 10 weeks before the midterm elections,” redistricting commission leaders Ralph Hise and David Lewis said in a statement. “We expect that Judge Wynn’s opinion will meet the same fate at the Supreme Court as his failed effort to force a special election on voters last year.”

But the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy has complicated matters. Kennedy provided a fifth vote against acting on the gerrymandering lawsuits; with his seat vacant, the court could deadlock, leading to a 2018 election with new maps or a delayed election.

It’s not clear when Kennedy’s seat will be filled. President Trump’s nominee, Brett M. Kavanaugh, is seen as a likely vote to preserve partisan gerrymanders, and his confirmation hearings begin Tuesday. Senate Republicans hope to seat him weeks before the midterm elections. n ©The Washington Post

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NATION

Deadly red tide rolls on for Florida

BY D ARRYL F EARS AND L ORI R OZSA

in Siesta Key, Fla.

E

ven as she sat under the brilliant Florida sun, her toes covered in sugarwhite sand, Alex McShane wasn’t exactly enjoying her summer vacation. Florida’s worst red tide in more than a decade had turned the aqua-blue surf to a rusty dull brown.

And then there were the lifeguards — wearing gas masks.

With no mask of her own, McShane, 24, wore a frown. Her eyes itched, she coughed, and the stench was giving her a headache — all telltale symptoms of the monster algal bloom spanning the southern Gulf Coast. It is killing untold numbers of marine animals from Bradenton to Naples, where rotting fish still lie scattered on a beach behind Gov. Rick Scott’s seaside mansion, even after a cleanup.

As the outbreak nears the year mark, with no sign of easing, it’s no longer a threat to just marine life.

Business owners in the hardest-hit counties report losing nearly $90 million and laying off about 300 workers because of the red tide and a separate freshwater algal bloom in Florida’s largest lake.

Together, the two blooms have caused a sharp drop in tourism.

A pair of toxic algal blooms striking the state at the same time is rare and, in this case, especially lethal. A red tide is a natural phenomenon that develops miles offshore before making its way to the coast, where it feeds on a variety of pollutants, including phosphorus and nitrogen from fertilizer, along with other runoff and wastewater.

What is not clear is whether climate change and pollution from humans near the shore has made this outbreak even worse.

Scientists have found that the algae thrive in warmer waters and increased carbon dioxide levels.

August was brutal for Sarasota County, where McShane sat on a folding chair on the top-rated beach at Siesta Key. In the second week of the month — one of the worst of the red-tide bloom —

EVE EDELHEIT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST

Stubborn algal bloom is killing Gulf Coast wildlife, tourism and businesses — with no end in sight small-business revenue fell by as much as 50 percent, according to a survey conducted by the local convention and visitors bureau.

At the Hub restaurant, manager Tim Wong tried to be positive. “If it’s going to hit, this is the best time, because it’s the slow season for us. It could be gone tomorrow — you never know.”

But others worry that the painful slow season, which stretches from August to November, will be tough to endure. “I’m prepared for the slow season, but this is scary,” Tom Kouvatsos said after another breakfast and lunch with hardly any diners at his Village Cafe.

The longest red tide on record is a 30-month marathon of misery that started in 1994. That was before social media broadcast the problem around the world.

At the Mote Marine Laboratory and Aquarium, Gretchen Lovewell and her crew responded to yet another emergency call.

They climbed into a pickup and

rushed to Manasota Key Beach, where a baby dolphin was spotted on the edge of the surf. The calf was dead, but its carcass could yield valuable tissue samples for understanding how the toxin kills.

The red tide’s poisonous algae is a variety called Karenia brevis, native to the Gulf of Mexico. It breaks out every year, and its neurotoxin disorients and paralyzes marine life. But in her nine-year tenure at Mote, Lovewell has never seen animals die on this scale.

As of Aug. 24, the aquarium had recovered 19 dolphins and 239 sea turtles in Sarasota and Manatee counties alone. That did not include more than 100 manatees statewide and an untold number of fish, as well as large animals such as sharks and tarpons.

To keep up with the death toll, Lovewell has worked six-day weeks and up to 16 hours on some shifts. More than 2,000 tons of dead marine animals have been removed from the coasts of the five

Lifeguard Mariano Martinez wears a mask because of the stench of red tide at Lido Beach in Sarasota, Fla.

hardest-hit counties, according to cleanup reports. The baby dolphin was the 13th recovered.

Scott has taken aggressive steps to address the outbreak, declaring a state of emergency, providing millions of dollars to help small businesses and directing his Department of Environmental Protection to partner with the Mote lab to track the algae bloom. But his detractors point to his record.

After he first took office, appointees Scott placed on boards that govern state water management districts cut $700 million from their budgets, including money for red-tide research.

“I am so sick of hearing it’s a natural occurring phenomenon that I’m ready to puke,” said Andy Mele of Suncoast Waterkeeper, a nonprofit watchdog. “Yeah, it’s naturally occurring, but what happens to it is man-made. It responds to nutrients — period. Really the dynamite that lights the explosion is nutrient pollution.”

On Sanibel Island, where a rare whale shark washed up dead in July, David Schuldenfrei said the red tide is killing his business.

Schuldenfrei said he was showing a buyer two homes worth $7 million each, with spectacular gulf views. There were no dead fish or signs of algae near them.

“We got into the subject of the red tide. It was enough to spook him.” The buyer walked away.

Over the years, scientists who study the gulf have come a long way toward perfecting the way red tides are tracked. But they are not close to figuring out how to stop or dissipate them, or redirect them from the shore, where they do the most harm. They have considered everything from dropping clay on the algae to infusing it with ozone or hydrated copper sulfate.

But those treatments could be costly — and might not work.

The solution, environmentalists say, is prevention.

“We don’t have an algae problem in Florida,” Mele said. “We have a nutrient problem in the state.” The only way to stop giant blooms, he said, is to stop nutrients from polluting the water. n ©The Washington Post

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Vatican division bursts into view B Y C HICO H ARLAN in Dublin

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ope Francis has long faced criticism from traditionalists — a group that includes academics as well as cardinals — who say the church is too willingly following the whims of the anything-goes modern age.

Much of the dissent has remained within the Vatican walls, as Francis’s opponents worked to stonewall reforms. A few highranking church leaders have questioned him publicly about his teachings. But the simmering opposition has suddenly exploded across the Catholic world, with a former Vatican ambassador accusing the pope of covering up sexual abuse — and demanding that Francis step down.

The accusations came in a 7,000-word letter written by Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò that could be viewed as an act of courage or unprecedented defiance. Either way, it sheds light on the opposition movement, and its insistence that homosexuality within the church — and Francis’s inability to keep it at bay — is to blame for the sexual abuse crisis.

Defenders of the pope note that the letter was published at perhaps the most challenging point of Francis’s papacy, when abuse scandals in the United States, Chile, Australia and elsewhere are embroiling members of the church hierarchy.

“We are a step away from schism,” said Michael Sean Winters, a columnist for the National Catholic Reporter. “I think there is a perception among the pope’s critics that there is vulnerability here — on the part of the pope and in the Vatican generally.”

The document alleges that Francis, as well as predecessor Pope Benedict XVI, had known for years about abuse allegations against Theodore McCarrick, who last month became the first cardinal in nearly a century to resign. Francis, asked about the accusations this past Sunday, did not directly respond to them, saying that the document “speaks

GREGORIO BORGIAS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Traditionalists blame homosexuality for sexual abuse crisis and call for Pope Francis to resign for itself.”

The author, Viganò, a 77-yearold who is two years into retirement, is described by acquaintances as shy and quiet, but he has a history of advocating for right-wing causes. During the pope’s U.S. visit in 2015, he orchestrated a meeting between Francis and a conservative county clerk who defied a federal order to issue same-sex marriage licenses. In Italy this year, he spoke briefly at a gathering of dissenters that included Cardinal Raymond Burke, perhaps the most prominent anti-Francis figure.

“All of the traditionalist outlets have given Viganò’s letter a great echo, because that was the voice that they were waiting for,” said Roberto de Mattei, president of the conservative Lepanto Foundation and a critic of Francis.

Francis has used more inclusive messages about gays and divorced Catholics at a time when

the religion is losing its hold across the Western world. But some conservatives feel that Francis — who has made no concrete changes to church teaching on homosexuality or the role of women in the church — risks undoing the credibility of a religion that is based on immutable ideas and principles.

In the letter, Viganò goes into detail about years of failures to act within the Vatican bureaucracy. He mentions “homosexual networks” within the church and quotes an academic who cites such networks as a core reason for clergy abuse.

With his letter, Viganò became the torchbearer for the argument, shared among a group of Catholic conservatives, that sexual abuse stems from an overabundance of priests with homosexual feelings.

They charge that Francis, who describes abuse in terms of power and clerical narcissism, fundamentally misunderstands the is-

Pope Francis, flanked by Vatican spokesman Greg Burke, listens to a journalist’s question aboard a flight to Rome from Ireland on Aug. 26.

sue, jeopardizing the church’s ability to address the scandals.

In an interview published Monday by the conservative Italian newspaper La Verità, Burke said that “homosexual culture” had found “roots inside the church and can be connected to the drama of abuses perpetrated on adolescents and young adults.”

That view has little hold in the mainstream and has been roundly dismissed by researchers and other outsiders, who say that sexual abuse results from a complicated combination of factors including church secrecy, the training and sexual development of young priests, and the profound power gap between clergy and young parishioners.

“A lot of this is homophobia,” said Father James Martin, an American Jesuit who has advocated for the church to welcome LGBT members with more compassion. “I think they’re using abuse to beat up on gays.”

For traditionalists, Martin’s invitation from the Vatican to speak lin Dublin at a massive World Meeting of Families event was proof of how Francis is gradually eroding church teachings on sexuality. Before Francis landed in Dublin, a group of 400 dissidents met for two days at a hotel for what one organizer called a gathering to promote “the authentic teachings of the Catholic Church.”

On Aug. 20, Francis had released a letter to Catholics acknowledging “crimes” committed by the church. LifeSiteNews said the letter was facing criticism from “faithful Catholics” for “ignoring the underlying issue of rampant homosexuality in the clergy.”

Though Francis did not directly address the claims in the letter, he delivered a message last week to reporters on the papal plane that seemed ready-made to roil his critics. Asked by a reporter what a parent should say to a child who comes out as gay, the pope said: “Don’t condemn. Dialogue, understand.” n ©The Washington Post

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JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

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all clouds gather in the distance, and Brice Brown turns right to point his truck toward the worst of it.

“Summertime in New Orleans,” he says, though on steamy weekend evenings there’s more to worry about than some here-and-gone storm. It’s the last Friday before school starts at Edna Karr High, where Brown has led the football team to the past two Class 4A state championships, and he has been here long enough and immersed himself in enough players’ lives to learn this much: These are the times when bad things happen.

Last weekend, one of Brown’s wide receivers ran away from home. An offensive lineman spent a night on his front porch after a fight with his father. A sophomore disappeared for 48 hours.

But that’s not why he’s out here an hour after practice ended, patrolling the streets with the steering wheel in one hand and his iPhone in the other. Last year, there were 589 shootings in New

One Coach’s Mission: Keep Players alive After a shooting killed one of his former players, Brice Brown vowed to never let it happen again B Y K ENT B ABB in New Orleans

Head Coach Brice Brown addresses the Edna Karr High School football team after practice on Aug. 13 in New Orleans.

Orleans, and six days ago — on a night just like this — two people fired into a crowd: three dead, seven wounded. Eight days from now, a 15-year-old boy will be fatally shot two miles from Edna Karr.

“Every time, we get an update: shooting in Central City,” Brown, 33, says. “Shooting in Uptown. Shooting in New Orleans East.

Shooting in Algiers.”

As the sun sets, he dials a player to ask about his weekend plans. Then another to ask if he ate dinner. Another to ask what size shirt he wears. Brown is really calling to hear each player’s voice, to make sure he made it home, to find out if he’s alive or dead.

“We’ve got kids who live in these areas,” Brown says, “who are trying to make it.”

He opens the contact for Ronnie Jackson, the Cougars’ 18-year-old running back and perhaps the greatest challenge of the coach’s life, and a moment later the phone is ringing, ringing, ringing, and when it goes to voice mail, Brown can’t help but think the worst.

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JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

‘I wasn’t called for X’s and O’s’ By the end of 2016, there had been 486 shootings in New Orleans, and victims ranged from largely anonymous to well-known.

Former NFL running back Joe McKnight was shot to death in December at a nondescript intersection in the Terrytown neighborhood. Will Smith, the retired defensive end for the New Orleans Saints, died in April after being shot in the ritzy Lower Garden District.

The final seven months of 2016 were especially bloody, with 390 people being shot, according to data collected by New Orleansbased crime analyst Jeff Asher.

Particularly alarming is the consistency of shootings in the nation’s 49th-largest city — New Orleans is one of nine U.S. cities with at least 100 murders in each of the past 49 years, though it’s

Rhonda George decorates the gravesite of her son, Tollette “Tonka” George, at McDonoghville Cemetery.

the only one of those with fewer than 600,000 residents — and that shots can ring out seemingly at any time, in any part of town.

On a steamy Friday in June 2016, a 23-year-old played pickup basketball with friends, told his mother he loved her and made his way to a gas station in Algiers.

Tollette George, whom most everyone called “Tonka,” had returned home after graduating from Alcorn State University seven weeks earlier. Tonka had played wide receiver for the Braves, and during ambitious moments he would vow to someday suit up for the Saints. When he was being realistic, he would tell friends he wanted to coach at Edna Karr, his alma mater, and be a symbol for young people: If Tonka could make it, they could, too.

But that Friday in Algiers, the sound of gunfire filled the air, and

so eventually did ringing phones.

Brown picked up to hear a voice urging him to get to the gas station because Tonka, the quarterback who had led Edna Karr to the 2010 state title game, was dead.

Brown arrived around midnight, police tape holding back onlookers, including Tonka’s shell-shocked mother and uncle.

Rhonda George knew it was her son behind the partition, but she kept calling his phone anyway, praying he would answer.

The coach tried to console them, and in time they would come back to the same question: Why? Like 65 percent of murders in New Orleans between 2010 and 2017, Tonka’s has not resulted in an arrest.

He was bright, talented and ambitious, and Rhonda would come to believe that’s partly why her only son died. Tonka’s uncle, Brannon Getridge, believed his

nephew made one mistake: He returned to a place where life has seemingly been devalued amid a wave of gunfire.

“I tried telling Tonka,” Getridge says, “ ‘Don’t come back to this city.’ ” Tonka’s death “changed the way I view football,” Brown says now, and it wound up being the young man’s death, not his life, that made him a symbol at Edna Karr.

As the months and seasons passed, Brown pondered his own future. Even if he spent decades winning championships, would he be a success? No, he decided, and so he made a promise to himself: Whatever it took, no matter the financial or personal cost, he would not allow another bullet to take one of his players.

“I wasn’t called for X’s and O’s,” Brown says. “Our call is to save them.”

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‘I always used to fail the test’ A phone rings in a bedroom in Algiers, and a young man issues an annoyed smile when he sees the display: “CoachBrice.” He knows he’d better answer.

“Where you at?” Brown asks.

“At the house,” says Ronnie Jackson, Edna Karr’s talented running back, who will play college football if Brown can keep him on track — and alive — for 10 more months.

“Is your phone on silent again?”

Ronnie sighs. Every day with this. A while earlier, Brown called, and Ronnie was making dinner or was taking a shower or . . . whatever it was. He wasn’t tethered to his phone, and so it went to voice mail.

“You’re still — you’re bad with this phone,” Brown says, and he asks about Ronnie’s grandmother. What if she calls? How about his girlfriend? Brown bets Ronnie answers then.

The young man squirms before barking, finally, into his phone.

“You think you’re the only one, Coach?”

“Mm-hmm,” Brown says, the outburst apparently what he was going for.

In a few minutes, the coach will deliver chicken fingers to Ronnie so there’s one fewer reason to leave Grandma Darlene’s house.

It’s also a way to check on him, to remind him Big Brother Brice is watching. While Ronnie will spend the evening playing video games with a teammate, his free hours weren’t always spent so innocently.

A few miles from where he now lives stands the first house Ronnie ever broke into. He was 8 years old then, his friends feeding him through a window because he was small enough to fit. He opened the locked door, and he and his friends grabbed as many electronic devices as possible, Ronnie says, and the older boys would use part of their bounty to buy him a new outfit.

He laughs at the memory now: the fear he felt in those first moments inside, the excitement when they finished, the relief when he ran away and the sirens faded.

“It’s crazy how I can remember all this,” he says, and as he grew, so did the memories and the stakes.

Two cousins would be shot to death, their names now tattooed

PH0TOS BY JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

ABOVE: Edna Karr’s Ronnie Jackson, second from left, shares a laugh with, from left to right, Girard Hawkins, Leonte Richardson, Lonte Nettles and Devin Bush before practice. RIGHT: Coach Brown looks after his team on and off the field.

on Ronnie’s back, and he can picture the way an uncle’s midsection looked after two bullets were removed from it. At family reunions, Ronnie noticed how few males attended; he would describe a departed relative by how many Christmases he had missed.

His mother would sometimes suggest the males in their family had a curse on them, though to her Ronnie was different. “I didn’t have no problems,” Lisa Jackson now says, and this is comical to

Ronnie, too, because of how little his mother knows about his childhood.

He would skip school to start fights or smoke marijuana, and when a youth coach told him he was destined for prison or an early grave, Ronnie figured the man was probably right. He stormed off the field that day, the first of many times he quit a team, and back then coaches just let him keep walking.

“I ain’t never had coaches,” he

says now, “that really hold on.”

When he reached Edna Karr, Ronnie brought his helmet to Brown’s office and announced he had better things to do than ride the bench. So the coach ordered him into the lineup just to watch him fail. Later, when Ronnie blew off practice to smoke with old friends, Brown sent an assistant coach to drag him back to practice. When Ronnie told Brown he was quitting the team to enroll in trucking school, the coach ordered him out of his office.

When he came back, meekly asking for another chance, Brown again told him to get out. This went on for a while, and one day Brown told him to leave and Ronnie refused. This, he told his coach, was his team, too. He wasn’t going anywhere.

Brown’s face relaxed. Finally, the kid got it.

“He was testing me,” Ronnie says. “I used to always fail the test.”

It has taken all this, Brown says, for the young player to learn to stand his ground rather than run away.

“He has become a fighter,” the coach says, “not a quitter.”

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COVER STORY ‘All it takes is a little push’ Brown knows how to mix it up, too, and in his lifelong war against the streets, he has learned to fight dirty.

After a recent practice, he told players that leaving a mess in the locker room might compel coaches to present them with dirty jerseys for their first game. Maybe they’d forget to clean the water bottles. Last year, after players complained about spaghetti for a pregame meal, Brown served them ham sandwiches and water.

Sometimes he’ll burst into a team meeting, drop five boxes of drug tests on a table and then walk out.

“Sometimes I’m full of ” it, he says. “But you’ve got to make them uncomfortable.”

Brown says that’s just the language here, and when he met Ronnie years ago during an inschool suspension, the coach couldn’t get him to stop talking. So he threw a dictionary at him. Only a paperback, Brown points out.

They eventually talked, forming a fateful but volatile bond, and occasionally traded threats.

Other times they found commonality in being the only sons of single mothers or in complexities they usually kept buried. Brown was an admitted control freak, the only person capable of saving these kids, and if Ronnie was a natural leader — on the field or organizing his eighth-grade class to cheat on an assessment test — he was a terrible follower.

Brown recognized that, so last year he elevated Ronnie to team captain. At practices, he leads stretches, adjusts teammates’ positioning, is the fastest to drills when they need an example and the slowest when they need to be herded. Brown, a mad social scientist with a scraggly beard and whistle, issues jersey numbers based on his ranking of players’ importance to the program. Ronnie wears No. 2, and if it drives him crazy that he’ll never be No. 1, that’s precisely the point.

“I worry about Ronnie more than others because he’s been to the dark side before,” Brown says.

“And all it takes is a little push.”

He is, for better or worse, Brown’s defining project: frustrating and charming, a past that makes you want to give up and a free-spirited charisma that won’t let you — and in those ways, isn’t he just like Guy Henderson?

Nearly two decades ago, Brown

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code, but it just rang and rang.

Another funeral, another casket to carry, another symbol for his players at Edna Karr. But as time passed, the coach’s grief hardened into regret.

“If we had met,” he says now, “would that still have happened?”

He pauses and then sighs.

“We probably could’ve done more.”

Another pause. Another sigh.

“Ronnie reminds me so much of him.”

PH0TOS BY JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

ABOVE: Jackson — flanked by his pregnant sister, Jasmine Jackson, left, and his girlfriend, Madelyn Duronslet — takes a phone call at home.

RIGHT: Jackson gets a hug from his grandmother outside the home they share in the Algiers section of New Orleans.

and Henderson grew up on these streets and found themselves playing together at Edna Karr. Henderson was the Cougars’ quarterback, Brown the offensive lineman who protected him. They forged a friendship based not only on similarities — among them is that both of their fathers were murdered — but their differences. Brown was the responsible one, his focus always on the future; Henderson preferred to take risks. They were teammates again at Grambling, and if Brown was determined to stay gone, Henderson knew he’d make his way back to New Orleans.

Eventually they both did, and Brown shelved his dreams of coaching the Saints when he accepted an internship at Edna Karr. The months turned to years, and Brown climbed the coaching

ladder while Henderson was drawn to the shadows. They still spoke often, and Brown learned that if Henderson didn’t answer the first time he called, he’d always pick up the second time.

Three years ago, the men texted about Henderson joining the team’s coaching staff. Brown’s old friend knew the game and could speak the players’ language, but the truth is the coach was trying to throw one more block for his old quarterback. They agreed to grab lunch and discuss the future, but Henderson — typical — never called to confirm.

Brown was in his truck when the text arrived: Henderson was dead, shot in his car at 4 in the afternoon. Brown couldn’t believe it. He called Henderson not once but twice, their longtime

‘That’s not how the real world works’ They filter into Ronnie’s room, four generations of relatives and, because his sister Jasmine is six months pregnant, a fifth on the way.

Sunday is about shrimp pasta and conversation, and nearly 20 family members have found their way to Grandma Darlene’s. Ronnie has been pushed to the edge of his bed as they discuss their favorite topic: his future.

“You have come a long way, baby,” Lisa, his mother, says.

“You’re going to be really something,” great-grandmother Suzie says.

“He’s the only one that made it,” sister Kijha says.

Ronnie smiles at the attention, but he is the keeper of many secrets. As far as he has come, occasionally the old muscle memory still fires. Ronnie again quit the football team last year, peeling off his jersey and pads following a disappointing game, and he has wondered aloud whether he’s cut out for college. He knows he’s supposed to answer the phone when Brown calls — the coach has explained, time after time, what an unanswered call means to him — but Ronnie is a teenager, and sometimes he’s in no mood for a lecture.

“So it’s kind of like you want to be bothered when you want to be bothered?” Brown asked him recently.

“Basically.”

“See, that’s not how the real world works.”

Ronnie doesn’t get into much of that with his family, and it’s easier for them to focus unimpeded on him somehow altering the family’s trajectory. So he didn’t tell them about the man who recently brandished a gun at Ronnie and a friend. Or how often Brown has to lock the gates surrounding the Edna Karr practice field because of a nearby active

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shooter. He certainly didn’t tell them about the block party last year near Tulane University. That was the night, Brown now says, about 30 Edna Karr players were gathered and someone sprayed bullets into the crowd. “They’re shooting,” was the text message Brown recalls getting, and of course when he called Ronnie it went straight to voice mail.

Brown didn’t learn Ronnie was still alive until hours later. After becoming separated from his teammates, Ronnie says, he ran into a hallway and through a door, and in the median he saw a body.

He ran again, lying on the ground behind a vehicle until the shooting stopped and he heard the voice of an Edna Karr assistant coach, who was working security at the party, urging him into his car.

That night, Ronnie decided parties were no longer a good idea. Neither was walking most anywhere, accepting rides from anyone but close friends, talking to fans at road games, celebrating after touchdowns, lingering on the field after wins, going anywhere after dark.

“You got to hide,” he says, and it is around this time that Grandma Darlene, back and forth from the kitchen, enters the room.

Though she knows some of her grandson’s secrets, she nonetheless believes this is a time for honesty.

“These little boys are so jealous of him because he’s doing good, they’ll kill him,” she says.

“Just to see him not make it?”

Jasmine asks.

“Because they don’t want to see him make it,” Darlene says.

Still at the foot of his bed, Ronnie nods.

“In New Orleans,” he says, “they don’t care if you run the ball good. They don’t care nothing about that.”

The conversation pivots to what should come next. As his senior year begins, Ronnie has scholarship offers to play football from four colleges, as far away as Kentucky and Kansas.

If Ronnie is a success, his mother says, he’ll have a responsibility to return and offer inspiration to the neighborhood, the school, the city. But Ronnie says that was Tonka’s plan, too, and look what happened.

“Everybody down here is so prideful,” Jasmine says.

“Crabs in a bucket,” Darlene says.

JAHI CHIKWENDIU/THE WASHINGTON POST

Three-year-old Liam Randall keeps an eye on Jackson during drills before practice. Liam is the son of the team’s outside linebackers coach, Norman Randall. Head Coach Brown chats with offensive line coach Chris DeGiovanni in the background.

‘It’s always the next kid’ Brown is back in his truck, returning from a weekend trip. The miles pass, and quicker than Brown ever imagined, so have the years.

Nearly a decade ago, he gave up his goal of coaching in the NFL. But after going 38-6 in his first three seasons as a head coach, more and more he asks himself the same question: Could he coach college football? Last year, he says, the coach of a Power Five school asked him to consider joining his staff — something of a liaison to high schools in the Southeast, Brown says. He gathered players to share his decision: He would be leaving Edna Karr.

One by one, the hands went up.

Who’s going to bring me something to eat? Who’s going to buy my school shirts? Who’s going to be here when I need somebody to talk to?

Then Ronnie spoke up: “You can’t [freaking] leave,” he told Brown, and for once it was Ronnie who wouldn’t let him quit.

And so, guilt prevailing over ambition, Brown stayed. The Cougars went 14-1, won another state title, and for one more year,

no players died. Brown spent another series of months calling them, worrying when they don’t answer that he’ll be summoned to another crime scene, trying to convince them the only path to survival and happiness is to not just leave New Orleans but to stay away. And it’s not lost on him that the coach saying that was once a young man who got out, then came back. Now he can’t leave.

“I’m pushing them out to save their life, and I keep staying,” says Brown, who lives less than three miles from the house where he grew up.

This is no badge of honor, not to him, but he has realized that following the deaths of Guy Henderson and Tonka George, he is motivated not by what he hopes will happen but instead what he hopes will not. Just because Brown kept his players alive last year doesn’t mean he will this year. Just because one challenge ends doesn’t mean there won’t be another behind it. Just because Ronnie answered the phone yesterday doesn’t mean he will today.

“I don’t think my job can ever be done with him,” Brown says. “I

think he’s one of those kids that he’s attached to me probably for life.”

He keeps driving, the New Orleans skyline cutting into the horizon.

“There’ll be a new Ronnie. It’s always the next kid,” he says. “The next one and the next one and the next one.”

Brown is ruminating now, going a long time without speaking.

“I’m damned,” he eventually says, “and that’s just the truth.”

He directs the truck up the highway, his destination somewhere ahead, and with the sun setting he passes the area of town where shots interrupted last year’s block party. It reminds Brown there’s something he needs to do, and the momentary feeling of purpose has brightened his mood.

“We’ve just got to keep striving for the now,” he says, reaching into the center console for his phone.

He glances at the display, his thumb scrolling and pressing the contact labeled “Ronnie 2,” and he rests his arm on the steering wheel and takes a breath as the phone begins to ring. n ©The Washington Post

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Are Google’s search results ‘rigged’?

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B RIAN F UNG

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resident Trump thinks Google’s search engine is “rigged.” By featuring more mainstream news outlets and relatively fewer conservative sites in results he sees, Trump tweeted Tuesday, Google is “suppressing” right-wing views. Trump escalated his attacks in remarks from the Oval Office, warning that “Google and Twitter and Facebook, they are treading on very, very troubled territory and they have to be careful.”

It’s easy to see how Trump arrived at this conclusion, because in many ways his experience mirrors that of millions of Americans who have seen the dominance of Google — and Facebook, and Twitter — in their everyday lives.

How Google does its job can seem deeply mysterious, giving rise to theories about the way it operates. Is it possible for Google to manipulate results? Would it?

Google denies that it does.

“Search is not used to set a political agenda, and we don’t bias our results toward any political ideology,” the company said Tuesday.

“We never rank search results to manipulate political sentiment.”

The dust up between Trump and Google is an opportunity to shed light on what we know about Google and its search algorithm.

What happens when you run a Google search?

At a high level, Google’s search engine is based on a long list of websites from which Google has already scraped information, using automated software it calls a “crawler.” The crawler gathers keywords and other data about sites, and at this point billions of Web pages have been analyzed this way.

When users type in a search query, Google takes their request and looks in its records for matches. Then it faces another problem: how to organize all the results.

This is where the more subjective parts of Google’s search engine come in. Over 100 factors — from where the user is located to how recently a given Web page was updated — contribute to how highly a certain result may appear.

What we do and don’t know about an online engine that dominates many American lives

DON RYAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS

Google’s executives are hesitant to discuss the specifics of their software, for fear of encouraging those who may seek to game the algorithm.

In addition, the company’s PageRank algorithm, developed by cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, plays a role in determining the authoritativeness of a source.

Google executives are hesitant to discuss the specifics of their software, for fear of encouraging those who may seek to game the algorithm. And a core aspect of Trump’s critique is that Google is mistaken in the way that it assigns authority in the first place.

But, said Pandu Nayak, the head of Google’s search ranking team, Google tests its own search results with regular humans to ensure that the search engine provides relevant and authoritative results.

“We’ve developed a detailed series of guidelines about what it means to be authoritative,” Nayak said. “It’s a 160-page document, it’s been publicly available on the Web for several years now, and it’s our representation about what it means to give relevant and authoritative results.”

Google News’ secret sauce Recent changes to Google News have turned it into a much more personalized product. The company now applies artificial intelligence and accounts more for your expressed preferences.

This approach has given rise to questions about what determines News results and just how much

its engineers truly understand about the decisions their AI is making. A consistent theme in current machine learning research is that often, the only way to determine why an algorithm made a decision is to try to reverseengineer the logic from the results.

Still, it appears, companies and individuals can influence Google search results.

Reverse-engineering Google has practically become something of a cottage industry, particularly in media. Publishers are constantly trying to find ways to compete for visibility on Google News and on Google Search.

But not even the best experts can know for sure whether their techniques are working.

Google is certainly capable of tailoring search results, but often does it less than you think That media outlets tinker with ways to boost performance on Google is a byproduct of Google’s success, not evidence of any favoritism by Google, experts say.

“If you’re a publisher, it’s impossible to simply remove yourself from any interaction with Google,” said Chris Pedigo, senior vice president of government affairs at Digital Content Next, an association representing online publishers.

Still, by setting up the system this way, Google clearly has some degree of control over how information is presented to the user.

The question for many is how aggressively Google intervenes in this process. Google’s algorithm, particularly for search, is a master algorithm that is applied in real time against each search query as it comes in, according to the company. Although the algorithm itself frequently changes as Google makes tweaks, it is applied identically to each search.

If the results differ from person to person, that could be because they may be using a browser in

incognito mode, which deletes the cookies and other third-party tracking software. Or they may be searching from a different location, triggering Google’s reflex to return local results. Or they may simply be performing a search slightly later in time than another, said Christo Wilson, a computer science professor at Northeastern University who studied Google search practices for six years.

Wilson’s research involves comparing Google searches under different conditions.

“We have never seen big differences,” said Wilson. “In fact — what we typically have seen in the past is that your search history — things you’ve looked for in the past — they only matter for about 10 minutes and even that’s not true anymore for most queries.”

This may be a function of Google’s “bias” toward freshness, Wilson said. And this is likely what Trump experienced as well.

“The results he’s getting are going to be the same results that everyone is getting for those [same] queries,” said Wilson, “at least for the U.S.” Overseas, it’s a different story Which brings us to Google’s activities in other countries that underscore the company’s ability to censor results — literally. In China, the search giant has reportedly sought to build a version that complies with a government policy of blocking certain sensitive results, such as those related to the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

And it wasn’t long ago that Eric Schmidt, then the chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, publicly considered the possibility of demoting content that’s considered hateful or extreme.

“We’re very good at detecting what’s the most relevant and what’s the least relevant,” he told Fox Business in 2017. “It should be possible for computers to detect malicious, misleading and incorrect information and essentially have you not see it. We’re not arguing for censorship, we’re arguing just take it off the page, put it somewhere else . . . make it harder to find.” n ©The Washington Post

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SUNDAY, September 2, 2018