Elections

Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, the law firm leading the Trump campaign’s efforts to cast doubt on the presidential election results in Pennsylvania, abruptly withdrew from a federal lawsuit that it filed days earlier on behalf of President Trump.“Plaintiffs and Porter Wright have reached a mutual agreement that plaintiffs will be best served if Porter Wright withdraws,” the law firm said in a federal court filing.The firm’s withdrawal followed an article in The New York Times on Monday described internal tensions at the firm about its work for Mr. Trump’s campaign in Pennsylvania. Some employees said they were concerned that the firm was being used to undercut the integrity of the electoral process. One Porter Wright lawyer resigned in protest over the summer.Porter Wright, based in Columbus, Ohio, has received at least $727,000 in fees from the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, according to federal election disclosures.The law firm on Monday filed a lawsuit in the Federal District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania on behalf of the Trump campaign. The suit, which is pending, alleged that there were “irregularities” in the presidential vote across the state, which President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. won by more than 50,000 votes.The Democratic National Committee has filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit.Previously, Porter Wright had filed a number of other actions in Pennsylvania courts challenging aspects of the state’s voting process. It isn’t clear if the firm will continue to represent Mr. Trump’s campaign on those cases. A Porter Wright representative didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on Friday.On Wednesday, Porter Wright issued a statement noting its “long history of election law work during which we have represented Democratic, Republican and independent campaigns and issues.”“At times, this calls for us to take on controversial cases,” the statement said. “We expect criticism in such instances, and we affirm the right of all individuals to express concern and disagreement.”Alan Feuer contributed reporting. More

Moderate and progressive Democrats broadly agree on all of these policies. Biden has no excuse not to enact themOn 8 July, the Joe Biden campaign published the results of its unity taskforces with the former Bernie Sanders campaign in a 110-page document of policy recommendations. Though Biden has not committed to enacting the policies recommended by the taskforces, they represent a clear vision for what a Biden presidency might look like.While each taskforce proposed new legislation to achieve its goals, you can also read the document with an eye toward what a Biden administration could accomplish on day one, without having to go near Congress. To that end, we found 277 policies that are clearly within the executive branch’s power to immediately pursue, at least in part. Continue reading… More

Before the dust had settled on Joe Biden’s presidential victory, a news cycle had begun, yet again, about how the Democratic party was in disarray. Representative Jim Clyburn, the juggernaut of South Carolina Democratic politics and a frequent emissary for the centrist wing of the party, began telling news reporters that he feared that the summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, and in particular the slogan “Defund the Police”, had dampened the Democrat’s chances of strengthening their majority in the House and retaking the US Senate.
On a tense conference call for the party’s House of Representatives caucus on Thursday, Abigail Spanberger, a Virginia congresswoman who narrowly won re-election on Tuesday, expressed the same concern. Meanwhile, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the standard bearer of the party’s progressive wing, gave an interview to the New York Times urging her party to adopt more modern voter engagement tactics and to view the left as allies, not obstacles. “I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy,” she said. “And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy.”
Democratic infighting is an old story, one that comes up perennially, sometimes ascribed to generational or regional differences: the younger, more city-dwelling Democrats want universal healthcare and demand racial justice; the older, suburbanite Democrats shush them, worrying they will scare off the white suburban swing voters whom centrists believe that Democrats need for a majority. The conflict is repeated ad nauseam, whether Democrats lose or whether they win.
But the truth is that the Democratic party is indeed a deeply divided one. The coalition that swept Joe Biden to victory was massive, diverse and profoundly self-contradictory. It contained older Black voters with religious convictions that are not dissimilar to those of the white evangelicals who power the American right, and it contained younger Black voters who believe fiercely in transgender civil rights and the dismantling of the police state. It contained white college-educated women who took offense at Trump’s crass language and it contained young Latino voters who feared for his threats to their citizenship. It is a coalition composed of the vast majority of all the Americans who are not white and a sizable minority of the Americans who are, of people who identify as socialists and people who see socialism as a serious threat to their way of life, people who desperately fear for abortion rights and people who deeply oppose them. The Democratic coalition, in other words, is huge – composed of people with competing, mutually exclusive goals, people who, in the end, probably would not always like each other.
How did the Democrats wind up here, with such a very big tent, with so many competing demands underneath it? In large part, the answer to how the Democratic party’s coalition became so huge and contradictory lies not with the Democrats, but with Republicans. Throughout the Trump era but also for decades before, stretching back to the Nixon administration, the Republican party has played an aggressive base politics, shaping its policy positions and public rhetoric around white racial grievance. As Americans of color have grown in numbers and the share of the white vote has decreased, Republicans have not adjusted their stance to be more welcoming to non-white voters, but instead have increasingly relied on gerrymandering, voter suppression and anti-democratic institutional advantages to secure their continued power even in the absence of majority support. The Republicans have abandoned the pretense of trying to convince a majority of voters to back their vision for the country, and instead have taken on an electoral strategy that is about power, not persuasion.
Republicans gerrymander congressional and state legislature districts to ensure Republican majorities in these bodies even when Democrats receive more votes, and they suppress the vote with archaic, burdensome and racially targeted state laws to ensure Republican victories even in races that would be competitive with a complete, free electorate. The result is that Democrats can often achieve only divided government at best even when, like in the 2020 election, they produce a massive majority of the votes. Republicans, meanwhile, can often secure united government even with a minority of votes. Faced with defeat, the anti-democracy Republican party need not even accept the results of an election that does not go in their favor, as we have seen over the past few days as the Trump campaign and Republican-controlled justice department sue in an attempt to have votes for Biden in many swing states declared illegal. Republican power relies heavily on these anti-democracy tactics, so heavily that in many instances the party no longer intends to persuade a majority of voters. They intend, instead, to secure minority rule.
The result is that the competition between the Republican and Democratic parties has become de facto not a competition between ideologies or policy positions, but a competition between pro-and anti-democracy forces. Though the Republicans sometimes make half-hearted, clumsy and comedically tone-deaf overtures towards men of color in an attempt to secure their votes – Donald Trump increased his share of the Latino male vote significantly in the 2020 election, and attempted to court Black male voters by staging a bizarre photo op with the New Orleans rapper Lil Wayne – their overall strategy has been to remain in power by making it as difficult as possible for people to vote, and by especially targeting the voting rights of Black Americans. The goal is to ensure that the votes which matter most belong to their white minority of supporters.
With one party committed to suppressing the vote, and only one other party remaining that considers itself accountable to voters, its no wonder that the Democratic party has assembled a coalition of so many disparate and conflicting constituencies. As the only pro-democracy party left in America, the Democrats have had to take as their mandate all the different democratic ambitions of a vast and diverse nation. Voters of different ideological stripes, ages and agendas have begun voting Democratic because the Republican party is repugnant to their principles in some cases, outright hostile to their citizenship in others. In other words, many voters have come under the Democratic tent because there is nowhere else for them to go.
What does such a large coalition mean for the Democrats? In one sense, it’s an advantage – it means overwhelming popular support. Democratic party surrogates never tire of reminding Americans that their party has won the popular vote in every election except one since 1992. Those popular vote majorities are sizable, too – Joe Biden’s popular vote lead over Donald Trump is set to surpass 5m, even bigger than Hillary Clinton’s 3m popular vote lead in 2016. Anti-democratic provisions in the American constitution mean that more votes do not always translate to more power – Republicans control the Senate, for instance, even though their Democratic colleagues in that body represent millions more constituents. But in the long term, it means that Democrats have popular opinion, and sheer numbers, on their side.
But the heft of the Democratic coalition also means that the party is swollen and overburdened, attempting to be all things to all its voters, attempting to please everyone at once. There is no coherent Democratic agenda, to speak of. The Biden campaign made little effort to draw attention to its policy proposals during the election season, relying instead on vague, broadly appealing rhetoric about the nation’s soul. Though the party has leaned heavily on the issue of healthcare, perhaps the one policy area that affects every single voter, the party’s healthcare agenda has been inconsistent across congressional districts, with Democrats calling for a single-payer system in blue areas and for a strengthened or merely maintained Affordable Care Act in purple ones. The issue is perhaps emblematic of the party’s problem in representing too many different groups: they can’t have one message, because there’s nothing that so many different people can all agree on.
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

The worst economic crises of the last century both played out during “transition” — the period between the presidential election and the inauguration. That’s not a coincidence.The most important transitions — ones that involving major changes of direction for the government — leave months of uncertainty over policy in the interim. Things that were already going wrong often spiral. Chaos loves a vacuum.Unfortunately, the Covid crisis and the transition of 2020 have the clear potential to spin out of control in the same way.The country’s major transition crises had certain elements in common: a pre-existing problem, an incumbent administration that had been criticized for its policy in dealing with it, and a presidential election ushering in a challenger calling for a sharp break from the predecessor’s approach.The transition then left the public (and businesses and investors, too) trying to grapple with a paralyzing dilemma: “What happens while we wait for something completely different?” The answer was that the problem metastasized.It happened in 1932. The Great Depression had worsened, and the economy and the financial system teetered on the edge of ruin. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election promised a strong break from the policies of Herbert C. Hoover. Yet for months, while the country waited for the inauguration, Hoover remained in charge.Hoover maintained that the Depression had only gotten worse because of people’s fear of what the incoming President was proposing to do. He attempted to convince Roosevelt to commit to continuing policies like fiscal austerity and the gold standard. But Roosevelt wanted nothing to do with him. During the standoff, the economy cratered and the financial system fell apart.Another major crisis occurred in 2008, when President Obama won the election promising a starkly different approach from the Bush administration’s. I was part of that transition, and in December our economic team briefed Mr. Obama about the quickly fading economy. He said, jokingly: “Is it too late to ask for a recount?”Unlike in 1932, 2008 was an amicable and cooperative transition. Officials in the outgoing Bush administration did not undermine the incoming administration. To the contrary, they took the transfer of power seriously and did what they could to help.Even in that circumstance, though, there were still significant disagreements in how to respond to the crisis: how the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) rescue money should be spent, what conditions should be put on banks that received the money, how auto companies should be treated, and much more. People knew a change was coming but not what would happen in the interim, and they worried that no one was really in charge. The crisis escalated.I’ve focused on economic crises, but the issue is even bigger than that. Some of the biggest political crises in the country also happened in transition. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the election, promising a sharp break from Democrats and the incumbent, President James Buchanan. Lincoln’s election brought tensions to a boil. States talked openly of seceding.The Presidential TransitionLatest UpdatesUpdated Nov. 13, 2020, 10:11 a.m. ETChina is the latest foreign country to recognize Biden as president-elect.When Trump’s term ends, so does his constitutional protection from prosecution.Biden education policies focus on public education, a blunt shift from Trump’s approach.President Buchanan, a lame duck, announced that he did not believe the federal government had the authority to stop states from leaving. Within weeks, South Carolina voted to secede, followed by six other states, all before the inauguration. Soon after Lincoln took office, the Civil War began.Which brings us to 2020. Even before the election, the coronavirus had surged and was raging through much of the country. The United States has had more than 140,000 cases in a day,rising numbers of hospitalizations and has even witnessed multiple super-spreader events in the White House that infected the president, his chief of staff, cabinet members and senior advisers.Economists have emphasized from the beginning that controlling the spread of the virus is crucial to fixing the economy. The CARES Act, the rescue package passed in March, provided temporary relief in the hope that the virus would rapidly diminish. But as that money has run out, a wide gulf has opened between the approach of the outgoing Trump administration (which has variously argued for doing less and minimized the seriousness of the problem) and the incoming Biden administration, whose first action after the election was to appoint a board of medical advisers and push an aggressive agenda to get the coronavirus under control.And so the nation is, once more, counting down the months before a new administration changes the country’s direction, wondering what policy the federal government will pursue in the interim, and watching a pre-existing problem that may easily spiral out of control while we wait.The good news is that there is a strong possibility that we could have an effective vaccine widely available sometime next year.The bad news is that the outgoing administration has actively fought against the changeover — withholding transition funds, forbidding the sharing of information with the Biden folks and contesting the election results. As the weeks pass, tens of thousands of people may lose their lives and millions of businesses may disappear unnecessarily.Certainly we will hope for the best — that this third wave of infections in the United States subsides quickly, that the economy continues to recover, people temporarily laid off can come back to their jobs, and a massive number of small businesses do not go broke.But history teaches that problems brewing during major transitions of power can explode. So, as if enough hadn’t happened already in 2020, the Biden administration and the broader American public, had best prepare for the worst, just in case.Austan Goolsbee, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, has advised President Barack Obama and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. Follow him on Twitter: @austan_goolsbee More

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Joe Biden’s team is pressing forward with preparations to take over the federal government when his term starts despite virtually no help from Donald Trump’s outgoing administration.
The president-elect faces choices that will either please or anger the bickering wings of his party as leftists and centrists vie to set the direction of the incoming Democratic administration. The process also sends a clear message to the Republican party and Trump: Biden won and will be sitting in the White House come January.
“The truth is the Trump administration can file whatever it wants to the federal register, can do whatever executive orders it wants until noon on January 20th, and at that moment they can no longer do it and the Biden people get to stop whatever they had in the pipeline and put whatever they want in their own pipeline,” said Tevi Troy, who helped run the transition to the second Bush-Cheney term in 2004. Troy also authored Fight House: Rivalries in the White House from Truman to Trump.
The Biden team, Troy added, “know the things they want to stop from happening and they’re just going to go do it”.

On Wednesday night Biden took his most significant step yet, naming Ron Klain, a longtime aide, as his chief of staff. The move underscored that even as Biden vows to fill out his administration with figures spanning all wings of the Democratic party, he also plans to include hands familiar with the conventional levers of Washington DC.
“He wants people who are super capable … part of what you want to do is restore faith in government, in public service and the way that career folks are treated,” said Lisa Brown, a former staff secretary for Barack Obama’s administration who worked on the 2008 presidential transition.
Brown noted that Biden’s team was focused on diversity. “A lot of what he wants to do if we don’t get the Senate back is going to be harder and so one of the things he’s got control over is the people that he wants to appoint. So you can show people you’re representing America even if you’re not able to get through Congress some of the initiatives.”
Klain’s appointment comes at a moment of high political tension in Washington. Despite losing the popular vote and electoral college, Trump has not conceded the race, and the General Services Administration, the federal agency in charge of supporting other agencies, has not yet given the Biden team the normal designation a victorious presidential campaign gets.
A sign-off from the administrator of the GSA is required for an incoming administration to get some essential transition resources – such as access to classified briefings – and take steps for background checks on cabinet appointees. In past elections, the GSA has recognized the results much faster. More

President Trump lost more than an election last week. When he leaves the White House in January, he will also lose the constitutional protection from prosecution afforded to a sitting president.After Jan. 20, Mr. Trump, who has refused to concede and is fighting to hold onto his office, will be more vulnerable than ever to a pending grand jury investigation by the Manhattan district attorney into the president’s family business and its practices, as well as his taxes.The two-year inquiry, the only known active criminal investigation of Mr. Trump, has been stalled since last fall, when the president sued to block a subpoena for his tax returns and other records, a bitter dispute that for the second time is before the U.S. Supreme Court. A ruling is expected soon.Mr. Trump has contended that the investigation by the district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., a Democrat, is a politically motivated fishing expedition. But if the Supreme Court rules that Mr. Vance is entitled to the records, and he uncovers possible crimes, Mr. Trump could face a reckoning with law enforcement — further inflaming political tensions and raising the startling specter of a criminal conviction, or even prison, for a former president.“He’ll never have more protection from Vance than he has right now,” said Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas.“Vance has been the wild card here,” Professor Vladeck added. “And there is very little that even a new administration that wants to let bygones be bygones could do formally to stop him.”A lawyer for the president, Jay Sekulow, declined to comment through a spokesman.The district attorney’s investigation of a sitting president has taken on even greater significance because Mr. Trump’s past use of his presidential power — pardoning those close to him charged with federal crimes — suggests he will make liberal use of the pardon pen on behalf of associates, family members and possibly even himself, as he claimed he has the right to do.But his pardon power does not extend to state crimes, like the possible violations under investigation by Mr. Vance’s office.Mr. Vance’s inquiry could take on outsized importance if the incoming Biden administration, in seeking to unify the country and avoid the appearance of retaliation against Mr. Trump, shies away from new federal investigations.Such a move would not bind the district attorney, an independent elected state official.Mr. Vance’s lawyers acknowledged during the court fight over the subpoena that the Constitution bars them from prosecuting a president while in office, but the district attorney has said nothing about what might happen once Mr. Trump leaves the White House.Danny Frost, a spokesman for Mr. Vance, declined to comment. It remains unclear whether the office will determine that crimes were committed and choose to prosecute Mr. Trump or anyone in his orbit.Mr. Vance’s actions in the coming months are likely to put him under increasing political scrutiny. Mr. Trump will leave the White House amid calls for him to face criminal charges and a drumbeat of strident criticism from the left that he has evaded any legal consequences for his conduct over the years.On the one hand, Mr. Vance could face pressure to forsake any charges to allow the country to move forward after a contentious presidential election. On the other, the district attorney was sharply criticized for his 2012 decision not to seek an indictment against Mr. Trump’s children, Ivanka Trump and Donald J. Trump Jr., after they were accused of misleading investors in a condo-hotel project. Mr. Vance has said that after a two-year investigation, his office could not prove a crime was committed.Some legal experts said it would send the wrong message if Mr. Vance had evidence to justify charges but decided to walk away from a prosecution of Mr. Trump.“That would put the president above the law,” said Anne Milgram, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan and Democratic attorney general in New Jersey and a frequent critic of Mr. Trump.And because Mr. Trump has repeatedly complained that the investigation was part of a broad partisan witch hunt, any decision to end it once the president left office could be seen as a tacit acknowledgment that such criticism was justified.Few facts have been publicly disclosed about the course of the district attorney’s investigation or the people or potential crimes being examined because the inquiry is shielded by grand jury secrecy.But during the legal battle over Mr. Vance’s subpoena, which sought eight years of Mr. Trump’s personal and corporate tax returns and other records from his accounting firm, prosecutors suggested in court papers that they were investigating a range of potential financial crimes. They include insurance fraud and criminal tax evasion, as well as grand larceny and scheming to defraud — which together are New York State’s equivalent of federal bank fraud charges.And prosecutors argued in court that the documents they had demanded from the accounting firm, Mazars USA, represented “central evidence” for their investigation.But they have provided little in the way of specifics beyond citing multiple news reports that detailed a range of potential criminal conduct by the president and his associates, including a series of 2018 New York Times articles that outlined possible tax crimes committed by Mr. Trump based on a detailed analysis of some of his tax return data obtained by the newspaper.Mr. Trump, before and during his presidency, declined to publicly release his tax returns, breaking with 40 years of White House tradition, and he vigorously fought attempts by Congress and state lawmakers to obtain them.The district attorney’s inquiry, which began in the summer of 2018, was first thought to focus on hush money payments made on behalf of Mr. Trump just days before the 2016 presidential election to an adult film star who had claimed she had an affair with him.But the subpoena for Mr. Trump’s tax returns underscores an apparent greater focus on potential tax crimes, which tax experts, former prosecutors and defense lawyers agree can be among the toughest cases for the government to win at trial.“The burden of proof is substantial,” said William J. Comiskey, a former longtime state prosecutor of white-collar and organized crime cases who later oversaw enforcement at New York’s Department of Taxation and Finance.That, in large measure, is because prosecutors must prove that the defendant actually intended to evade taxes, Mr. Comiskey said.And tax cases can be boring for jurors.“They involve a complicated set of rules and numbers, and it’s hard for jurors — or anyone — to keep their focus through days and days of testimony,” said Amy Walsh, who handled tax cases as a federal prosecutor and later as a defense lawyer at a firm that specialized in tax matters.The challenge in presenting such cases to a jury is compounded without a cooperating witness who can serve as a guide through complex financial strategies and records, or emails or other statements containing admissions, experts said.“They need a smoking gun or they need someone to flip,” said Daniel J. Horwitz, who brought tax and complex fraud cases during more than eight years in the Manhattan district attorney’s office and is now a white-collar defense lawyer.It is unknown whether Mr. Vance’s prosecutors have obtained the cooperation of any insiders for their investigation, but another consequence of Mr. Trump’s departure from office and loss of the power of the presidency could be that it would be easier for them to do so.In addition to Mr. Vance’s inquiry, Mr. Trump also faces continuing scrutiny by New York State’s attorney general — who he has also claimed has targeted him out of partisan rancor.In his lawsuit seeking to block the grand jury subpoena, Mr. Trump’s lawyers quoted 2018 campaign statements by the attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, saying they were part of a “campaign to harass the president.”They cited one statement, for example, in which she said Mr. Trump should worry because “we’re all closing in on him.”Last year, Ms. James’s office opened a civil fraud investigation into Mr. Trump’s businesses. As recently as last month, Mr. Trump’s son Eric, after months of delays, was questioned under oath by the office’s lawyers.Rebecca Roiphe, a former assistant district attorney in Manhattan who teaches legal ethics and criminal law at New York Law School, said Ms. James’s earlier statements made it appear there was some truth to the accusation that people who were investigating Mr. Trump were “at least capitalizing on that from a political perspective.”The only way for Mr. Vance to avoid that perception, Professor Roiphe said, was “to have a rock-solid case with overwhelming evidence, which will help convince the public that they’re holding the former president accountable for criminal acts.”Ms. James, in response to criticism from Mr. Trump last year, tweeted that her office “will follow the facts of any case, wherever they lead.” She added: “Make no mistake: No one is above the law, not even the President.”One thing seems likely: Defending against a white-collar investigation, even as a former president, will be challenging, stressful and disruptive for Mr. Trump, said Daniel R. Alonso, who was Mr. Vance’s top deputy from 2010 to 2014 and is now in private practice.“There are subpoenas and seizures and documents all over the place, as well as constant meetings with lawyers,” Mr. Alonso said, adding, “It would certainly not be pleasant for him.” More

Hours after President Trump repeated a baseless report that a voting machine system “deleted 2.7 million Trump votes nationwide,” he was directly contradicted by a group of federal, state and local election officials, who issued a statement on Thursday declaring flatly that the election “was the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence” any voting systems were compromised.The rebuke, in a statement by a coordinating council overseeing the voting systems used around the country, never mentioned Mr. Trump by name. But it amounted to a remarkable corrective to a wave of disinformation that Mr. Trump has been pushing across his Twitter feed.The statement was distributed by the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which is responsible for helping states secure the voting process. Coming directly from one of Mr. Trump’s own cabinet agencies, it further isolated the president in his false claims that widespread fraud cost him the election.The statement also came as a previously unified Republican Party showed signs of cracking on the question of whether to keep backing the president.Across the country, election officials have said the vote came off smoothly, with no reports of systemic fraud in any state, no sign of foreign interference in the voting infrastructure and no hardware or software failures beyond the episodic glitches that happen in any election. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lead in the popular vote has expanded to more than five million, and he remains on track to win a solid victory in the Electoral College.The group that issued the statement was the Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council, which includes top officials from the cybersecurity agency, the U.S. Election Assistance Commission and secretaries of state and state election directors from around the country. The group also includes representatives from the voting machine industry, which has often been accused of being slow to admit to technological shortcomings and resistant to creating paper backups.“While we know there are many unfounded claims and opportunities for misinformation about the process of our elections, we can assure you we have the utmost confidence in the security and integrity of our elections, and you should, too,” the officials added in their statement. “When you have questions, turn to elections officials as trusted voices as they administer elections.”In 2020, in part because of the vastly increased use of mail-in ballots, more than 92 percent of votes had some form of paper backup that can be used in audits or recounts.The council was responsible only for the security of the actual election infrastructure — the voting machines, the scanners and the counting systems for ballots. So its statement did not encompass the full range of Mr. Trump’s accusations — rebutted by elections officials across the country — of other types of voting fraud, most notably that mail-in ballots were manipulated to give an advantage to Mr. Biden.But Mr. Trump’s tweet on Thursday morning, citing an unsubstantiated report from One America News Network, which has backed Mr. Trump’s claims without skepticism, suggested that machines made by Dominion Voting Systems systematically deleted 2.7 million votes. His post immediately generated a warning from Twitter.The basis of Mr. Trump’s claim was an error made in a county in Michigan, which initially miscounted a vote total in Mr. Biden’s favor. It was a human error, and it was quickly caught and corrected.The Dominion software was used in only two of the five counties that had experienced Election Day hiccups in Michigan and Georgia. In every instance, there was a detailed explanation for what happened, most of it human error. In none of the cases did software affect the vote counts.The council’s statement on Thursday was prompted by repeated “baseless claims of voter fraud that none of us have seen any evidence of,” said one the federal officials who signed it, Benjamin Hovland, the chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.Mr. Hovland said that the group was aware of Mr. Trump’s tweet about the Dominion systems before it published its statement, but that it was only one of many statements that had disturbed the group for days.Election 2020 More

So the blue wave fell short of expectations. Joe Biden will be the next president, but unless Democrats pull off an upset in the Georgia Senate runoffs — which, to be fair, they might, given the remarkable strength of their organizing efforts there — Mitch McConnell will still be the Senate majority leader.Big business seems happy with this outcome. The stock market was rising even before we got good news about prospects for a coronavirus vaccine. Corporate interests appear to imagine that they will flourish under a Biden presidency checked by Republican control of the Senate.But big business is wrong. Divided government is all too likely to mean paralysis at a time when we desperately need strong action.Why? Despite the vaccine news, we are still on track for a nightmarish pandemic winter — which will be made far worse, in human and economic terms, if a Republican Senate obstructs the Biden administration’s response. And while the economy will bounce back once a vaccine is widely distributed, we have huge long-term problems that will not be resolved if we have the kind of gridlock that characterized most of the Obama years.First, the pandemic: With much of the public’s attention focused either on Donald Trump’s last-ditch efforts to steal the election or on hopes that a vaccine will let us resume normal life, I’m not sure how many people realize just how ruinous a prospect we’re facing for the next few months.Over the past week, Americans have been dying from Covid-19 at the rate of more than 1,000 a day. But deaths typically lag a few weeks behind reported cases — and the daily number of new cases has doubled over the past three weeks. This means that we’re almost surely looking at 2,000 deaths a day at some point next month.And the number of new cases is still rising exponentially, so things will get much, much worse over the months that follow, especially because until Jan. 20 we will, for all practical purposes, not have a president. By the time Biden is finally inaugurated we may well be having the equivalent of a 9/11 every day.In addition to bringing death as well as long-term health damage for many survivors, the exploding pandemic will bring immense economic hardship. Responsible governors are imposing new lockdowns that may help curb the spread of the coronavirus, but that will also lead to a new wave of job losses.True, some of the worst coronavirus outbreaks are now in states with irresponsible governors who won’t even impose mask mandates. But even in those states people can’t help noticing that friends and neighbors are dying and that the hospitals are full; they will cut back on their spending, leading to many lost jobs, even without political guidance.What we need, clearly, is a very large-scale program of disaster relief, providing families, businesses and, not least, state and local governments with the help they require to avoid financial ruin until a vaccine arrives. And you might think that a Republican Senate would be willing to work with the Biden administration on such an obviously necessary program.That is, you might think this if you’ve been hiding in a cave for the past 12 years.Remember, Mitch McConnell’s famous declaration, “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” came in October 2010, at a time of sluggish recovery and extremely high unemployment. Why expect him to be more cooperative, more willing to act in the national interest, when millions of dead-end Trump supporters are accusing establishment Republicans of stabbing their hero in the back?Realistically, the most we can hope for is a stingy package that falls far short of what America needs. And I wonder whether Trump-fearing Republicans — who have offered remarkable profiles in cowardice as the soon-to-be ex-president makes wild claims about election theft — will be willing to agree to even that much.The good news is that the misery will abate when we finally have widespread distribution of a vaccine. In fact, we’ll probably see a sharp jobs recovery late next year.But that won’t be the end of the story. Before the coronavirus struck, America had low unemployment — but our short-term (and very unequally distributed) prosperity masked the extent to which we were neglecting our future. We desperately need to spend trillions on repairing our crumbling infrastructure, caring for our children and meeting the urgent need for action against climate change.How much of that essential spending will a Republican Senate agree to? The best guess is zero. After all, McConnell blocked infrastructure spending even when Trump was in the White House and public investment could have helped keep him in office.Now, what’s bad for America isn’t necessarily bad for corporations. But given where we are, divided government would mean paralysis in a time of crisis, which could very well be catastrophic for everyone. The truth is that even in its own interests, the big money should be rooting for Democrats in those Georgia runoffs.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: [email protected] The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More