In short, there’s a growing rebellion inside the GOP conference instigated by President Donald Trump, who promises more GOP senators will join the effort and also called for mass protests in D.C. on Wednesday. (Yes, the Proud Boys and right-wing militias will be there, and, yes, there is cause for concern about the prospect of violence.)
We can’t say this emphatically enough: This does not happen to Mitch McConnell. For four years, the Senate leader has managed to maintain order in his ranks as Trump unleashes daily mayhem on the GOP from the White House. That’s all gone to hell.
By now you’ve heard about the tape that AJC and WaPo obtained, putting pressure on an unmoving GA SoS Brad Raffensperger.:
More to come on this.
Is what Trump did illegal? Probably, but someone has to press charges.
Trump’s pressure on Georgia election officials raises legal questions
In audio from a Saturday phone call, the president is heard urging the officials to reverse his loss.
POLITICO has confirmed the recording, which was first obtained by The Washington Post and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The leaked audio comes as Congress is set to certify the Electoral College votes on Wednesday. At least 12 incoming and current Republican senators, along with well over 100 Republican representatives, have said they are going to challenge the results based on unsupported allegations of voter fraud.
Remember, he can’t pardon his way out of state violations. But he can pardon family and self.
Heather Cox Richardson/Substack:
The attempt of the senators to get Congress to appoint an investigatory committee into alleged fraud in the election is dangerous and unprecedented, and they know it. In their statement, they tried to suggest they are simply following the precedent established by Congress after the chaotic 1876 election, but the two situations are very different.
In 1876, elections were organized by the parties themselves and were notoriously corrupt. Parties printed their own ballots in a distinctive color with only their own slate of electors. Men dropped the ballots for their party, unmarked, into a box, but their votes were not secret: how men voted was obvious from the colored ballots, at the very least. Politicians watching the polls knew exactly what the counts would be, and it was not unusual for ballot boxes to be either stuffed or broken open before results were reported.
In Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina in 1876, Democrats appeared to have won the election, but there was no dispute that they had terrorized Republican voters to keep them from the polls. The results were a hopeless mess: in South Carolina, for example, 101% of all eligible voters cast ballots. Florida and Louisiana both reported more reasonable numbers of voters, but they each sent competing sets of electors to Congress. In both states, different officials signed off on different certificates of election, so it was not at all clear which certificate was the official one. In this utter confusion, Congress established a committee to figure out what had actually happened.
None of that is the case today. The processes were transparent and observed by Republicans as well as Democrats. The Trump campaign had the right to challenge vote counts and did so; each turned up virtually the same result as the original count: Biden won, by a lot. Each state in the country has delivered to Congress certified results that have been signed by the state governors, who nowadays have the final say in the state certification process.
Steve Schmidt (lightly edited):
The die is cast for the Republican Party. It will be destroyed on January 6th in much the same way the Whig party was destroyed by the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. The act unraveled the Missouri compromise and allowed for the westward expansion of slavery.The party could not survive its factionalism. There could be no more accommodation, compromise and partnership between pro-slavery and anti-slavery Whigs. A new political party was born, the Republican Party. That party will divide into irreconcilable factions on January 6th.The 6th will commence a political civil war inside the GOP. The autocratic side will roll over the pro-democracy remnant of the GOP like the Wehrmacht did the Belgian Army in 1940. The ‘22 GOP primary season will be a blood letting. The 6th will be a loyalty test. The purge will follow. Does anybody doubt the outcome of the @IvankaTrump vs. @marcorubio primary in Florida? Anyone willing to make a bet on @robportman?It turns out JFK was right. The problem of trying to ride the tiger is the likelihood of winding up inside the tiger. The poisonous fruit from four years of collaboration and complicity with Trumps insanity, illiberalism and incompetence are ready for harvest. It will kill the GOP because it’s Pro Democracy faction and Autocratic factions can no more exist together then could the Whig Party hold togetherthe abolitionist with the Slave master.
Charles Bethea/New Yorker:
Can Democrats Win Georgia—and the Senate?
In order to do so, the candidates will need high voter turnout in a state where it tends to drop during runoffs, especially among the Party’s own supporters.A week later, I called [Nsé Ufot, the C.E.O. of the New Georgia Project]. “I feel really good,” she told me. She had just left an early-voting location, where she’d been giving out water and “delicious pudding.” She was headed to a suburban Atlanta county that went for Biden. “People are definitely voting,” she said, despite “how hard the G.O.P. is going after voting rights and voting locations.” She said that there were eighty counties where Republicans were challenging the voter rolls, mostly unsuccessfully. Of these efforts, she said, “We feel like they’re designed to put up hurdles that make it difficult for people to vote.” But she sounded optimistic. By the end of early voting, more than three million Georgians had cast their ballots, and the early data appeared to favor the Democrats: there were thousands of new voters, a high percentage of Black voters, and somewhat lower turnout—so far; Election Day voting may rebalance things—in conservative parts of the state. The county that had come closest to matching its November total was Randolph, a poor county in the Black Belt, which has been ravaged by the pandemic. Ufot’s hopeful tone reminded me of the biggest applause line at the Biden rally, which was delivered, not surprisingly, by Warnock. “It’s dark,” he’d said. “But morning is on the way. Hold on.”
Early voting ends with record 3M Georgia voters for US Senate runoffs
Turnout stayed strong during this holiday week, with more than 150,000 people casting in-person votes each day, similar to the pace seen in the final days of early voting before the general election.
The heaviest turnout came in areas that lean Democratic and embrace early and absentee voting, including the 6th and 4th congressional district in metro Atlanta.
While turnout in rural areas was generally lower than the rest of the state, some populated counties like Chatham and Richmond also had subpar early voting numbers.
Infected after 5 minutes, from 20 feet away: South Korea study shows coronavirus’s spread indoors
The study — adding to a growing body of evidence on airborne transmission of the virus — highlighted how South Korea’s meticulous and often invasive contact tracing regime has enabled researchers to closely track how the virus moves through populations.
“In this outbreak, the distances between infector and infected persons were … farther than the generally accepted 2 meter [6.6 foot] droplet transmission range,” the study’s authors wrote. “The guidelines on quarantine and epidemiological investigation must be updated to reflect these factors for control and prevention of COVID-19.”
KJ Seung, an infectious disease expert and chief of strategy and policy for the nonprofit Partners in Health’s Massachusetts COVID response, said the study was a reminder of the risk of indoor transmission as many nations hunker down for the winter. The official definition of a “close contact” — 15 minutes, within 6 feet — isn’t foolproof.
Source: Daily Kos
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