Last Call For Elector Defector Detector Director

Axios games out the "new slate of electors/faithless electors" scenario that seems to be Trump's best chance of actively engineering an illegal coup to nullify the presidential election, and while I'm seriously infuriated that this appears to be happening, you can't say I wasn't warning folks around here that this was going to be a distinct possibility.

What we're watching: In this long-shot scenario, Trump and his team could try to block secretaries of state in contested states from certifying results. That could allow legislatures in those states to try to appoint new electors who favor Trump over Biden.

"It's basically hijacking the democracy," one lawyer familiar with the process tells Axios. "They've got nothing else; you'd be trying to deny Joe Biden 270." If Trump were to pursue this course, it likely would become apparent the week leading up to Thanksgiving, as states face deadlines to finalize election results.

Between the lines: Trump has not directly said he would pursue this strategy. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo each noted on Tuesday that the election results don't become official until electors cast their votes next month. To date, Biden's status as president-elect is rooted in media projections based on raw vote totals reported by individual states. 

Those totals don't become official, though, until states certify them. The Constitution prescribes that those official results will be used to apportion electors who officially pick the president.  “At some point here, we’ll find out finally who was certified (the winner) in each of these states, and the Electoral College will determine the winner and that person will be sworn in on January 20," McConnell said. "No reason for alarm.”

One Senate leadership aide said McConnell was not signaling an elector strategy and was simply noting that it's not uncommon for there to be litigation before the Electoral College results are complete. 

Pompeo, who raised eyebrows with a line about how there would be a "smooth transition to a second Trump administration," independently raised the Electoral College during a State Department news conference. “When the process is complete, there’s going to be electors selected," he said. "There’s a process; the Constitution lays it out pretty clearly.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to requests for comment.

How it works: If a lawsuit successfully stops certification of results in a state, legislators there could step into the void and pick a pro-Trump slate of electors. The lawyer, who requested anonymity to speak about the scenario, said Trump's team now appears to be trying to throw enough dirt at the process for counting late ballots to argue that accurate results can't be ascertained.

The next step could be to try to get federal or state courts to enjoin secretaries of state from certifying results. Any move to provide an alternative slate of electors could force the first real test of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 and could land before the Supreme Court. Among the key swing states, Arizona and Georgia have GOP governors and legislatures. Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have Democratic governors but GOP legislatures.

"This is a horrible idea, one that should be morally repugnant to every American," elections law expert Edward B. Foley wrote recently in The Washington Post. "For a state legislature to reclaim this power after voters have already cast their own ballots would be an even more egregious intrusion into the democratic process."

 

Now this definitely sounds like Axios is laying scaffolding here for making mountains out of molehills, it's what they do. But at the same time, this is how the coup would play out.

It's why this particular Supreme Court hearing a case on state legislatures and appointing slates of electors is so very dangerous. We already know there's at least three votes on the court to embrace former Chief Justice William Rehnquist's crackpot theory that state legislatures get the final say in electors and elections.

If there's two more, who knows? We shouldn't be anywhere near this point, but here we are.

Householder Of Cards, Con't

Despite former Ohio House Speaker Larry Householder's arrest for bribery and corruption charges, despite evidence that the Ohio GOP received millions in slush fund money in order to vote for a corrupt energy bill that made Ohio's largest energy company billions of dollars at direct taxpayer expense, Ohio voters simply reelected everyone involved in the mess, and actually gave even larger margins to the state's GOP supermajority.

 

The scandal surrounding House Bill 6 took out the speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives. It has dominated the news pages and airwaves for months. It was the subject of countless campaign attack ads.

In the end, voters didn’t seem to care.

The scandal implicating former Speaker Larry Householder and his effort to get a nuclear bailout enacted into law emerged as a major theme in the 2020 Statehouse elections, but seemingly had little impact on the results.

In total, there were 46 lawmakers who voted for House Bill 6 and were on the ballot this November for a seat in the Ohio House or Ohio Senate. The unofficial results show that every single one of them won their election: 46-for-46. That includes Householder himself, who won reelection to his 72nd District over a slate of write-in opponents.

In contrast, there were 35 “no” votes who were up for election. Four of them have been voted out, and a fifth lawmaker’s race is too close to call.

That’s a striking result considering the extent to which the scandal has enveloped Ohio politics since the July arrests of Householder and four political operatives.

In recent months, news outlets have extensively covered an 81-page affidavit outlining the years of alleged corruption and bribery that went into HB 6 being enacted to benefit the former FirstEnergy Solutions of Akron. So too did news stories highlight the vote to remove Householder as the House leader; the ensuing trials; and the ongoing effort to get HB 6 repealed.

Voters got one last reminder last week, when two people charged in the alleged scheme pleaded guilty.

The yearslong plot, as alleged by federal investigators, involved FirstEnergy Solutions funneling “dark money” toward a group controlled by Householder. These resources were used to get Householder and a number of other Republican allies elected to the Ohio House of Representatives. These allies joined with more than two-dozen Democrats to elevate Householder as House speaker in 2019.

 

In fact, even more Ohio lawmakers have been arrested by the FBI over the FirstEnergy Solutions scam, including Cincinnati City Councilman Jeff Pastor, just this week, as the guilty pleas and evidence pile up.

Cincinnati Councilman Jeff Pastor has been arrested, according to sources. Pastor, a Republican, is expected to face federal charges including bribery, extortion and money laundering.

A press conference is scheduled at the FBI headquarters in Cincinnati at 2:30 p.m. featuring U.S. Attorney David M. DeVillers and Chris Hoffman, Special Agent in Charge for the FBI’s field office.

As previously reported by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer, the FBI may have been running an operation in Cincinnati last year involving two mysterious men identifying themselves as real-estate developers. The two men made the rounds there, seeking help from local public officials with a planned hotel project.

They also ended up hiring Columbus lobbyist Neil Clark, ostensibly for his help changing state law to benefit the planned hotel by amending a pending sports-betting legalization. But the amendment ultimately did not make its way into the bill. Chinedum Ndukwe, a former Cincinnati Bengals player who now is a real-estate developer in Cincinnati, was involved with the hotel project and attended some of the meetings, which Clark said he felt appeared to give it legitimacy.

After his and others' arrest in July on corruption charges linked to the passage of a nuclear bailout bill, Clark said quotes of his that appeared in the indictment were recorded during meetings he held with the Cincinnati hotel developers. He said he suspects they were either undercover FBI agents, or at the least, informants working with the FBI. Clark has pleaded not guilty and denied wrongdoing.

Efforts by cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer to locate the men who hired Clark were unsuccessful. Officials in Cincinnati recalled interacting with the men, believing they were from Nashville and either North Carolina or Georgia, but said they haven’t heard from them since last summer. Federal officials declined to comment on any ongoing investigation.

 

But again, every Republican who voted for Householder's corrupt kickback bill, and every Republican who made Householder Speaker before he was forced to step down, was reelected by Ohio voters.

 

But that's also proof of how moribund and useless the Ohio Democrats are, they couldn't beat a single Republican, with several indicted. Outside Sherrod Brown, the state's Democrats are 100% worthless, useless, and pointless.

You know, kind of like the KY Democrats.

Corruption means nothing in this state. I guess we'll have to wait until the Biden Justice Department gets around to actually trying the cases in court.

That Poll-Asked Look, Con't

NY Times Upshot pollster Nate Cohn talks to The New Yorker's Isaac Chotiner about what the polls got wrong this year compared to 2016, and it's a long, long list, and a fair amount of "I don't knows" in that list.

Isaac Chotiner: In a lot of preelection polling, Trump was running ahead of Republican Senate candidates. But Republicans seemed to do better than Trump in the generic House vote, and in some of these Senate races. Why do you think that was?

Nate Cohn: I don’t know why that turned out to be the case. I think one of the most interesting parts of the polling error this year is that it was greater down-ballot than it was as at the top of the ticket, and in 2016 it was the opposite. And so while a lot of our explanation for what went wrong in 2016 was searching for things that were mainly about the President, I’m not sure that the pollsters would be right to suppose that this year’s polling error is unique or specific to the President.

IC: In 2016, the national polls were off a couple points, and then Midwestern polls, especially polls that didn’t weight by education, were off more. This year with your polling for the New York Times, with other polling, there were a lot of misses. And these were the polls that really took weighting by education seriously and took a lot of steps after 2016 to fix errors, and in your case nailed the 2018 midterms. Do you know what happened this time?

NC: I don’t. I can offer you some theories.

IC: Yeah, please.

NC: But, before I say that, I do want to agree that this was a much bigger polling miss, in important ways, than in 2016. It was a bigger polling miss in the national surveys. It was a bigger polling miss for the industry’s most prominent and pricey survey houses. The state polling error will be just as bad, even though, as you mentioned, many state pollsters took steps to increase the number of white voters without a degree in their surveys. And state polls look a lot like they did in 2016.

But, if the state polls are just as bad as they were in 2016, despite steps that we know improved the President’s standing in the surveys, we can say with total confidence—and I know this was true in our data—that the underlying survey data has to be worse than it was in 2016. Or, if you prefer, if all the pollsters were using the 2016 methodology, the polls would have been far worse this year than they were in 2016. And that is really interesting. As I said, I can list a bunch of theories for you.

IC: Yeah. What are your theories?

NC: Well, the key framing is what’s changed since 2016. What would make the polls worse now than they were then? So one possibility is that it’s four more years of Trump, and that as American politics grew more and more defined along the lines of your attitudes about the President, and as old political allegiances sort of fell away, that non-response bias in polling became more and more correlated with Presidential vote choice.

Another possibility is that “the resistance” is what broke the polls. Think of all of the political engagement on the left, the millions of dollars that were spent to help Jon Ossoff in 2017 or to help Jamie Harrison in 2020. This portrays a tremendous increase in the level of political participation on the part of progressives. We know that politically engaged voters are more likely to respond to surveys. And so it may be that as the Trump Presidency has totally energized the Democratic base, it has also led those same kinds of voters to increase their propensity to respond to political surveys.

Another possibility is the high turnout this year. We in the polling world have tended to assume that higher turnout makes polling easier, because we think of turnout as something that’s an additional variable that the polls have to get right beyond just taking a nice sample of the population. This year, though, we have this huge increase in turnout, and most people have supposed that it was good for Joe Biden. Maybe it was good for Joe Biden. But I think we also have to be open to the idea that it was not good for Joe Biden. In Florida, where we were collecting turnout data live on Election Day, I can tell you with certainty that the electorate was more Republican than it was in 2016, more than our polls projected, no matter your likely voter methodology. That may be true elsewhere in the country. I don’t know. It may not be. We just don’t have that data yet.

But I would note that many of the late polls stopped showing a gap between the preferences of registered and likely voters, and in some cases it went into reverse, where the Democrats were faring better among likely voters and registered voters. A few late examples—the CNN poll showed Biden up ten in Pennsylvania, but only up five among registered voters. I believe the final ABC News/Washington Post poll in Pennsylvania showed Joe Biden doing better among likely voters than registered voters.

And then a final thing I would raise is that maybe it was the coronavirus. You may recall that, one year ago, at the time we published a series of polls that showed Biden narrowly ahead of Trump and Elizabeth Warren trailing Trump, and those polls were a lot more accurate than the polls that we did since then.

 

There are a lot of factors, but the big one was education. Education, not race, is now the single biggest predictor of partisan voting, but race is still a close second.

And Democrats did badly with Latino men and White college-educated women in particular. The polls had support for Biden from these groups overestimated by double-digits at the minimum. 

But the major problem is this: you can't fix voter suppression with turnout. You just get turnout that favors the suppressors.

Last Call For Lowering The Barr, Con't

You knew Bill Barr had to make an appearance in this dangerous farce somewhere, and when he did, it was a classic example of authoritarian coup tactics.

Attorney General William P. Barr, wading into President Trump’s unfounded accusations of widespread election irregularities, told federal prosecutors on Monday that they were allowed to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified.

Mr. Barr’s authorization prompted the Justice Department official who oversees investigations of voter fraud, Richard Pilger, to step down from the post within hours, according to an email Mr. Pilger sent to colleagues that was obtained by The New York Times.

Mr. Barr said he had authorized “specific instances” of investigative steps in some cases. He made clear in a carefully worded memo that prosecutors had the authority to investigate, but he warned that “specious, speculative, fanciful or far-fetched claims should not be a basis for initiating federal inquiries.”

Mr. Barr’s directive ignored the Justice Department’s longstanding policies intended to keep law enforcement from affecting the outcome of an election. And it followed a move weeks before the election in which the department lifted a prohibition on voter fraud investigations before an election.

“Given that voting in our current elections has now concluded, I authorize you to pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections in your jurisdictions,” Mr. Barr wrote.

A Justice Department official said that Mr. Barr had authorized scrutiny of allegations about ineligible voters in Nevada and backdated mail-in ballots Pennsylvania. Republicans have circulated both claims in recent days without any evidence emerging to back them.

Mr. Barr did not write the memo at the direction of Mr. Trump, the White House or any Republican lawmakers, the official said.

Mr. Barr has privately told department officials in the days since the election that any disputes should be resolved in court by the campaigns themselves, according to three people briefed on the conversations. He has said that he did not see massive fraud, and that most of the allegations of voter fraud were related to individual instances that did not point to a larger systemic problem, the people said.

But critics of Mr. Barr immediately condemned the memo as a political act that undermined the Justice Department’s typical independence from the White House.

 

The legal reasoning from Team Trump now, thanks to this horsecrap:

 

1. Because the Justice Department has authorized US attorneys to investigate fraud that doesn't actually exist, 
2. election results then can't be certified until the investigation by US attorneys is exhausted, 
3. and this will take as long as it takes, 
4. and if it takes so long that electors to the Electoral College can't give either candidate 270 votes,
5. because not enough state elections have been certified and for electors to be elected by the states,
6. or faithless electors vote for Trump,
7. then the Supreme Court has to step in and stop the election process for President,
   
8. then the Presidential contest has to go to the majority of House state delegations where Trump wins, or
9. state legislatures elect faithless electors anyway, and
10. enough faithless electors abandon Biden and give Trump 270 electoral votes,
11. and the Supreme Court orders all-new elections for the House and Senate races in disputed states,
12. which would simply be annulled by SCOTUS until enough Republicans win.
    

 

Now that is a 12-step program to hell, yes?

 

It would effectively be the end of free and fair elections in the US, which is kind of funny actually because America didn't have universal suffrage for roughly the first 180 years of its existence thanks to non-white folk not being able to vote, women not being able to vote, and Jim Crow laws, and the major mechanism for enforcing universal suffrage, the Voting Rights Act, was effectively dismantled by Chief Justice John Roberts seven years ago, and kept dismantled by Mitch McConnell.

 

Free and fair small "d" democratic elections in America are literally a younger concept than the Zandarparents. America has been an actual "symbol of freedom" for maybe six decades out of 25, and that's being amazingly generous.

And Bill Barr is helping Trump put an end to that.

The Battle Of Georgia

Biden won Georgia and Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock were able to force runoffs in January in large part thanks to the herculean efforts of Stacey Abrams and other voting rights activists working to overcome massive voter suppression. Now Abrams has her sights set on winning both runoffs, and she's going to have a cornucopia of resources to get the job done and win the Senate for the Dems.

Voting rights activist and former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams said Sunday that Democrats are going to have unprecedented financial support for the two possible January Senate runoff elections in her state — contests that could also determine control of Congress.

Democratic challengers Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are battling GOP Sens. David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler for the seats. NBC News has not projected an outcome in the Ossoff-Perdue race, but Perdue's campaign said Friday that it's preparing for a runoff. The Senate currently shows Democrats and Republicans each in control of 48 seats, with four races still outstanding.

"This will be the first time we've had three things happen," Abrams said. "One, we've got Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock at the top of these tickets, working together to make certain that voters come back."

"Number two, we will have the investment and the resources that have never followed our runoffs in Georgia for Democrats," she continued. "And number three, this is going to be the determining factor of whether we have access to health care and access to justice in the United States. Those are two issues that will make certain that people turn out."

It appears the money is already flooding in to the Georgia contests. A spokesman for Abrams' group Fair Fight told NBC News that, in the past 48 hours, they have raised more than $3.6 million dollars.

 

And she's right. Ossoff and Warnock winning are the difference between being able to actually fix the problems in this country, and another two years of frustrating gridlock with Mitch McConnell blocking every piece of legislation he can. 

We'll get to that battle in 55 days or so, but the time to prepare is now, and Abrams is already on it.

Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump regime is opening up dangerous efforts this week to try to de-legitimize Joe Biden's win, and will challenge the election itself starting this week with multiple recounts in multiple states, attacking the election process in various state courts, and a nationwide media blitz on cable channels to engage Trump supporters to mobilize. Axios's Alayna Treene:

 

President Trump plans to brandish obituaries of people who supposedly voted but are dead — plus hold campaign-style rallies — in an effort to prolong his fight against apparent insurmountable election results, four Trump advisers told me during a conference call this afternoon.

What we're hearing: Obits for those who cast ballots are part of the "specific pieces of evidence" aimed at bolstering the Trump team's so-far unsupported claims of widespread voter fraud and corruption that they say led to Joe Biden’s victory. Fueling the effort is the expected completion of vote counting this week, allowing Republicans to file for more recounts.

What's next: Team Trump is ready to announce specific recount teams in key states, and it plans to hold a series of Trump rallies focused on the litigation.

• In Georgia: Doug Collins, the outgoing congressman who lost to Sen. Kelly Loeffler in a special election to fill former Sen. Johnny Isakson's seat, will be leading the campaign's recount efforts. The team has also redeployed 92 staffers from Florida to Georgia, doubling its group on the ground.
• In Arizona: Kory Langhofer, former counsel for Trump's 2016 transition, will serve as lead attorney.
• In Pennsylvania: Porter Wright's Ron Hicks is heading up the legal effort.
• Nationwide: They're assembling additional surrogates and lawyers.

"We want to make sure we have an adequate supply of manpower on the ground for man-to-man combat," one adviser said.

The group is also staffing a campaign-style media operation. The team led by Trump communications director Tim Murtaugh is now a surrogate messaging center. It will pump out "regular press briefings, releases on legal action and obviously things like talking points and booking people strategically on television," one adviser said. They'll also make a big play to raise money for their legal defense fund.

Trump's formal legal team includes 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien, lawyer Justin Clark, and senior advisers Jason Miller and David Bossie. Reps. Jim Jordan and Scott Perry, as well as former White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus, are also advising.

 

This is all going to end up extremely badly for the country, especially when Trump cultists decide that maybe obstacles to Trump's "win" need to be removed by any means necessary. The damage is going to be incalculable, and please note all the dozens of Republicans lining up to help Trump do this.

 

Well, the ones that are left, anyway.

 

Mike Allen follows up as Republicans are worried however that Trump's long, futile fight will cost them Georgia's Senate runoff.

GOP leaders and confidants of President Trump tell Axios his legal fight to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory — which they admit is likely doomed — could last a month or more, possibly pushing the 2020 political wars toward Christmastime.

Why it matters: Most top Republicans have followed Trump’s orders not to accept the Biden victory, and to allow all legal options to be exhausted. That could mean weeks of drama — and, more importantly, distractions from the vital work of transitioning government for a change of power.

Axios is told an internal effort is underway to dissuade Trump from pursuing a blitz (with Rudy Giuliani as the tip of the spear) that could mean three to six weeks of legal challenges, discovery and rulings — at the same time that Biden is talking daily about a message of healing. 

Some top sources tell Axios that Trump has no plan to call for national unity. "No chance," says a person who talks often to the president. A senior Republican who talks often to Trump said the president is "angry ... volatile ... disconsolate."

The problem was never Trump.

The problem was always the GOP and the people who support them.

StupidiNews!

• The latest White House COVID-19 outbreak has now spread to Trump legal team pointman David Bossie, Bossie took over for WH Chief of Staff Mark Meadows after Meadows tested positive.
• The US has now passed 10 million total COVID-19 cases according to Johns Hopkins medical center officials, with more than 237,000 deaths and counting.
• Disney's parks division has furloughed an unknown additional number of Disneyland employees this week, on top of the 28,000 furloughed across Disney Parks in the US in September.
• Peruvian President Martin Vizcarra was ousted Monday by the country's lawmakers in a 105-19 vote, Manuel Marino, head of Peru's congress, will be sworn in as interim president this morning.
• Commercial spaceflight company Relativity Space says test-firing of its Aeon 1 3D-printed rocket engine was a success, running at full power for over 3 minutes.
  

Last Call For Retribution Execution, Con't

The Trump regime is refusing to recognize Joe Biden's victory, and as such, will not lift a finger to provide the incoming Biden administration with anything far as resources for a smooth transition.

A Trump administration appointee is refusing to sign a letter allowing President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team to formally begin its work this week, in another sign the incumbent president has not acknowledged Biden’s victory and could disrupt the transfer of power.

The administrator of the General Services Administration, the low-profile agency in charge of federal buildings, has a little-known role when a new president is elected: to sign paperwork officially turning over millions of dollars, as well as giving access to government officials, office space and equipment authorized for the taxpayer-funded transition teams of the winner.

It amounts to a formal declaration by the federal government, outside of the media, of the winner of the presidential race.

But by Sunday evening, almost 36 hours after media outlets projected Biden as the winner, GSA Administrator Emily Murphy had written no such letter. And the Trump administration, in keeping with the president’s failure to concede the election, has no immediate plans to sign one. This could lead to the first transition delay in modern history, except in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided a recount dispute between Al Gore and George W. Bush in December.

“An ascertainment has not yet been made,” Pamela Pennington, a spokeswoman for GSA, said in an email, “and its Administrator will continue to abide by, and fulfill, all requirements under the law.”

The GSA statement left experts on federal transitions to wonder when the White House expects the handoff from one administration to the next to begin — when the president has exhausted his legal avenues to fight the results, or the formal vote of the electoral college on Dec. 14? There are 74 days, as of Sunday, till the Biden inauguration on Jan. 20.

“No agency head is going to get out in front of the president on transition issues right now,” said one senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly. The official predicted that agency heads will be told not to talk to the Biden team.

 

So again, this isn't just mean-spirited or petty. This is active sabotage, and it will result in thousands of additional deaths as the pandemic rages across the country this winter and the incoming Biden team can't get started, because the regime is already letting a thousand Americans die a day from COVID-19 and still refuses to activate any federal resources whatsoever.

And speaking of petty, Trump's house cleaning is now under way as he puts acting cabinet officials in place to execute whatever vile garbage he has in mind in the last 70 days of his reign, and it should worry all of us that he's starting with the Pentagon.

President Trump on Monday announced he had fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper, a move that comes days after Joe Biden was projected to have won the presidential race.

"I am pleased to announce that Christopher C. Miller, the highly respected Director of the National Counterterrorism Center (unanimously confirmed by the Senate), will be Acting Secretary of Defense, effective immediately," Trump said in a series of tweets. "Chris will do a GREAT job! Mark Esper has been terminated. I would like to thank him for his service."

Trump and Esper have had a rocky relationship since the summer’s nationwide racial justice protests. During the height of the protests, Trump threatened to deploy active-duty troops to quell the demonstrations. Esper responded by holding a press conference at the Pentagon announcing his opposition to deploying troops.

Esper’s public split reportedly angered Trump so much that he had to be talked out of firing the Defense secretary then.

Earlier Thursday, NBC News reported that Esper had prepared a letter of resignation, and Politico reported that while Esper was expected to resign soon, the uncertainty of the election had put his plans on the back burner.

Trump replacing the Secretary of Defense with the Pentagon's top counterterrorism official is a really, really big clue as to what's coming next, guys.

 

And finally, Mitch McConnell made it official as the GOP Senate gets back to confirming more Trump federal judges: Joe who? Never heard of him. 

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in Congress, on Monday threw his support behind President Trump’s refusal to concede the election, declining to recognize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory as he argued Mr. Trump was “100 percent within his rights” to challenge the outcome.

Even as he celebrated the success of incumbent Republican senators who won re-election and the winnowing of Democrats’ House majority, Mr. McConnell, the majority leader, treated the outcome of the presidential election as uncertain, and hammered Democrats for calling on Mr. Trump to accept the results.

“President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options,” the Kentucky Republican said, delivering his first comments since Mr. Biden was declared the winner. “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election.”

Mr. McConnell did not contradict Mr. Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him, instead endorsing the president’s vow to pursue a bevy of lawsuits in key swing states aimed at handing him a victory. He said that “this process will reach its resolution” and that the nation’s legal and political system “will resolve any recounts or litigation.”

Following him on the floor, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said flatly that “Joe Biden won this election fair and square.” He called Mr. Trump’s claims “extremely dangerous, extremely poisonous to our democracy” and warned Republican leaders not to give it oxygen.

“Republican leaders must unequivocally condemn the president’s rhetoric and work to ensure the peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Schumer said.

Yet none have done so, and only a handful of Republican senators have acknowledged Mr. Biden’s victory.

There will be no concessions from Trump, from McConnell, or from any Republican. There will be no bipartisanship, only self-serving treacle from Collins, Murkowski, and Romney when it suits them, and nothing that doesn't.

 

But of course, that's the plan.  Always was.

You all knew that, of course.

Utah Tries Not To Go Viral

Utah GOP Gov. Gary Herbert declared a state of emergency last night as the state's COVID-19 situation is now completely dire. Herbert addressed Utahns through the Emergency Broadcast System and announced implementation of several immediate measures designed to arrest the uncontrolled spread of the pandemic across the Beehive State, including an enforced statewide mask mandate.

 

Utah’s governor declared a new state of emergency late Sunday after the state’s most devastating week of the pandemic, as COVID-19 infections skyrocketed and deaths hit new highs. His big concern is the surge in hospitalizations that may soon overwhelm doctors and nurses.

Gov. Gary Herbert issued a series of new restrictions, including a statewide mask mandate — a step he has resisted for months.

Unlike other restrictions, the governor intends to extend the mask mandate “for the foreseeable future.” Businesses that fail to comply will face fines.

The new executive orders are signed by Herbert and by Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox, who is the governor-elect. They limit any social gatherings to people in the same households and place a hold on all school extracurricular activities, including athletic and intramural events.

These restrictions take effect at 1 p.m. Monday and will end Nov. 23, just a few days before Thanksgiving. The governor said the state will offer holiday recommendations in the coming days.

This order doesn’t require any business to close, but businesses and event hosts must require social distancing.

The order does not apply to churches.

It doesn’t require any schools to go online — despite a teachers union pushing for junior high and high schools to go virtual.

The new restrictions don’t stop professional or college sports or the completion of the high school playoffs as long as coaches and athletes test negative and the crowds are severely limited. The order says there can be two attendees for every player or coach.

Restaurants can serve only people from the same households and must be able to keep groups 6 feet apart. Bars must close at 10 p.m. each night.

“Utah is open for business. You can still shop, dine in or carry out, exercise, worship and recreate, and many other things,” Herbert said in a video message. “We are just saying stay within your household group whenever possible, particularly for the next two weeks.”

Herbert did say that state and local authorities would crack down on the “organizers of public gatherings that do not exercise the required precautions of social distancing and mask-wearing.” He said organizers would face fines up to $10,000 per occurrence. This comes after multiple dance parties held in Utah County attracted hundreds if not thousands of young people, many who didn’t wear masks. And some clubs in Salt Lake County ignored the mask mandate there.

This is as good as it's going to get from Herbert, who is outgoing anyway. The problem is now firmly in the lap of his successor, current Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox.

But at least Herbert and Cox are actively trying to do something to contain the spread of the virus. Republicans have been actively sabotaging efforts to fight COVID-19 all year long, starting with Trump. I have no idea if state Republicans are going to revolt and sue to block Herbert's mandates, as if just about any Democratic governor tried this, it would almost certainly involve an armed terrorist cell showing up in their front yard.

And yes, for a Republican to actually do this now, things must be absolutely horrific in Utah.

They are. 2,000 cases per day in a state like Utah, with 3.25 million people, is roughly equivalent to 200,000 cases per day nationwide.  They're way out ahead of the national infection curve, and in a bad way.

The United States’ surging coronavirus outbreak is on pace to hit nearly 1 million new cases a week by the end of the year — a scenario that could overwhelm health systems across much of the country and further complicate President-elect Joe Biden’s attempts to coordinate a response.

Biden, who is naming his own coronavirus task force Monday, has pledged to confront new shortages of protective gear for health workers and oversee distribution of masks, test kits and vaccines while beefing up contact tracing and reengaging with the World Health Organization. He will also push Congress to pass a massive Covid-19 relief package and pressure the governors who’ve refused to implement mask mandates for new public health measures as cases rise.

But all of those actions — a sharp departure from the Trump administration’s patchwork response that put the burden on states— will have to wait until Biden takes office. Congress, still feeling reverberations from the election, may opt to simply run out the clock on its legislative year. Meanwhile, the virus is smashing records for new cases and hospitalizations as cold weather drives gatherings indoors and people make travel plans for the approaching holidays.

“If you want to have a better 2021, then maybe the rest of 2020 needs to be an investment in driving the virus down,” said Cyrus Shahpar, a former emergency response leader at the CDC who now leads the outbreak tracker Covid Exit Strategy. “Otherwise we’re looking at thousands and thousands of deaths this winter.”

Expect more Republican and Democratic states to follow suit in the days and weeks here after the election. We won't see Mitch McConnell lift a finger until next year (and the Trump regime will simply continue to let people die to spite them not reelecting Trump.)

It's 100% up to states now as the catastrophe scenario unfolds.

The good news: Pfizer's vaccine seems very promising.

The drug maker Pfizer announced on Monday that an early analysis of its coronavirus vaccine trial suggested the vaccine was robustly effective in preventing Covid-19, a promising development as the world has waited anxiously for any positive news about a pandemic that has killed more than 1.2 million people.

Pfizer, which developed the vaccine with the German drugmaker BioNTech, released only sparse details from its clinical trial, based on the first formal review of the data by an outside panel of experts.

The company said that the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection. If the results hold up, that level of protection would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed, the company said.

Pfizer plans to ask the Food and Drug Administration for emergency authorization of the two-dose vaccine later this month, after it has collected the recommended two months of safety data. By the end of the year it will have manufactured enough doses to immunize 15 to 20 million people, company executives have said.

And before everyone screams that Pfizer sandbagged their data for a week on purpose to throw the election, understand that they didn't take a dime from Trump's "Operation Ward Speed" vaaccine program, which by all accounts continues to be a complete failure. Pfizer did this because it's a drug company and hundreds of millions of vaccine doses will make them hundreds of billions of dollars, and everyone knows it.

 

Meanwhile, Utah won't be the last state to declare emergency this winter. Far from it.

Our Little White Supremacist Domestic Terrorism Problem, Con't

As expected, violent Trump-supporting white supremacist terrorist groups are now making their post-election move to threaten the governments of states that Biden won in order to change the outcome of the election.

As President Trump signaled his intention to continue fighting the results of an election that he lost, some of his supporters — many of them carrying guns — amassed at state capitol buildings around the country.

In some cities, tensions continued to escalate throughout the day Saturday. In Harrisburg, Pa., the police started out watching the scene from afar, but intervened during the afternoon to keep supporters of Mr. Trump and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. separated. Some Trump supporters were carrying what appeared to be assault rifles.

In Salem, Ore., members of the far-right Proud Boys, a group notorious for engaging in violence, gathered at a rally where people embraced the president’s baseless claims of election fraud. One person wearing a Proud Boys shirt pepper-sprayed someone, and video showed another person in the crowd shoving a photographer. The police intervened.

In Lansing, Mich., right-wing advocates chanted, “Whose streets? Our streets!” and repeated Mr. Trump’s false contention that he won the election. Video showed a fight break out, with people knocked to the ground near a line of portable toilets. Many people were carrying weapons.

 

Very soon, those people with weapons are going to start using them, especially with massively irresponsible and incendiary rhetoric from not just Trump, but 99% of his party of terrorists. 

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) warned on Sunday that there will never be another Republican president if the current 2020 elections results are allowed to stand.

Graham made the remarks on Fox News after multiple news networks called the election for President-elect Joe Biden.

“Number one, this is a contested election and the media doesn’t decide who becomes president,” Graham complained. “If they did, you would never have a Republican president forever. So, we’re discounting them.”

The South Carolina Republican went on the claim that he had evidence of 15 dead people voting in Pennsylvania.

“If we don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again,” he asserted. “President Trump should not concede.”

  

Note Graham here is not talking about challenging the election as illegitimate, he's talking about our entire election system as illegitimate. And Graham easily won his election while spouting his nonsense about the system being tilted in Democrats' favor, in a state where Republicans have done everything possible to disenfranchise thousands of Black voters for decades.

There's a far, far distance between Trump refusing to concede in order to protect his brand as chief Biden critic in exile, which he's doing, and what Graham is saying here, which is straight-up sedition.

I mean at this point, the violence in the days and weeks ahead is almost guaranteed, and I am despondent over it.

 

StupidiNews!

• Legendary Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek has passed at age 80 from pancreatic cancer, Trebek had a nearly 50-year career hosting game shows in the US and Canada, with 36 years hosting Jeopardy!
• The Biden transition team says it's ready to defeat any "roadblocks" that Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell may have as far as putting together a new cabinet and agenda.
• Bolivia's Luis Arce was sworn in over the weekend as President, restoring the country's socialist party to power after former President Evo Morales was ousted late last year.
• President-elect Joe Biden is expected to name members of his COVID-19 task force on Monday, starting with former Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, fired by Donald Trump in 2017.
• Automakers are looking to use car bodies themselves as battery storage in electric vehicles, with thousands of energy cells sandwiched between the car's inner and outer layers.
  

Last Call For Winter, Spring, Summer Or Fall

So, whatever you were imagining for the story behind how Rudy Giuliani and Trump's "crack legal team" ended up giving a press conference yesterday at Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia rather than the Four Seasons Hotel in Philadelphia, I guarantee you it's not as utterly bonkers as the truth. 

 

It started Saturday morning, with a presidential tweet that, as has often happened during the past four years, Trump’s advisers quickly scrambled to correct.

Trump announced: “Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia, 11 a.m.,” only to delete his post minutes later and replace it with one changing the venue from the upscale Center City hotel to a similarly named business: Four Seasons Total Landscaping on industrial State Road, next to Fantasy Island Adult Books and Novelties and across the street from the Delaware Valley Cremation Center.

“To clarify, President Trump’s news conference will NOT be held at Four Seasons Hotel Philadelphia,” the hotel’s management tweeted out minutes later. “It will be held at Four Seasons Total Landscaping — no relation with the hotel.”

But by then, many on social media were already delighting in a booking they assumed must have been a mistake.

The New York Times reported Saturday that Giuliani and Trump adviser Corey Lewandowski had always intended the news conference to take place in a section of Philadelphia where they might receive a more welcome reception than at the raucous celebrations of Biden’s victory going on in Center City. It was the president, the paper reported, who had misunderstood.

As for why Four Seasons Total Landscaping? Giuliani offered no explanation Saturday and made no mention of the company or its owner, Marie Siravo, during his remarks. Tom Matkowski, GOP ward leader for the neighborhood, said the news conference hadn’t been coordinated with the local Republican Party and that he didn’t believe the Siravo family was active in local party politics.

The phone at Four Seasons went unanswered throughout the day, and Siravo did not return calls for comment.

Her social media posts indicate she and some of her family members were vocal, but not necessarily unshakable, Trump supporters.

“We don’t need to invite him for dinner,” Siravo posted in August, in response to a “Conservative Hangout” Facebook page that listed Trump’s accomplishments in office. “We just need him to fix our country & all the democratic mess.” She added that she had been “raised a Democrat.”

In a Facebook post, the Four Seasons team described itself as a “family-owned small business run by lifelong Philadelphians” that would have “proudly hosted any presidential candidate’s campaign.”

“We strongly believe in America and in democracy,” the message read. It promised it would have merch ready to sell by next week. 

 

Rather than admit a staffer booked the wrong venue, or that Trump booked the wrong venue, everybody went with the Emperor Has No Clothes and just ran with it.

They never had a plan for anything, and they nearly destroyed the country.

They still might.

Passing By On Your Left

NY Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez makes it very clear to NY Times reporter Astead Herndon that she believes centrists are useless sitting ducks, and that if all Democrats ran like she did in her D+25 district, we'd have the public option by now.

 

But...she's not wrong about the DCCC and the DSCC and even the DNC itself being utterly incompetent when it comes to winning races, either.

For months, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he sought to defeat President Trump.

But on Saturday, in a nearly hourlong interview shortly after President-elect Biden was declared the winner, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made clear the divisions within the party that animated the primary still exist. And she dismissed recent criticisms from some Democratic House members who have blamed the party’s left for costing them important seats. Some of the members who lost, she said, had made themselves “sitting ducks.”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

We finally have a fuller understanding of the results. What’s your macro takeaway?

Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.

We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.

But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.

To your first point, Democrats lost seats in an election where they were expected to gain them. Is that what you are ascribing to racism and white supremacy at the polls?

I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating D.C.C.C.-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.

Some of this is criminal. It’s malpractice. Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the Year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.

And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.

Well, Conor Lamb did win. So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy?

These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.

 

I don't think ripping into Dems who lost to Republicans and saying "Well you didn't run your campaign like I ran mine, and you would have won if you did" is going to make her any friends. It kinda makes people not think she's on the same side, or any side other than her own.

 

But I don't think she cares, either. And when it comes to "I know how to beat DCCC campaigns so take my advice" she is unequivocally right. She knows how to primary them and she knows how to exploit their weaknesses. She's beat them before and she has helped others beat them. She's not wrong about Obama creating his own stuff outside the DNC, either.

 

Whether that actually helps Dems beat Republicans nationally is another thing entirely.

 

Sunday Long Read: The Art Of What's Possible

Politico takes a look at nine areas of foreign and domestic policy that the incoming Biden Administration is planning to tackle, and how they will run into Republicans in the Senate and on the courts that will do everything they can to stop every possible policy item. 

 

Joe Biden wants to expand Obamacare and add a public insurance option. He plans to bring back strict carbon emissions for power plants and promises a zero-emissions economy by 2050.

He also says he’ll stop the border wall construction, raise taxes on households that make more than $400,000 a year and scale back President Donald Trump’s tariffs.

Now for the reality check: Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and legislative successes, matched up with a federal judiciary now stacked with Trump-appointed conservatives, have created an environment that could easily stymie the dreams of a sweeping progressive agenda under a Biden presidency.

The prospect of a Republican Senate is already scaling back the Biden agenda. And the onslaught of legal challenges from the Trump campaign may distract from Biden's plans.

In some cases, creating new regulations will take months, maybe years. Regulations have to go through a tedious proposal, rule-making and public comment process — and Biden can’t just press an accelerator pedal to make it go faster. And some regulations could just get knocked down in court by Trump judges.

“We have to remember that all of our actions can be challenged in court and the Trump administration has stacked all these courts with the most conservative judges,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.).

On the industry front, Biden will face massive pushback from the fossil fuels industry on much of his climate agenda — and he may be inclined to listen to their pleas, having promised places like Pennsylvania that he won’t kill fracking.

And with a tight Senate, Biden can't just bulldoze his way through legislation on tax increases, technology company crackdowns or Obamacare options.

So while progressive icons like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders are already angling for prominent cabinet positions to push a progressive agenda, the reality of the incoming Biden administration is that they will have to legislate, negotiate, compromise and at times just ditch their campaign dreams in favor of a realistic approach to governing a polarized country.

To be sure, there will be some low-hanging fruit for Biden, like lifting the Pentagon’s transgender ban, rejoining the Paris climate agreement and reversing rules that stripped federal funding from Planned Parenthood.

But the first order of business will be building out a robust pandemic response that includes using the Defense Production Act to produce protective gear for health care workers, while pushing a massive economic stimulus that could top $2 trillion. The lingering question of a national mask mandate will loom large for Biden.

As Biden puts together his transition team, his West Wing apparatus and his Cabinet nominees, his closest advisers have been gaming out the various scenarios for what Washington will look like after Jan. 20. And many of his supporters are clear-eyed about the scope of the task ahead.

“Biden’s transition team as well as Biden himself are going to have to be changing tires as the car is speeding down the highway, and changing four tires at the same time,” said Robert Reich, a former Labor secretary under President Bill Clinton. “It will be extraordinarily difficult. The challenge will be huge. And to make matters worse, the country is deeply divided.”

 

The nine areas:

• Health Care
• Immigration
• Education
• Technology
• Taxation
• Trade
• Defense
• Climate Change
• Housing

 

The issue remains that while there is much Biden can do on Day One of his administration, the reality is without 50 +1 in the Senate, the end of the filibuster, to which several Democratic senators have already said no to, and adding more justices to the Supreme Court, Biden's agenda is largely going absolutely nowhere.

 

And for something to happen, we're going to have to survive 2022, and a very good chance of losing the House completely as progressives turn on Biden for failing to deliver, and handing things back over to the GOP.

The odds of that are going to be bad.  I'm hoping that turning around COVID-19 will go a long way.

Last Call For Harris, Her Time As Well

That would be "Madam Vice-President-elect Kamala Devi Harris.

 

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris spent much of her victory speech on Saturday night showing gratitude for women who she said had “paved the way for this moment tonight,” highlighting Black women in particular, whom she called “the backbone of our democracy.”

Ms. Harris, who is Black and South Asian, said from the stage in Wilmington, Del., that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. deserved credit for having the “audacity” to choose a woman as his vice president. She wore an all-white outfit in apparent tribute to suffragists.

Her comments echoed the words of Black women across the United States who spent Saturday celebrating Ms. Harris’s ascent, whether at impromptu parties in streets and parks or around a television at home.

“I’m very proud to be a Black woman, very proud to witness this important time in history, given the huge divide that we have in our nation right now,” Tracie Hunter said from the produce section of a Los Angeles grocery store. Ms. Hunter said she was “encouraged that we can continue to have our little Black girls and other girls of color feel encouraged, like they can do whatever they want to do and they can be whatever they want to be.”

Yolanda Latimore, the owner of an advertising agency in Macon, Ga., said Ms. Harris’s rise to the vice presidency was particularly important and would show young Black girls that anything is possible.

“I know that it won’t solve all problems, but it definitely will raise the spirit and the drive of Black women,” Ms. Latimore said, adding that she was “just so glad to see something like this happen.”

Carole Porter, 56, a health care information technology team leader who lives in Richmond, Calif., is a close friend of Ms. Harris’s and first met her at the neighborhood bus stop when they were children in Berkeley, Calif. The pair rode the bus together each morning to a more affluent area. In 1970, Ms. Harris joined the second elementary school class in Berkeley to be desegregated by busing.

“We didn’t know that we were in the middle of this social moment,” said Ms. Porter, who remembered Ms. Harris as studious and disciplined. “We just knew we had to get up really early for school and it was a long way from home.”

When Ms. Porter got a text message from a friend confirming the Biden-Harris ticket had won on Saturday, she said she started to cry, and thought of Ms. Harris’s mother.

“I thought of the West Berkeley flatlands,” she said, “this small, immigrant, people of color, redlined neighborhood we grew up in”

 

History is made as time passes, but sometime what comes to pass is truly historic, and this moment, the first Black woman Vice-President, is going to be something you tell your grandkids and great-grandkids about for a long time.