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Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was first performed exactly 200 years ago Tuesday and has since become probably the work most likely to be embraced for political purposes.

It was played at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin; it was performed in that city again on Christmas 1989 after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when Leonard Bernstein replaced the word “Joy” in the choral finale with “Freedom”; the European Union adopted the symphony’s “Ode to Joy” theme as its anthem. (These days the Ninth is being played in concert halls worldwide in commemoration of the premiere. The classical music world loves anniversaries.)

Beethoven might have been surprised at the political allure of his masterpiece.

He was interested in politics, but only because he was deeply interested in humanity. The story goes that he originally wanted to dedicate his “Eroica” symphony to Napoleon — it was to be called “Bonaparte” — but he changed his mind after Napoleon abandoned the ideals of the French Revolution and was crowned emperor.

I don’t believe, however, that Beethoven was interested in everyday politics. He was not an activist.

Instead, he was a deeply political man in the broadest sense of the word. He was concerned with moral behavior and the larger questions of right and wrong affecting all of society. Especially significant for him was freedom of thought and of personal expression, which he associated with the rights and responsibilities of the individual. He would have had no sympathy with the now widely held view of freedom as essentially economic, necessary for the workings of the markets.

The closest he comes to a political statement in the Ninth is a sentence at the heart of the last movement, in which voices were heard for the first time in a symphony: “All men become brothers.” We understand that now more as an expression of hope than a confident statement, given the many exceptions to the sentiment, including the Jews under the Nazis and members of minorities in many parts of the world. The quantity and scope of the crises facing humankind severely test that hope. We have seen many crises before, but we do not appear to learn any lessons from them.

I also see the Ninth in another way. Music on its own does not stand for anything except itself. The greatness of music, and the Ninth Symphony, lies in the richness of its contrasts. Music never just laughs or cries; it always laughs and cries at the same time. Creating unity out of contradictions — that is Beethoven for me.

Music, if you study it properly, is a lesson for life. There is much we can learn from Beethoven, who was, of course, one of the strongest personalities in the history of music. He is the master of bringing emotion and intellect together. With Beethoven, you must be able to structure your feelings and feel the structure emotionally — a fantastic lesson for life! When we are in love, we lose all sense of discipline. Music doesn’t allow for that.

But music means different things to different people and sometimes even different things to the same person at different moments. It might be poetic, philosophical, sensual or mathematical, but it must have something to do with the soul.

Therefore, it is metaphysical — but the means of expression is purely and exclusively physical: sound. It is precisely this permanent coexistence of metaphysical message through physical means that is the strength of music. It is also the reason that when we try to describe music with words, all we can do is articulate our reactions to it, and not grasp music itself.

The Ninth Symphony is one of the most important artworks in Western culture. Some experts call it the greatest symphony ever written, and many commentators praise its visionary message. It is also one of the most revolutionary works by a composer mainly defined by the revolutionary nature of his works. Beethoven freed music from prevailing conventions of harmony and structure. Sometimes I feel in his late works a will to break all signs of continuity.

The Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci said a wonderful thing in 1929, when the Benito Mussolini had Italy under his thumb. “My mind is pessimistic, but my will is optimistic,” he wrote to a friend from prison. I think he meant that as long as we are alive, we have hope. I try to take Gramsci’s words to heart still today, even if not always successfully.

By all accounts, Beethoven was courageous, and I find courage an essential quality for the understanding, let alone the performance, of the Ninth. One could paraphrase much of the work of Beethoven in the spirit of Gramsci by saying that suffering is inevitable, but the courage to overcome it renders life worth living.

Daniel Barenboim is a pianist and conductor, co-founder of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra and founder of the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin.

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In bars tucked away in alleys and at salons and bookstores around Shanghai, women are debating their place in a country where men make the laws.

Some wore wedding gowns to take public vows of commitment to themselves. Others gathered to watch films made by women about women. The bookish flocked to female bookshops to read titles like “The Woman Destroyed” and “Living a Feminist Life.”

Women in Shanghai, and some of China’s other biggest cities, are negotiating the fragile terms of public expression at a politically precarious moment. China’s ruling Communist Party has identified feminism as a threat to its authority. Female rights activists have been jailed. Concerns about harassment and violence against women are ignored or outright silenced.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has diminished the role of women at work and in public office. There are no female members of Mr. Xi’s inner circle or the Politburo, the executive policymaking body. He has invoked more traditional roles for women, as caretakers and mothers, in planning a new “childbearing culture” to address a shrinking population.

But groups of women around China are quietly reclaiming their own identities. Many are from a generation that grew up with more freedom than their mothers. Women in Shanghai, profoundly shaken by a two-month Covid lockdown in 2022, are being driven by a need to build community.

“I think everyone living in this city seems to have reached this stage that they want to explore more about the power of women,” said Du Wen, the founder of Her, a bar that hosts salon discussions.

Frustrated by the increasingly narrow understanding of women by the public, Nong He, a film and theater student, held a screening of three documentaries about women by female Chinese directors.

“I think we should have a broader space for women to create,” Ms. He said. “We hope to organize such an event to let people know what our life is like, what the life of other women is like, and with that understanding, we can connect and provide some help to each other.”

At quietly advertised events, women question misogynistic tropes in Chinese culture. “Why are lonely ghosts always female?” one woman recently asked, referring to Chinese literature’s depiction of homeless women after death. They share tips for beginners to feminism. Start with history, said Tang Shuang, the owner of Paper Moon, which sells books by female authors. “This is like the basement of the structure.”

There are few reliable statistics about gender violence and sexual harassment in China, but incidents of violence against women have occurred with greater frequency, according to researchers and social workers. Stories have circulated widely online of women being physically maimed or brutally murdered for trying to leave their husbands, or savagely beaten for resisting unwanted attention from men. The discovery of a woman who was chained inside a doorless shack in the eastern province of Jiangsu became one of the most debated topics online in years.

With each case, the reactions have been highly divisive. Many people denounced the attackers and called out sexism in society. Many others blamed the victims.

The way these discussions polarize society unnerved Ms. Tang, an entrepreneur and former deputy editor of Vogue China. Events in her own life unsettled her, too. As female friends shared feelings of shame and worthlessness for not getting married, Ms. Tang searched for a framework to articulate what she was feeling.

“Then I found out, you know, even myself, I don’t have very clear thoughts about these things,” she said. “People are eager to talk, but they don’t know what they are talking about.” Ms. Tang decided to open Paper Moon, a store for intellectually curious readers like herself.

The bookstore is divided into an academic section that features feminist history and social studies, as well as literature and poetry. There is an area for biographies. “You need to have some real stories to encourage women,” Ms. Tang said.

Anxiety about attracting the wrong kind of attention is always present.

When Ms. Tang opened her store, she placed a sign in the door describing it as a feminist bookstore that welcomed all genders, as well as pets. “But my friend warned me to take it out because, you know, I could cause trouble by using the word feminism.”

Wang Xia, the owner of Xin Chao Bookstore, has chosen to stay away from the “F” word altogether. Instead she described her bookstore as “woman-themed.” When she opened it in 2020, the store was a sprawling space with nooks to foster private conversations and six study rooms named after famous female authors like Simone de Beauvoir.

Xin Chao Bookstore served more than 50,000 people through events, workshops and online lectures, Ms. Wang said. It had more than 20,000 books about art, literature and self-improvement — books about women and books for women. The store became so prominent that state-owned media wrote about it and the Shanghai government posted the article on its website.

Still, Ms. Wang was careful to steer clear of making a political statement. “My ambition is not to develop feminism,” she said.

For Ms. Du, the Her founder, empowering women is at the heart of her motivation. She was jolted into action by the isolation of the pandemic: Shanghai ordered its residents to stay in their apartments under lockdown for two months, and her world narrowed to the walls of her apartment.

For years she dreamed of opening a place where she could elevate the voices of women, and now it seemed more urgent than ever. After the lockdown, she opened Her, a place where women could strike friendships and debate the social expectations that society had placed on them.

On International Women’s Day in March, Her held an event it called Marry Me, in which women took vows to themselves. The bar has also hosted a salon where women acted out the roles of mothers and daughters. Many younger women described a reluctance to be treated the way their mothers were treated and said they did not know how to talk to them, Ms. Du said.

The authorities have met with Ms. Du and indicated that as long as the events at Her didn’t become too popular, there was a place for it in Shanghai, she said.

But in China, there is always the possibility that officials will crack down. “They never tell you clearly what is forbidden,” Ms. Tang of Paper Moon said.

Ms. Wang recently moved Xin Chao Bookstore into Shanghai Book City, a famous store with large atriums and long columns of bookcases. A four-volume collection of Mr. Xi’s writings are prominently displayed in several languages.

Book City is huge. The space for Xin Chao Bookstore is not, Ms. Wang said, with several shelves inside and around a small room that may eventually hold about only 3,000 books.

“It’s a small cell of the city, a cultural cell,” Ms. Wang said.

Still, it stands out in China.

“Not every city has a woman’s bookstore,” she said. “There are many cities that do not have such cultural soil.”

Li You contributed to research.

In an interview last week, NewsNation’s Blake Burman asked Speaker Mike Johnson about Marjorie Taylor Greene, and before Burman could finish his question, Johnson responded with classic Southern scorn. “Bless her heart,” he said, and then he told Burman that Greene wasn’t proving to be a serious lawmaker and that he didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about her.

Strangely enough, Johnson’s dismissal of Greene — on the eve of her potential effort to oust him from the office he won in October — spoke as loudly as his decision to put a vote for Ukraine aid on the floor in the first place. In spite of the Republican Party’s narrow majority in the House and the constant threat of a motion to vacate the chair, he will not let MAGA’s most extreme lawmaker run the place.

To understand the significance of this moment, it’s necessary to understand the changing culture of the MAGAfied Republican Party. After eight years of Donald Trump’s dominance, we know the fate of any Republican politician who directly challenges him — the confrontation typically ends his or her political career in the most miserable way possible, with dissenters chased out of office amid a hail of threats and insults. Jeff Flake, Bob Corker, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney are but a few of the many Republicans who dared to defy Trump and paid a high political price.

But there’s an open question: Does the MAGA movement have the same control over the Republican Party when Trump isn’t directly in the fray? Can it use the same tactics to impose party discipline and end political careers? If the likes of Greene or Steve Bannon or Matt Gaetz or Charlie Kirk can wield the same power, then the transformation of the party will be complete. It won’t be simply in thrall to Trump; it will be in thrall to his imitators and heirs and perhaps lost to the reactionary right for a generation or more.

I don’t want to overstate the case, but Johnson’s stand — together with the Democrats’ response — gives me hope. Consider the chain of events. On April 12, Johnson appeared at Mar-a-Lago and received enough of a blessing from Trump to make it clear that Trump didn’t want him removed. Days before a vote on Ukraine aid that directly defied the MAGA movement, Trump said Johnson was doing a “very good job.”

Days later, Johnson got aid to Ukraine passed with more Democratic votes than Republican — a violation of the so-called Hastert Rule, an informal practice that says the speaker shouldn’t bring a vote unless the measure is supported by a majority within his own party. Greene and the rest of MAGA exploded, especially when Democratic lawmakers waved Ukrainian flags on the House floor. Greene vowed to force a vote on her motion to end Johnson’s speakership. She filed the motion in March as a “warning” to Johnson, and now she’s following through — directly testing her ability to transform the House.

But what happened after the Ukraine vote was truly fascinating. First, Republicans who voted for Ukraine aid found their actual constituents were generally fine with the vote. Many supported Ukraine. There was little to no backlash back home.

Second, Democrats came to Johnson’s aid. Last Tuesday, the top three Democrats in the House — Hakeem Jeffries, Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar — issued a statement supporting Johnson and opposing Greene’s motion to vacate. “If she invokes the motion,” they said, “it will not succeed.”

Next, the Republican Party’s human weather vane, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, blasted Greene in an interview with RealClearPolitics’s Phil Wegmann, telling him that “what’s she’s doing is really unhelpful to the country.” Of course, Cruz will pivot on a dime if Trump turns on Johnson, but at the moment the power dynamic is clear, and MAGA without Trump is much more bark than bite.

In fact, if you take a step back and look at Biden’s term so far, one can see the outlines of healthy government — at least so long as Trump stays out of the fray. There is a rough governing consensus on a number of fronts. In 2021, for example, Congress passed a bipartisan infrastructure bill. In December 2022, it passed the Respect for Marriage Act, a bipartisan compromise bill that protects both gay marriage and religious liberty, and that same month it passed bipartisan reforms to the Electoral Count Act that will make it much more difficult for a losing candidate to sow chaos after a presidential election.

Combine those measures with the immensely important foreign aid package passed last month, and you can see the outlines of a functioning Congress, one in which compromise and persuasion are still tools of the trade.

But that infuriates MAGA, which scorns compromise and persuasion as weakness. It derides bipartisan legislation as a product of a corrupt Washington “uniparty.” And so Greene is pushing ahead with her motion to vacate. If Johnson survives the vote with Democratic support, she’ll label him the “Democrat speaker” and continue her relentless political guerrilla war.

It has been nine years since Trump came down the escalator, and since that time MAGA has become a movement that hopes to outlive Trump himself. It’s systematically dismantling the old G.O.P. and attempting to recreate the party in its own image. But it has never been clear to me that MAGA can survive without Trump, and Johnson’s battle with Greene tells us why.

To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s devastating takedown of Dan Quayle in the 1988 vice-presidential debate, we know Donald Trump. He’s been a megawatt celebrity for more than four decades. He built an entire brand around the false notion that he was one of the world’s greatest businessmen. He has an uncanny ability to reach his core audience. And you, Representative Greene, are no Donald Trump.

Neither is the rest of MAGA. The clown car collection of MAGA personalities who orbit Trump is often both profoundly weird and remarkably inept. They suffered a collective humiliation in the 2022 midterm elections. Mainstream Republicans coasted to victory in key elections in Georgia, Ohio and Florida, while the election-denying MAGA conspiracy theorists suffered a string of losses in battleground states.

The scandals and conspiracies that don’t seem to touch Trump at all can still bring down other Republicans, including the MAGA candidates who hug Trump the hardest. It turns out that the vaunted ideological change of the Republican Party from Reaganite conservatism to America First and working-class populism may well be overblown.

This makes the 2024 election all the more crucial. If Trump wins, MAGA has four more years to consolidate its hold on the Republican Party and transform the conservative movement from the inside out. But if Trump loses, the battle is joined once again.

And if the mismatch between Speaker Johnson and Greene is any indication, I would not presume that MAGA will win the day.

Since late last month, Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota has been the subject of fierce bipartisan attacks for her decision to shoot and kill her family dog, a 14-month-old German wirehaired pointer named Cricket. Ms. Noem has repeatedly defended her actions, which are detailed in her forthcoming memoir, in which she says the dog was “aggressive,” “untrainable” and “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with.”

On Sunday, she suggested that President Biden should have considered killing his own dog, Commander, a German shepherd who was banished from the White House last year after repeatedly biting Secret Service officers.

“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people,” Ms. Noem, a Republican, said in an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” “So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog?”

Experts said that there were some circumstances in which dogs are so aggressive that they should be euthanized. But euthanasia should be an option of last resort, they said, used only when a dog poses a serious danger and other potential solutions have been ruled out. In the cases of both Cricket and Commander, there were plenty of reasonable, nonlethal approaches available.

“We have lots of tools in our tool belt — medication, lots of different behavioral interventions as well — before you get to the step where you’re, like, I can’t handle this dog,” said Erica Feuerbacher, an expert on dog behavior and learning at Virginia Tech. “That’s what I’d want, is that they’d really value their dog’s life and give their dog its best chance of having a full, long life.”

The Guardian first reported on the excerpts from Ms. Noem’s memoir, which is set to be released on Tuesday. In it, she reportedly blames Cricket for ruining a pheasant hunt, killing another family’s chickens and biting, or trying to bite, her.

Although it may be undesirable to people, some level of aggression — growling, baring teeth and even biting — is normal in dogs, which are descended from gray wolves and share some of their predatory drive, said Clive Wynne, a canine-behavior expert at Arizona State University who is working on a book about the history of dogs.

That predatory instinct, Dr. Wynne said, most likely explains why Cricket went after the chickens. But a dog that kills chickens does not necessarily pose a risk to people, he said. “That doesn’t really have any predictive value as a way of gauging whether that dog would then be harmful to you,” he said. “Because you don’t look like prey, you don’t sound like prey, and dogs form these strong emotional bonds with members of their human family.”

More often, Dr. Wynne said, dogs bite humans because they are stressed or scared. “Mostly in a human household, a dog is biting because its other attempts to communicate that it is uncomfortable or fearful have failed,” he said.

Still, even a dog that bites defensively can pose dangers and should receive a professional evaluation from a veterinarian, experts said. Dogs that are sick or in pain might be more likely to lash out; in a 2021 study of nearly 1,000 dogs exhibiting aggressive behavior, researchers found that 15 percent had an underlying medical condition that might have contributed to the misbehavior.

“We’re so quick to say that our dog is aggressive instead of taking a step back and saying, Why is my dog responding this way?” said Vivian Zottola, an author of the study who is a canine behavioral modification specialist in Boston. (She is also a research associate at the Center for Canine Behavior Studies, a nonprofit organization.)

Dogs who receive a clean bill of health may benefit from working with a certified animal behaviorist or a dog trainer. These professionals can also help owners identify whether there are particular triggers that set off their dogs. “We will often overlook our dogs’ stress, and they can be very subtle with stress signals,” Ms. Zottola said.

Often, owners can eliminate aggressive behaviors simply by being attentive to these triggers and by keeping their dogs out of situations that are likely to prompt aggression — what Dr. Feuerbacher described as “just making good decisions on behalf of your dog.”

Dogs that seem nervous or reactive around strangers, for instance, are not good candidates to go to a farmers’ market — and may also be ill-suited to live in the White House. “Clearly, that was not the right environment if the dog is biting multiple times,” Ms. Zottola said.

In cases in which stressors cannot be eliminated from the home environment, a new home might need to be found for the dog.

Medications, including anti-anxiety drugs, can also help soothe some canines.

If all else fails, there are circumstances in which an owner may consider what experts call behavioral euthanasia. In such cases, the dog’s aggression is so unpredictable that it cannot be managed or its bite is so strong that it does severe physical damage, Dr. Feuerbacher said.

In some of those cases, euthanasia might also be in the dog’s best interest; an animal that is lashing out so frequently that it cannot safely be around people probably does not have a great quality of life, she said.

But based on the information made public, Ms. Noem still had several options worth pursuing before resorting to euthanasia, Dr. Feuerbacher said. “I think she missed a few steps,” she said.

Dr. Wynne agreed. “This case is just so egregious,” he said.

Dr. Wynne said that he had been heartened that so many people, on both sides of the political aisle, seemed dismayed by Cricket’s fate. (Mitt Romney took flak during his presidential campaigns for his decision, in 1983, to travel with his family dog, Seamus, strapped to the top of his car in a carrier.)

Even President Trump, who infamously boasted that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue without losing voters, seems to know better than to brag about killing a dog, Dr. Wynne said: “Trump never said, ‘I could shoot a puppy dead on Fifth Avenue.’”

Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, already under fire for killing her family’s 14-month-old dog and boasting about it, on Sunday took aim at another family’s pet: Commander, President Biden’s bite-prone German shepherd.

Appearing on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” Ms. Noem, a Republican, suggested that Commander, who was banished from the White House last fall after bloodying a number of Secret Service agents, should also have been put down.

“Joe Biden’s dog has attacked 24 Secret Service people,” she told her interviewer, Margaret Brennan. “So how many people is enough people to be attacked and dangerously hurt before you make a decision on a dog?”

Commander was sent to an undisclosed location after the Secret Service recorded 24 biting episodes involving him between October 2022 and July 2023, about half of which required medical attention.

Ms. Noem’s opinion of the proper way to have handled him emerged during the publicity ramp-up to the release of her memoir, “No Going Back,” which is to be published on Tuesday.

The South Dakota governor, who had been widely seen as a contender to be former President Donald J. Trump’s running mate, wrote in the book about a female wire-haired pointer named Cricket that she had hoped to use to hunt pheasant on her ranch. She said that the dog proved “untrainable,” “dangerous to anyone she came in contact with” and “less than worthless” as a hunting dog — so she shot her in a gravel pit.

“I hated that dog,” Ms. Noem wrote.

She also alluded to Commander in elaborating on her decision to shoot Cricket: “A dog who bites is dangerous and unpredictable (are you listening, Joe Biden?) — especially if you are running a business where people interact with your dogs,” she wrote.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In the CBS interview, Ms. Noem sought to defend the killing of Cricket — and a goat she also shot the same day — as “a choice I made over 20 years ago” to “protect people.”

But in her book, she also nodded to the idea that Cricket may be in a better place, or perhaps a worse one. Imagining becoming president in 2025 and sending Mr. Biden’s dog to meet his maker, Ms. Noem added: “Commander, say hello to Cricket for me.”

A 5-year-old boy died on Sunday in Johnson County, Texas, the authorities said, after being swept away by floodwaters caused by heavy rains that have pounded parts of the state over the past few days.

His body was found southeast of Fort Worth at around 7:20 a.m., several hours after the authorities received a 911 call reporting that two adults and the boy were stuck in a vehicle in fast-moving water, Johnson County’s Office of Emergency Management said on Facebook.

All three tried to get out of the vehicle and were swept into the floodwaters, but the adults survived, the agency said.

The death comes as rounds of storms have prompted evacuations and rescues in the state, with forecasters warning of potential flash flooding. The storms exacerbated dangerous conditions and forecasters said that once the storms passed, rivers could be swollen for days or even weeks.

Parts of southeast Texas were under a flood warning on Sunday afternoon, according to the National Weather Service in Houston. Other areas remained under flood watches, and up to eight inches of rain were possible in some areas through Sunday, forecasters said.

Heavy rainfall was expected to taper by Sunday evening, the Weather Service said. Forecasters said that because of the recent rounds of rainfall, flooding could occur earlier than would be expected in ordinary conditions.

The Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management said that as of 10 a.m. on Sunday, there had been 233 rescues of people and 164 pet rescues in the county.

There remained a risk of flash flooding from central to northeastern Texas, the Weather Service’s Weather Prediction Center said on Sunday afternoon.

Jeremy Justice, hydrological operations manager at Harris County Flood Control District, said on Saturday that some parts of Harris County could experience flooding near the record levels that were set during Hurricane Harvey in 2017, an event that claimed at least 68 lives and caused $125 billion in damage.

Several rivers in Texas had yet to reach their highest flows on Sunday morning, but were expected to crest in the next 24 hours, FEMA said. After cresting, the rivers’ recession would be slow, leaving the waterways above the major flooding stage through the middle of the week.

Eleven rivers were in a major flooding stage on Sunday morning, which means the flooding had caused an excessive inundation of roads and structures and required significant evacuations.

Another 18 rivers were experiencing moderate flooding, which can inundate some structures and may lead to evacuations.

Livia Albeck-Ripka contributed reporting.

The Federal Election Commission quietly issued an advisory opinion last week allowing candidates to raise unlimited money for issue-advocacy groups working on ballot measures in elections in which those candidates are on the ballot.

The opinion, issued in response to a request from a Nevada-based abortion rights group, could significantly alter the landscape in the fall in terms of the capacity that candidates aligned with these groups have to help them raise money.

The decision applies to all federal candidates, but with a presidential election taking place in six months, the biggest attention will fall to that race. If Mr. Biden can solicit money for abortion-rights ballot measures, he can add to an already-existing fund-raising advantage that his team currently has over Mr. Trump.

The decision could affect turnout in battleground states like Nevada where razor-thin margins will determine the election. In Arizona, an abortion rights group said it had the number of signatures required to put a referendum on the ballot. Florida — a state that has voted reliably for Republicans in recent presidential races — has a similar measure on the ballot.

The advisory opinion means that both Mr. Biden and former President Donald J. Trump can raise money for outside groups pushing ballot measures. In the wake of the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the landmark 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision, abortion ballot measures are expected to be a key focus for Democrats this fall.

“I think it’s quite significant,” said Adav Noti, of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, calling it a massive change from prohibitions put in place by the landmark McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill in 2002.

The opinion was issued on May 1, in response to a question from lawyers representing the group Nevadans for Reproductive Freedom, which hopes to put a referendum on the ballot in the fall. Several lawyers, including the veteran Democratic election law lawyer Marc Elias, represent the group.

The opinion found that federal candidates and officeholders can fund-raise for the group’s entities without being limited by dollar amounts or sources.

In a recognition of how the parties might see the opinion, the National Republican Senatorial Committee took issue with a draft of the measure a day before it was formalized. The objections included that such coordination between a candidate and an outside group would translate to a get-out-the-vote effort for Democrats in the Nevada effort, but the N.R.S.C. concerns went unheeded.

Of the six commissioners on the F.E.C., three Republicans and one Democrat agreed on the opinion.

A spokesman for the Biden campaign and a spokesman for the Democratic National Committee declined to comment.

The R.N.C. chief counsel, Charlie Spies, was pushed from his role after just two months amid a retreat for the committee’s donors in Palm Beach, Fla. A spokeswoman for the Trump team did not immediately respond to a question about whether Mr. Spies’s departure was at all connected to the advisory opinion.

But Chris LaCivita, a top adviser to Mr. Trump who’s now helping steer the R.N.C. as its chief of staff, described the development as an opening.

“We will engage in all opportunities available, including new ones to defeat the corruption and failure of the Democrat machine,” Mr. LaCivita said.

Mr. Noti said that the bloc of commissioners has rendered other opinions of significant impact recently, including the expansion of the capabilities of super PACs.

“The combined effect of these decisions is having a really significant and demonstrable effect on how campaigns are run, and it’s all for the worse,” he said.

The latest round of negotiations between Israel and Hamas hit an impasse on Sunday as mediators struggled to bridge remaining gaps and a Hamas delegation departed the talks in Cairo, according to two senior Hamas officials and two other officials familiar with the talks. An Israeli official also confirmed the negotiations had stalled and described them as being in “crisis.”

For months, the negotiations aimed at achieving a cease-fire and a release of hostages have made little progress, but signs the two sides were coming closer to an agreement appeared over the last week. Israel backed off some of its long-held demands and a top Hamas official said the group was studying the latest Israeli offer with a “positive spirit.”

But the setback over the weekend meant Palestinians living in miserable conditions in Gaza would not experience an imminent reprieve and the families of hostages held by militants would have to wait longer for the freedom of their loved ones.

The main obstacle in the talks was the duration of a cease-fire, with Hamas demanding it be permanent and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel expressing openness to only a temporary halt in the fighting.

Hamas blamed the lack of progress on Mr. Netanyahu, who vowed again in recent days that the Israeli army will invade Rafah, the southernmost town in the Gaza Strip, with or without an agreement.

“We were very close, but Netanyahu’s narrow-mindedness aborted an agreement,” Mousa Abu Marzouk, a senior Hamas official, said in a phone interview.

The Israeli official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that Israel and Hamas were closer to a deal a couple of days ago, but that Mr. Netanyahu’s statements about Rafah had compelled Hamas to harden its demands in an attempt to ensure that Israeli forces won’t enter the city.

Two U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, pushed back on the notion the talks were at an impasse, suggesting that parties were still reviewing details of the most recent proposals.

Fighting continued on Sunday, with Israeli strikes reported in Rafah, according to Palestinian media, and rocket fire on the area of a crossing between Israel and Gaza — which has been relatively rare in recent months.

Mr. Netanyahu and the United States have been contending that Hamas was holding up an agreement. On Sunday, Mr. Netanyahu said he would not agree to the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza and an end to the war. Countenancing such demands, he said, would allow Hamas to re-establish control over Gaza, rebuild their military capabilities, and threaten communities throughout Israel.

“It is Hamas that is holding up the release of our hostages,” he said. “We are working in every possible way to free the hostages; this is our top priority.”

An Israeli delegation never made it to Cairo for the latest round of talks. The Israeli official said that Israel had sought a written response to its latest proposal from Hamas before dispatching a delegation, but that the group never conveyed one.

Mr. Abu Marzouk said Hamas had wanted Israel to be present at the talks in Cairo, where they could have worked through mediators to clarify “vague” points in the latest Israeli offer, including on the duration of a cease-fire.

“The cease-fire needs to be permanent and fixed,” he said.

Mr. Abu Marzouk was the only one of the officials who spoke about the talks to allow the use of his name. The others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive subject or because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

Hamas, Mr. Abu Marzouk said, thought that Mr. Netanyahu wanted an agreement that would permit Israel to invade Rafah after its hostages are released.

“This is Netanyahu’s plan,” he said.

The Biden administration has been pressing Israel to refrain from undertaking a major operation in Rafah, where around one million Palestinians have been sheltering since the start of the war, which has lasted nearly seven months.

A technical team from the Qatari foreign ministry also left the Egyptian capital on Sunday, two officials briefed on the talks said.

On Monday, Hamas’s political leadership will convene in Doha to discuss what unfolded in Cairo over the past two days, but the group intended to continue participating in negotiations with “positivity,” said one of the senior Hamas officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

A report in Al-Qahera News, an Egyptian state-owned television channel, said that a Hamas delegation would return to Cairo on Tuesday, but the senior Hamas official said that the group hadn’t made a decision yet.

Peter Baker and Michael Crowley contributed reporting to this article.

The police forcibly dismantled a pro-Palestinian encampment at the Art Institute of Chicago on Saturday and arrested dozens of protesters, hours after demonstrators had gathered in a garden at the institute and set up tents.

Some of the demonstrators were students at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which is affiliated with the institute, the school said in a statement.

The Chicago police said on social media that officers had removed the protesters at the school’s request. A Chicago Police spokesman said Sunday that 68 people had been arrested and charged with trespassing.

The protesters set up the encampment in the North Garden, which is part of the Art Institute of Chicago museum, at about 11 a.m. on Saturday, the police said. While encampments at some other U.S. schools during the recent wave of pro-Palestinian protests have stood for days or even weeks before police action, in this case the police said that officers “immediately responded” to maintain the safety of the protesters and the public.

The People’s Art Institute, the organizers of the protest, said on social media that the demonstrators’ demands included that the institute formally condemn Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, remove any programs that legitimize the “occupation of Palestine” and divest from any individuals or entities that support Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory. Photos that the group uploaded to social media showed a sign in the encampment that read “Hind’s Garden,” a reference to Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed this year in Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza.

The school said that it had offered protesters an alternate venue and promised students that they would not face academic sanctions or charges if they relocated there.

The statement added that some protesters “surrounded and shoved a security officer and stole their keys to the museum, blocked emergency exits and barricaded gates.”

After about two hours of negotiations, the school asked officers to remove the protesters, the police said. Officers issued warnings and eventually removed and arrested protesters, the police said.

Videos posted by the organizers showed police forcibly pulling demonstrators out of the human chain they had formed outside the garden while some of the protesters chanted, “Who do you protect? Who do you serve?”