772 search results for ""voter fraud""

This is why I snap whenever anyone says the Republicans are cowards as a way of explaining why they refuse to oppose Donald Trump. That’s wrong. They are amoral, craven opportunists:

Changes to the way millions of Americans voted this year contributed to record turnout, but that’s no guarantee the measures making it easier to cast ballots will stick around for future elections.

Republicans in key states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden already are pushing for new restrictions, especially to absentee voting. It’s an option many states expanded amid the coronavirus outbreak that proved hugely popular and helped ensure one of the smoothest election days in recent years.

President Donald Trump has been unrelenting in his attacks on mail voting as he continues to challenge the legitimacy of an election he lost. Despite a lack of evidence and dozens of losses in the courts, his claims of widespread voter fraud have gained traction with some Republican elected officials.

They are vowing to crack down on mail ballots and threatening to roll back other steps that have made it easier for people to vote.

“This myth could not justify throwing out the results of the election, nor can it justify imposing additional burdens on voters that will disenfranchise many Americans,” said Wendy Weiser, head of the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law.

An estimated 108 million people voted before Election Day, either through early in-person voting or by mailing or dropping off absentee ballots. That represented nearly 70% of all votes cast, after states took steps to make it easier to avoid crowded polling places during the pandemic.

A few states sent ballots to every registered voter while others dropped requirements that voters needed a specific excuse to cast an absentee ballot. Many states added drop boxes and expanded early voting options.

The changes were popular with voters and did not lead to widespread fraud. A group of election officials including representatives of the federal cybersecurity agency called the 2020 presidential election the “most secure” election in U.S. history, and U.S. Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press there had been no evidence of fraud that would change the outcome of the election.

Nevertheless, Republicans in Georgia have proposed adding a photo ID requirement when voting absentee, a ban on drop boxes and possibly a return to requiring an excuse for mail voting, such as illness or traveling for work on Election Day.

Early supporters of the ID requirement include Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, Republicans who were criticized relentlessly by Trump for failing to back his fraud claims after losing in Georgia. A top deputy for Raffensperger has said the ID requirement would boost public confidence and refute any future claims of fraud.

The state’s two U.S. Senate runoffs next month will take place under current law, which requires local election officials to verify signatures on absentee ballots.

In Pennsylvania, Republican lawmakers have been writing legislation to address what they claim are problems with the 2020 election and mail voting in particular, even though courts and elections officials have found no evidence of widespread problems.

“We’d like to tighten it up as soon as we can,” said Pennsylvania Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward.

Republicans hold majorities in both legislative chambers, and their support was instrumental in a year-old state law that expanded mail voting to all registered voters. One bill being discussed would go so far as to repeal that law and force voters to state an excuse to receive a ballot in the mail.

Previous elections have shown that voters appreciate mail voting, no matter their party affiliation. Republican candidates down the ballot did very well this year, even as a record 81.2 million voters cast their ballot for the Democrat in the presidential race.

In Michigan, Republicans held every congressional seat and kept control of the legislature despite Trump losing the state. Yet Republicans still held a legislative hearing in which Trump’s lawyers argued there were widespread irregularities without explaining how these somehow affected only the presidential race but not other contests.

“Just like we have seen a lot of legislators making ill-advised decisions to hold hearings that ended up being more political theater than policy debates, we can similarly expect legislators to further this hyper-partisan agenda to restrict the vote,” said Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat.

Trump is making a total ass of himself and undermining American democracy more thoroughly than the Russian government could ever have hoped to do. But then, that’s the Republican playbook too. They’ve been shouting “voter fraud” for decades, despite no evidence of any kind of widespread or systematic attempts to do it and set the table for Trump’s inane temper tantrum. Now that he’s got 80% of Republicans believing that the vote is rigged, they can use that to suppress the vote even more. Win-win for them, even if it’s lose-lose for Trump.

This is the best thing that could ever have happened to them. They will be able to further restrict voting in swing states with GOP legislatures and tell their voters from now on that even when they lose they actually won. In the end, this may end up being Donald Trump’s greatest gift to the Republican Party. No wonder they aren’t saying a word about his betrayal of American democracy. It’s their dream come true.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

Read the following tweetstorm and ask yourself how it can be that 80% of Republicans can’t see something is wrong with the fact that Trump believes every single institution in America is conspiring against him. From the media and the Democrats, to the Department of Justice and the Intelligence Community to the entire judiciary including the Supreme Court to Governors and state representatives, including election officials, to the Republican Party itself they are all arrayed against him and either in on or enabling the greatest conspiracy in world history right in front of our eyes.

How can any supposedly sentient being believe this?

If a Democrat Presidential Candidate had an Election Rigged & Stolen, with proof of such acts at a level never seen before, the Democrat Senators would consider it an act of war, and fight to the death. Mitch & the Republicans do NOTHING, just want to let it pass. NO FIGHT!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2020

The “Justice” Department and the FBI have done nothing about the 2020 Presidential Election Voter Fraud, the biggest SCAM in our nation’s history, despite overwhelming evidence. They should be ashamed. History will remember. Never give up. See everyone in D.C. on January 6th.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2020

Where the hell is the Durham Report? They spied on my campaign, colluded with Russia (and others), and got caught. Read the Horowitz Reports about Comey & McCabe. Even the Fake News @nytimes said “bad”. They tried it all, and failed, so now they are trying to steal the election!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2020

The U.S. Supreme Court has been totally incompetent and weak on the massive Election Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election. We have absolute PROOF, but they don’t want to see it – No “standing”, they say. If we have corrupt elections, we have no country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 26, 2020

He’s obviously off his rocker. But what about all these people who see this and think it makes any sense at all?

I get that Republicans are grievance addicts. I’ve been covering that phenomenon for a long time. A lot of it is a big show to “own the libs.” But this is something else. Trump’s epic tantrum has grown from alleged Democratic voter fraud to a massive conspiracy and cover-up by everyone in the country except for him and his supporters. How can these people buy such insanity?

I’m a bit worried that the QAnon/Pizzagate conspiracy mongering of the past five years has seriously warped the brains of tens of millions of our fellow citizens and they will now believe anything. That seems … bad.

The Happy Hollandaise fundraiser goes through the end of the year so if you’re of a mind to kick in a little something below or at the snail mail address on the sidebar, I would be most grateful.

cheers,
digby

It appears that AG Bill Barr has become concerned about his legacy and possibly even about the president he has been collaborating with to undermine our democracy. After all, Trump has gone stark, raving, batshit over the past few weeks. Anyway:

Outgoing Attorney General William P. Barr said Monday that he saw no basis for the federal government seizing voting machines and that he did not intend to appoint a special counsel to investigate allegations of voter fraud — again breaking with President Trump as the commander in chief entertains increasingly desperate measures to overturn the election.

At a news conference to announce charges in a decades-old terrorism case, Barr — who has just two days left in office — was peppered with questions about whether he would consider steps proposed by allies of the president to advance Trump’s claims of massive voter fraud.

Barr said that while he was “sure there was fraud in this election,” he had not seen evidence that it was so “systemic or broad-based” that it would change the result. He asserted he saw “no basis now for seizing machines by the federal government,” and he would not name a special counsel to explore the allegations of Trump and his allies.

“If I thought a special counsel at this stage was the right tool and was appropriate, I would name one, but I haven’t, and I’m not going to,” Barr said.

Similarly, Barr said he would not name a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, President-elect Joe Biden’s son, who revealed earlier this month he was under investigation for possible tax crimes. Barr said the investigation was “being handled responsibly and professionally” by regular Justice Department prosecutors, and he hoped that would continue in the next administration.

“To this point, I have not seen a reason to appoint a special counsel, and I have no plan to do so before I leave,” Barr said.

The story goes into Trump growing disappointment with Barr for failing to help him sabotage Joe Biden and steal the election for him. I hadn’t heard about this though:

Trump told Fox News recently that Barr “should have stepped up” and publicized the case — which would have violated Justice Department policy.

“All he had to do is say an investigation’s going on,” Trump said, adding later, “When you affect an election, Bill Barr, frankly, did the wrong thing.

I’m sure that sounds familiar. It’s what Donald Trump extorted the Ukrainian president to do — and why he is only the third president in history to be impeached.

In addition to breaking with Trump on election fraud, Barr also seemed to put himself at odds with Trump in attributing recently uncovered cyberhacks of the U.S. government to Russia. Though Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had already done so, Trump later suggested on Twitter China might be the culprit.

“From the information I have, I agree with Secretary Pompeo’s assessment,” Barr said. “It certainly appears to be the Russians.”

That’s big of him, after everything he did.

I’ll just let Marcy Wheeler have the last word:

Let's look at how thin these breaks are:

1) He spent MONTHS, with no evidence, delegitimizing vote-by-mail.
2) He appointed a hack USA to investigate Biden on TOP of DE USA.
3) He spent years undermining RU investigation, in spite of all evidence. https://t.co/QKzedmOKkd

— emptywheel (@emptywheel) December 21, 2020

He gets no credit for “breaking” now that Trump is 30 days away from being a permanent resident of Mar-a-lago. He’s Trump’s top henchman. Unless he confesses to everything he did and spills the beans on what he knows, we don’t need to hear from him.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time. If you’re of a mind to drop something in the old Hullabaloo Christmas stocking, you can do so below.

cheers,
digby

The GOP is now a zombie so I suppose that there’s no real need for an autopsy. But get a load of the delusional cult-like thinking among Republican officials.

Democrats in Texas and New Hampshire are forming committees to examine the party’s failings in last month’s election. Less formal autopsies are underway in states across the country.

But the party that lost the presidential election isn’t soul-searching at all.

For the final act of his showman-like presidency, Donald Trump has convinced the Republican Party that despite losing the White House by 7 million votes — and despite seeing five states flip in 2020 — things could hardly be better inside the GOP.

Even as the Electoral College this week confirmed Joe Biden’s victory, interviews with more than two dozen GOP state and local chairs and Republican National Committee members reflect a party that, far from reassessing its embrace of Trumpism, is hell-bent on more of the same.

“Our president absolutely grew our party,” said Jennifer Carnahan, chair of the Minnesota Republican Party, noting the GOP’s down-ballot victories and explosive turnout with Trump on the ticket. “He totally advanced our party … I think that as Republicans, we just need to continue to remain on the course.”

It hardly matters that Trump couldn’t beat Biden in the Rust Belt. Or that Trump ceded the longtime Republican strongholds of Georgia and Arizona to Democrats and, in defeat, became the first incumbent president since 1992 to fail to win a second term.

Six weeks after the election, Republicans are beginning to chart a multi-state effort to undo mail ballot expansions that disadvantaged the party in November. But that’s a mechanical concern. As it prepares for the midterm elections and 2024, the direction of the party is set.

“As far as I’m concerned, everything’s great,” said Stanley Grot, a district-level Republican Party chair in Michigan, a state Trump won four years ago but lost to Biden in November.

In one of the more surreal role reversals in modern post-presidential election history, the winning party nationally is poring over its congressional and legislative losses, while the party that lost the White House isn’t.

When Mitt Romney lost the national popular vote by 5 million votes in 2012, his defeat sparked a devastating, 100-page RNC post-mortem based on conversations with more than 2,600 people, in-depth focus groups and polling, a survey of pollsters, and an online survey featuring the participation of more than 36,000 individuals. Trump lost by 2 million more votes than Romney, and there is nary a peep.

To many Republicans, that makes total sense. After all, GOP turnout was up, and down-ballot Republicans over-performed, reducing Democrats’ House majority and positioning the GOP — depending on the result of two runoffs in Georgia — to hold the Senate. Even if the president did get swamped by Biden — an outcome most Republicans don’t accept — there is little belief among Republicans that it had anything to do with him.

“It wasn’t a matter of our candidate,” said Bill Pozzi, chair of the Republican Party in heavily Republican Victoria County, Texas. “It was a matter of the process.”

[…]

But in the Republican Party of 2020, second-guessing is heresy. Trump ignored the lessons of the 2012 post-mortem when he ran in 2016, and he won. And even in defeat this year, Trump received more votes than any presidential candidate in history except for Biden, dramatically expanding the Republican Party’s ranks and making some modest inroads with Latinos, a growing segment of the electorate. More important, he persuaded Republicans, without evidence, that the election was rigged.

It’s hard for a party to draw lessons from an election it doesn’t think it lost.

As a result, Republicans mostly aren’t reckoning with their erosion in the suburbs or their weakness with women. Instead, they’re turning Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud into a cause that will animate the party for years, spinning forward frustration with the November election’s administration to advance voter ID laws and measures to limit mail voting in future elections.

“Everything’s great!” Lol.

The truth is that many of these people see a YUGE opportunity to use Trump’s fraudulent “voter fraud” nonsense as an excuse to further suppress the vote in swing states run by Republicans. But there is real brainwashing going on there too. They seem to truly believe that Donald Trump is worth hitching their futures to, even though he is the worst sore loser in history and clearly has shrunk their party to nothing but the core cult members.

They are nuts, but they still represent tens of millions of Americans and they have clout in this antiquated, barely-democratic country of ours. They aren’t going away. And they eat brains. Obviously.

It’s that time of year again, friends. If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so below. And Happy Hollandaise!

But he did what he came to do.

Poor Bill Barr.

After all that he did for President Trump, Barr was still forced out of his job as Attorney General for failing to hurl himself over a cliff as a human sacrifice. Trump wanted him to use the Department of Justice to help overturn his election loss which even Barr wasn’t able to finesse. Adding insult to injury, Trump just couldn’t forgive him for failing to “pull a Comey” by using a DOJ investigation of Hunter Biden to sabotage Joe Biden’s campaign.

Not that Trump’s unceremonious dumping stopped Barr from debasing himself even more ostentatiously than usual by offering a “resignation letter” that he obviously cribbed from one of those flowery love notes North Korean Dictator Kim Jong Un used to write to Trump during their passionate bromance. I’m guessing that was the price of getting out without being fired via an insulting tweet which seems to be something Republican men fear even more than thermonuclear war or feminism.

It just goes to show that no matter how much people are willing to prostitute themselves for Donald Trump, they are only as good as their last bad deed. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, Trump even stabbed his old mentor Roy Cohn in the back when he no longer had use for him:

Barr, who publicly lobbied for the job, proceeded to spend the next two years as a loyal flunkie for Trump, leveraging the power of the attorney general’s office to shield Trump from any accountability for his various criminal and ethical violations. Barr covered up for the Russian collusion. He tried to fix the Ukraine scandal. In the last days of the campaign, he even bolstered Trump’s lies about “voter fraud”, obviously an effort to support a conspiracy to steal the election.

To that list I would add his blatant political interference in the Michael Flynn and Roger Stone cases as well as his personal interest in the Durham probe all of which created massive turmoil in his department causing several career prosecutors to leave in disgust.

Barr never even tried to hide the fact that he considered it his duty to protect the president and his cronies from prosecution. He holds a political philosophy about the imperial presidency honed by decades of fulminating about the allegedly poor treatment of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan by congressional upstarts and special prosecutors. Barr’s infamous, unsolicited memo asserting that Robert Mueller could not charge the president with a crime, echoing those famous words of Richard Nixon — “if the president does it it’s not illegal” — was what got him the job in the first place. The inane pretense that he is adamantly opposed to “politicizing” the department of justice, even as he politicized it more than any Attorney General in history, was a true triumph of gaslighting.

He is also a right-wing culture warrior who believes in authoritarian policies to ensure that the nation subscribes to his definition of “order” (he rushed to reinstate the federal death penalty and immediately began executing prisoners in a hurry) and has argued forcefully for a dismantling of secular society And yes, he is a hard-core partisan zealot whose so-called principles are applied solely for the benefit of the Republican Party.

Frankly, I also think in his private moments he is probably a lot closer to the 1970s Archie Bunker style of old-fashioned bigot that he is willing to let on. He’s barely able to hide his revulsion for anyone who doesn’t conform to his idea of respectability and it’s more than obvious that he is hostile towards Black people. We saw that play out in his reaction to the George Floyd protests and the grotesque militarized responses in Lafayette Square and Portland, Oregon. It’s not hard to see why he was so keen to join up with Donald Trump.

However, Barr seems to have realized that Trump’s loss means that he’s done all he can to create the precedents for future Republican imperial presidents to consolidate their power. He successfully protected his president by exerting his own power while ensuring that the norms he broke are still available for Republicans to use against Democratic administrations. His work is done.

As I mentioned on Monday, there has been some chatter that after Barr took the unusual step of making John Durham into a Special Counsel, which somewhat insulates him from a Biden Department of Justice, Trump wanted Barr to appoint other Special Counsels to investigate the baseless election fraud claims and, of course, Hunter Biden. Presumably, Barr declined to lay these landmines on Trump’s behalf because the AP reported on Tuesday that Trump is still obsessing on this idea and has been discussing it with numerous other people including White House counsel Pat Cipollone, Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.

His aides are all pushing him hard to do it because they believe “that a special counsel probe could wound a Biden administration before it even begins.” And Trump is still debating whether he should pressure Barr’s replacement, Jeffrey Rosen and if he can’t persuade him, whether to replace him with someone who will do it. This could end up making the Saturday Night Massacre look like a schoolyard squabble. Trump has even suggested that he might be able to appoint the Special Counsels himself. (Bill Barr’s many lessons on the unlimited power of the Imperial President — “I have an Article II!!”— seem to have penetrated.)

It’s good to see that Trump has his priorities straight, as usual. Sure, we may still be in the throes of a deadly pandemic and facing logistical complications in getting the vaccines to everyone who needs them. And yes, Congress is flailing about under Mitch “Grim Reaper” McConnell’s malevolent desire to make people suffer instead of offering necessary relief. Oh, and the federal government seems to have been the victim of a massive cyberattack by Russia which Trump has not bothered to discuss even once. But that’s because he’s still busy blustering about voter fraud and plotting to sabotage Joe Biden.

Bill Barr, his obsequious “resignation” letter notwithstanding, is obviously making a break for it before the whole thing explodes. Perhaps he thinks that by getting out now, before Trump could fire him and replace him with someone who would do even more dirty work to subvert the incoming administration, he will have saved his reputation. But it’s way too late for that. Barr will forever be remembered as Donald Trump’s Roy Cohn and nothing more.

It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here:

It looks like we’re going to be forced to spend the next couple of years hanging on to Trump’s every tweet because he’s threatening to run again and everyone assumes he is the frontrunner. I wish I thought that was absurd, but recall that Sarah Palin was once the frontrunner for the 2012 nomination until her cheap and obvious grifting got in the way… (Trump is different — his grifting is part of his appeal.)

The following article suggests that he may not really run, he just wants people to think he will.

The president has spent days calling a dozen or more allies to ask what they think he needs to do over the next two years to “stay part of the conversation,” according to two people, including one who spoke to the president. And while Trump has told allies he plans to run for president again, he has also indicated he could back out in two years if he determines he’ll have a tough time winning, said three people familiar with the discussions.

Essentially, at this point, Trump appears just as interested in people talking about a Trump 2024 campaign as he is in actually launching a real campaign, even if he may ultimately turn his flirtation into a serious bid, according to interviews with 11 Republicans who worked for Trump or helped in his two races.

Formally running for president would mean a lot of things aides say Trump doesn’t want to deal with: financial disclosure forms, building campaign infrastructure, the possibility of losing again. But simply teasing a presidential run — without actually filing the paperwork or erecting a campaign — gets Trump the attention he needs for the next two years.

Attention will help sustain his business, parts of which lost millions of dollars while he was in office. Attention will help pay off his debts, which will need to be paid off in the coming years. Attention will help discredit his investigators, who are examining whether Trump illegally inflated his assets.

It’s a strategy Trump has used before. Prior to his 2016 run, Trump expressed interest in at least four different presidential bids spanning all the way to the late 1980s, only to ultimately back out.

“Trump has probably no idea if he will actually run, but because he only cares about himself and his association with the party has only been about his ambitions rather than what it stands for, he will try to freeze the field and keep as many people on the sidelines,” said a former White House aide. “Just for the sake of keeping his options open and, yes, keeping the attention all for himself.”

Trump hasn’t announced his candidacy yet in part because he won’t acknowledge he lost, falsely asserting widespread voter fraud gave the race to President-elect Joe Biden. On Monday, electors will meet in states across the country to officially cast their votes, a move expected to cement Biden’s win and prompt more Republicans to accept the victory.

That vote will train more focus on Trump’s future plans. Many in the MAGA base and even some prospective 2024 Republican presidential hopefuls have already thrown their support behind another Trump White House bid.

“There’s nobody really better than him to carry the torch,” said John Fredericks, a conservative radio host who served on the Trump campaign’s 2020 advisory committee.

In his calls to allies, Trump has been asking them specifically how he can campaign for four years, and soliciting advice on how to navigate the first two years. He has talked about traveling to the Middle East, a region where he would be well-received, according to the two people familiar with the calls. The visit would allow him to promote his policies there, including agreements his administration helped negotiate to normalize relations between Israel and several Arab nations. [YIKES!!!]

Among those he’s called are Fox News host Sean Hannity, former White House communications director Bill Shine, longtime allies Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie and former U.S. Ambassador to Germany Ric Grenell, according to one of people familiar with the calls. None of these people are dissuading him about running, but, according to the person, Trump has already dismissed concerns from those who think it’s a bad idea.

Some allies have privately urged Trump to announce he is running on Inauguration Day – as he did in 2017 — to try to take attention away from Biden and satisfy Trump’s need for attention. But Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law and top aide, and Bill Stepien, Trump’s 2020 campaign manager, are advising him to take his time to announce, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

“He’s going to announce,” according to the person. “It’s not a question of whether he will announce. The question is when he is going to announce.”

[…]

If Trump is just technically exploring a potential candidacy, he doesn’t have to register as a candidate, even if he conducts polling, travels and calls potential supporters, according to the Federal Elections Commission and election lawyers. But if he makes declarative statements about running, purchases campaign ads or spends more than $5,000 on an actual campaign, he would have to register, they added.

“I think it’s important for Trump to boldly telegraph to the public that this election was a sham, that it can never happen again, and that he will lead the opposition for the next four years, including demanding election reforms,” a senior Trump campaign official said.

“The oxygen of his life is attention,” said Steve Schale, who ran Unite the Country, a super PAC that supported Biden’s candidacy. “I’m sure that not being on the news every day is a terrifying prospect to him. … I would not be surprised if he announced because he needs it.”

I just don’t buy it. Sure, he doesn’t want to lose again. This is, by far, the most traumatic thing that’s ever happened to him and his psyche is shattering because of it. I suspect he’s convinced himself that he didn’t really lose and may be able to convince himself that he can get over in 2024. And he’s desperate for attention as always.

But I think he will run because his core philosophy of life is one thing and one thing only: Get Even. He will not be able to resist his deep, instinctual need to get revenge on Joe Biden.

“I always say don’t let people take advantage — this goes for a country, too, by the way — don’t let people take advantage. Get even. And you know, if nothing else, others will see that and they’re going to say, ‘You know, I’m going to let Jim Smith or Sarah Malone, I’m going to let them alone because they’re tough customers.’ — Donald Trump at Liberty University

It’s Happy Hollandaise time! If you’d like to help keep this old blog going for another year, you can do so here:

They’re going over the cliff:

President Trump lost key swing states by clear margins. His barrage of lawsuits claiming widespread voting fraud has been almost universally dismissed, most recently by the Supreme Court. And on Monday, the Electoral College will formally cast a majority of its votes for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

But as the president continues to refuse to concede, a small group of his most loyal backers in Congress are plotting a final-stage challenge on the floor of the House of Representatives in early January to try to reverse Mr. Biden’s victory.

Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle on Jan. 6 is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could thrust Vice President Mike Pence into the excruciating position of having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.

The fight promises to shape how Mr. Trump’s base views the election for years to come, and to pose yet another awkward test of allegiance for Republicans who have privately hoped that the Electoral College vote this week will be the final word on the election result.

For the vice president, whom the Constitution assigns the task of tallying the results and declaring a winner, the episode could be particularly torturous, forcing him to balance his loyalty to Mr. Trump with his constitutional duties and considerations about his own political future.

The effort is being led by Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, a backbench conservative. Along with a group of allies in the House, he is eyeing challenges to the election results in five different states — Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin — where they claim varying degrees of fraud or illegal voting took place, despite certification by the voting authorities and no evidence of widespread impropriety.

“We have a superior role under the Constitution than the Supreme Court does, than any federal court judge does, than any state court judge does,” Mr. Brooks said in an interview. “What we say, goes. That’s the final verdict.”

Isn’t that special? You’ve just got to love their stubborn adherence to the spirit of democracy don’t you? Or at tleast the concept of “one Trump cultists, one vote.”

This won’t work, of course. But I have to say I will love watching MIke pence dance on the head of a pin when it happens:

Under rules laid out in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887, their challenges must be submitted in writing with a senator’s signature also affixed. No Republican senator has yet stepped forward to say he or she will back such an effort, though a handful of reliable allies of Mr. Trump, including Senators Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rand Paul of Kentucky, have signaled they would be open to doing so.

The president has praised Mr. Brooks on Twitter, but has thus far taken no evident interest in the strategy. Aides say he has been more focused on battling to overturn the results in court.

Even if a senator did agree, constitutional scholars say the process is intended to be an arduous one. Once an objection is heard from a member of each house of Congress, senators and representatives will retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century.

[…]

“My No. 1 goal is to fix a badly flawed American election system that too easily permits voter fraud and election theft,” Mr. Brooks said. “A possible bonus from achieving that goal is that Donald Trump would win the Electoral College officially, as I believe he in fact did if you only count lawful votes by eligible American citizens and exclude all illegal votes.”

It remains unclear how broad a coalition he could build. More than 60 percent of House Republicans, including the top two party leaders, joined a legal brief supporting the unsuccessful Texas lawsuit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the election results. But it is one thing to sign a legal brief and another to officially contest the outcome on the House floor.

Some Republicans including Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Matt Gaetz have also signaled they could support an objection. Mr. Brooks said he had been speaking with others who were interested. But prominent allies of the president who have thrown themselves headfirst into earlier fights, like Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio or even the House minority leader, Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, have so far been publicly noncommittal.

“All eyes are on Jan. 6,” Mr. Gaetz said on Fox News Friday night after the Supreme Court rejected Texas’ suit. “I suspect there will be a little bit of debate and discourse in the Congress as we go through the process of certifying the electors. We still think there is evidence that needs to be considered.”

Mr. Paul, Republican of Kentucky, said he would “wait and see how all the legal cases turn out” before deciding what to do.

Mr. Johnson plans to hold a hearing this week “examining the irregularities in the 2020 election,” featuring Ken Starr, the former independent counsel who is a favorite of the right, and at least two lawyers who have argued election challenges for Mr. Trump. Whether he proceeds to challenge results on Jan. 6, he told reporters last week, “depends on what we find out.”

So yes, they are planning to turn it into a circus.Some probably believe this horsehit and some are likely just setting the table to take on “voter fraud” so they can cheat the way they are falsely accusing the Democrats of doing. (It’s yet another example of “I know you are but what am I” politics.)

But that’s not all, oh no:

President Donald Trump is angry that Attorney General Bill Barr knew about investigations into Hunter Biden but did not make them public until after the election, according to a new report by The Wall Street Journal.

“President Trump has expressed interest in pursuing the appointment of a special counsel to investigate allegations of fraud in the November elections and issues related to Hunter Biden, according to people familiar with the matter. In recent days, the president has directed advisers to look for people who could serve in such a position, one of the people said, as lawsuits and other efforts by Mr. Trump and his campaign to reverse the election results founder,” the newspaper reported Friday evening.

There might be two special counsels appointed.

“White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has told people that the president is interested in pursuing a special counsel to investigate election fraud and wants to act quickly, one of the people said. Senior White House officials have also discussed the possibility of pursuing a special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden, expressing frustration over Attorney General William Barr’s handling of investigations into Mr. Biden’s business and financial dealings and concern that the incoming administration of Joe Biden could seek to shut down any probes into Mr. Biden’s son, Hunter, an administration official said,” The Journal reported.

“Mr. Trump has expressed rising frustration with his attorney general in recent months, privately and publicly, according to aides, as efforts by the president and his supporters to overturn the election have repeatedly failed,” the newspaper reported. “Mr. Barr’s announcement that the Justice Department hadn’t found evidence of widespread election fraud that would reverse Mr. Biden’s victory infuriated the president, the aides said, and Mr. Trump has openly accused the Justice Department of being involved in the election fraud he has alleged.”

If Barr won’t do this I guess he’ll have to appoint a new AG — I’m sure there’s some toady he can put in there — to appoint these two special counsels on the last day and insulate them from being fired. (A new AG has the authority to fire a special counsel for cause but the idea is that these, like the Durham probe, would be too politically hot for a Biden AG to do it.) That is the Whitewater template, only in that case they pressured Clinton’s own AG into naming an Independent Counsel for every stupid scandal they dreamed up.

Gird yourselves. The entire GOP is on board a campaign to sabotage the new administration. It’s really the only thing they know how to do.

This is really getting ridiculous:

President Donald Trump’s campaign plans to buy ads on unspecified cable television networks to promote his effort to overturn the election he lost, highlighting claims that have been refuted by elections officials and dismissed by judges across the country.

One commercial claims that mail-in ballots were “a recipe for fraud” and urges viewers to “contact your legislators today.” Trump has sought to persuade Republican state lawmakers in several battleground states to override voters and award him their states’ electoral college votes.

The campaign did not say in a release how much it would spend on the ads or which networks would run them. Trump and the Republican Party have raised about $208 million since the election. The campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday evening.

He and his allied have failed in courts across the country to convince judges that their claims of a fraudulent election have merit. Attorney General William Barr has said the Department of Justice hasn’t seen evidence of widespread fraud in the election.

On Friday night, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a bid by Texas and Trump to nullify the election results in four pivotal states.

I suppose it’s possible that they really think they can get this done in January when the congress meets to certify the election. I’m sure they’ll make a big show of it. And maybe they figure they need to spend a little of that 200 million his cult has forked over to help him fight this bogus election result, just for show. But it appears he’s not going to shut up any time soon. Sigh.

Meanwhile:

YouTube will now remove videos that make false claims that widespread fraud or error cost President Trump the election, the company announced Wednesday in a blog post, and since September it has purged 8,000 channels for spreading “harmful and misleading” content.

The Google-owned video giant has taken heat in recent weeks for not removing or individually fact-checking content that has boosted baseless claims about voter fraud, as other social media companies have. But now that the “safe harbor deadline” — the point by which state-level election challenges must be completed — has passed, YouTube said it will bar content uploaded Wednesday or after that suggests widespread fraud or errors cost Trump the election.

“For example, we will remove videos claiming that a Presidential candidate won the election due to widespread software glitches or counting errors,” the company said in the blog post. “We will begin enforcing this policy today, and will ramp up in the weeks to come.”

This policy will apply to Trump, who on a daily basis has insisted without evidence that the election was rigged and that he actually won in a landslide. Democrat Joe Biden won the Nov. 3 election, and the White House transition is underway.

Will TV stations do the same thing? I wonder. I think we can certainly expect Sinclair, OAN, Newsmax and Fox to show them and they pretty much covers MAGAworld.

Michael Cohen was on MSNBC this morning and he truly believes this is all about money for Trump and nothing more. He thinks Trump sees that he may be able to swindle $5.00 per month from 20 million people which would add up to him making more money than he’s ever seen in his life. What that “product” is remains to be seen. But I suspect that he knows that if he’s seen as a loser they will lose interest in him. He must be seen as a winner who was cheated out of his rightful victory. That is something MAGA cult can get behind.

The Republicans lost their Hail Mary bid last night, as expected, and they lost it bigly. Not even their most sympathetic judicial brethren were willing to say they would have granted the injunction they were seeking.

Nonetheless, the big baby is still wailing, still ginning up his sad deluded base into believing he’s been cheated and now supposedly denied his day in court, despite losing by over 7 million votes and losing over 50 separate court cases at all levels of government including the Supreme Court.

But I guess he still hasn’t cried himself out:

The Supreme Court on Friday night delivered its widely expected-but-still-significant rebuke of President Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election. In a brief statement, the court dismissed the case Trump had called “the Big One.” It said those who brought it, including Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) and GOP leaders in 18 other states, lacked the necessary standing for the court to even consider the case.

The latest big loss in the overwhelmingly failed effort has been met, as with its many predecessors, with some remarkable spin. But both of the prevailing claims ignore the reality of the situation.

Beginning Friday night, Trump’s aides and supporters set about arguing two things:

The court made no ruling on the merits of the suit — that they essentially punted on a technicality — and that this means the claims could still have merit.

That the dissents of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas suggest there was some merit. Indeed, some have even hailed Alito and Thomas as heroes, in contrast to the three Trump-appointed justices who declined to take a stand.

White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany summarized the former argument Friday night on Fox News.

“There’s no way to say it other than they dodged,” McEnany said. “They dodged, they hid behind procedure and they refused to use their authority to enforce the Constitution. … This was on standing, dismissed on standing. None of the justices gave a view on the facts of the case …”

Trump on Saturday morning also promoted the idea that Alito’s and Thomas’s dissents rendered them defiant defenders of his rightful election. He retweeted a user who said, “Thank you, Justice Alito. Thank you, Justice Thomas.” In another tweet, he quoted Sean Hannity saying, “Justices Alito and Thomas say they would have allowed Texas to proceed with its election lawsuit.”

“Never even given our day in Court!” Trump proclaimed.

Except he has — and this is merely the latest in a never-ending string of losses.

Let’s deal with the latter claim first. The idea is pretty simple: that Alito’s and Thomas’s dissents suggest maybe there was some there there — that it wasn’t unanimous! There was indeed some confusion Friday night, with some critics of Trump’s legal strategy suggesting the two justices had participated in his effort to undermine democracy. And plenty besides Trump and those he quoted hailed the justices.

The justices’ dissents, though, are considerably less significant than all that.

As The Post’s Supreme Court guru Robert Barnes and many others noted, the dissents echoed the long-standing positions of the two justices, which is that the court’s “original jurisdiction” means it must accept such a case involving conflicts between states. Their dissents on that point, in fact, were merely a matter of course for them — something they’ve done before — not any kind of commentary on the substance of the claims.

And indeed, they actually made a pretty significant statement about the substance — but not in Trump’s favor.

“I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief,” Alito said in the dissent which Thomas joined, “and I express no view on any other issue.”

They key words there are “would not grant other relief.” The lawsuit was seeking an injunction to bar four closely decided states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — from selecting their presidential electors ahead of Monday’s vote of the electoral college. Not even Alito and Thomas would grant that. Legal experts argued this essentially meant they would have dismissed the case as well — just that they didn’t believe the court could decline to accept it in the first place.

In essence, there is no indication any of the justices would have granted the relief. You can’t call it a unanimous decision because there is no vote count, but that’s hugely significant.

But while that argument misunderstands (however deliberately) how the Supreme Court works, the first one — that there was some merit to the suit even though it wasn’t considered — might be more insidious. Given the Supreme Court decided not to consider the case, Trump’s allies are suggesting, it means the claims therein haven’t actually been evaluated. So even when Joe Biden is elected, they’ll argue, it’ll only be because of some kind of technicality.

This is bogus. While Paxon’s lawsuit advanced an extremely novel legal theory in seeking to overturn the election results — and even seemed to throw in the towel at actually proving fraud — it recycled claims from many cases that came before it. And those specific claims have been roundly rejected by courts across the country, at both the federal and state level.

For one, it alleged that states illegally expanded their mail-in-voting. But lower courts, including the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court and judges appointed by Trump, have repeatedly upheld the changes. Secondly, it alleged malfeasance in the vote-counting process, including the idea that GOP observers were not given sufficient access and even alluding to the idea that Dominion voting machines might have changed votes. But many of these allegations have also been rebuked by the courts as being speculative and without merit.

Indeed, in dozens of decisions, not a single court has found merit in the claims of voter fraud. (The Trump effort got a favorable ruling in one case, but only on a procedural matter.)

The argument of Trump and his supporters moving forward is going to be that, without a Supreme Court ruling on the merits, we’ll never truly know whether Biden’s win was legitimate. Trump will use this to claim he never truly lost, which certainly plays into his post-presidency plans.

But that ignores how our legal system works.

Alito’s and Thomas’s views on original jurisdiction notwithstanding, you are not entitled to have the nation’s highest court hear your case just because of the huge stakes — and that goes double when the claims in your suit have been roundly rejected by lower courts.

If the Trump team had any success in the lower courts, they could perhaps cry foul that the Supreme Court never definitively weighed in. But their baseless claims and terrible record in court means this is a settled issue.

And indeed, even the two justices that Trump and his supporters are holding up as the defiant defenders of their day in the Supreme Court, Alito and Thomas, essentially acknowledged that.

Trump knows nothing about history and, as far as I know, has never read a book, not even the ones his ghostwriters write for him. However, early in his term, Steve Bannon made a point of giving him a tutorial on Andrew Jackson, even taking him to visit the Hermitage, Jackson’s estate, to show him around. He said some stupid things about Jackson and the civil war and moved his picture into the oval office although I’m fairly sure what he really admires about him is that his picture is on currency.

Anyway, there was a lot of talk at one point about how Trump was the leader of a new 21st century Jacksonian populism which was defined by the Jackson scholar Walter Russell Mead as “grass-roots disdain for elites, deep suspicion of overseas entanglements—and obsession with America power and sovereignty.”

I’m not sure that panned out. Trump is basically an incoherent chaos agent, but Mead and Bannon seemed to think that a yearning for that was what drove the Trump phenomenon. For whatever reason, this notion of a “Jacksonian moment” seemed to fade as the Trump dumpster fire continued.

But this piece by Ed Kilgore suggests that it’s still active, even if Trump himself is unaware of the parallels:

Among the Republicans who are quietly urging Donald Trump to stop his futile and divisive effort to contest his 2020 loss are those who believe it compromises his future prospects at winning the White House again. Take, for example, Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen, who said Trump may be “creating a narrative that the presidency was stolen and setting up a campaign to ‘reclaim’ it in four years.” As other commentators have noted, there’s a pretty clear historical precedent for this sort of vengeful campaign, and as it happens, it was waged by Trump’s own favorite predecessor, Andrew Jackson.

Historian Jasmim Bath presented the parallels starkly soon after the election:

In 1824, before the antebellum two-party system was established, none of the four presidential candidates with significant support in the Electoral College had a majority, and the election was thrown into the House of Representatives. Under the scheme laid out in the Twelfth Amendment, the House was required to choose among the top three candidates, which meant the fourth, Henry Clay, was eliminated. Andrew Jackson and his supporters expected Clay to support his fellow westerner, who won a popular and electoral vote plurality, in the House. But he instead helped engineer the election of New England patrician and presidential scion John Quincy Adams. When Adams later made Clay his Secretary of State (then considered the second most important office in the land), Jacksonians concluded a “corrupt bargain” had robbed their candidate of victory.

The analogy has almost certainly occurred to Trump himself. No, he’s not a literate man in terms of either current events or political history, but his interest in Old Hickory (one observer called it a “bromance across the centuries”) is a well-established exception to his general indifference to anything he didn’t learn from watching television or conducting real-estate deals. He drew particular attention to his self-identification with Jackson when he told friendly reporter Salena Zito that this “very tough person” with a “big heart” would have prevented the Civil War had he been in office at the time. Jackson’s truculent nationalism — and perhaps even his racism — appeals to Trump, along with his self-proclaimed championship of the interests of the heartland white working class of his day in their battles with coastal elites.

So it would be natural if Trump identified himself (either sincerely or cynically) with Jackson’s grievances in 1824 and his grievance-driven comeback four years later, even if his prime motivation for behaving as he does is his own flawed character and zest for spite.

Pro-Trump pundit John Feehery agrees with Bath that the truth of these grievances doesn’t matter as much as their intensity: “To Trump partisans, there doesn’t have to be overwhelming evidence of voter fraud. After all, what Henry Clay did for John Quincy Adam[s] was fully legal. It just didn’t smell right.”

The analogy is imperfect, of course. Jackson’s comeback victory in 1828 was attributable to developments other than the righteous indignation of backwoodsmen angered by “the Establishment.” Most important was the emergence of a two-party system in which a powerful new Democratic Party forged by Martin Van Buren united behind Jackson. Trump, moreover, was not robbed by elites of a chance to serve as president; if anything, his elevation to the Oval Office in 2016 was made possible by an arguably corrupt Electoral College system. But if you wonder why the 45th president seems willing to risk his chances of becoming the 47th by his irresponsible refusal to concede defeat today, the example of the seventh president may help provide an answer.

Some of Trump’s associates may have brought this to his attention but honestly, I think Kilgore is giving him way too much credit. If he is following this playbook it is because of a similarity in temperament and instinct to Jackson not because he’s studied him. Nonetheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has whispered in his ear that his favorite guy on the money came back by running as the man whose election was stolen from him.