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      'I just want 11,780 votes': Trump pressed Georgia to overturn Biden victory

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      In an hour-long phone call on Saturday, Donald Trump pressed Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there in the election the president refuses to concede.The Washington Post obtained a tape of the “extraordinary hour-long call”, which Trump acknowledged on Twitter.Amid widespread outrage including calls for a second impeachment, Bob Bauer, a senior Biden adviser, said: “We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place.”The Post published the full call.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”Raffensperger is a Republican who has become a bête noire among Trump supporters for repeatedly saying Biden’s win in his state was fair. In one of a number of parries, he said: “Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”He also insisted: “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”Trump’s contempt for democracy is laid bare. Once again. On tapeTrump did not win Georgia, which went Democratic for the first time since 1992. Its result has been certified. Attempts to pressure Republicans in other battleground states have failed, as have the vast majority of challenges to results in court.Despite promised objections from at least 12 Republican senators and a majority of the House GOP, Biden’s electoral college victory will be ratified by Congress on Wednesday. The Democrat will be inaugurated as the 46th president on 20 January. Trump will then leave the White House – where he remained, tweeting angrily, all weekend.Edward B Foley, an Ohio State law professor, told the Post the call was “‘inappropriate and contemptible’ and should prompt moral outrage”. Trump’s behaviour was “already tripping the emergency meter,” he added. “So we were at 12 on a scale of one to 10, and now we’re at 15.”In an email to the Guardian, University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said: “The conduct that the press has reported might place Trump in legal jeopardy after Biden is inaugurated.“For example, if the justice department or US attorneys believe that Trump violated federal law or if local prosecutors in states, such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump may have engaged in similar behaviour with state or local election officials, believe that Trump violated state election laws, the federal or state prosecutors could file suit against Trump.”Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, went further, calling for Trump to be impeached a second time, even though he has little more than two weeks left in office.“The president of the United States has been caught on tape trying to rig a presidential election,” Bookbinder said. “This is a low point in American history and unquestionably impeachable conduct. It is incontrovertible and devastating.“When the Senate acquitted President Trump for abusing his powers to try to get himself re-elected [in February 2020, regarding approaches to Ukraine for dirt on Biden], we worried that he would grow more brazen in his attempts to wrongly and illegally keep himself in power. He has … Congress must act immediately.”From Congress, in a tweet, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, said: “Trump’s contempt for democracy is laid bare. Once again. On tape.”The lead prosecutor at Trump’s Senate impeachment trial last year added: “Pressuring an election official to ‘find’ the votes so he can win is potentially criminal, and another flagrant abuse of power by a corrupt man who would be a despot, if we allowed him. We will not.”Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat widely expected to be elected House speaker for a fourth term, set out her strategy for the election certification in a memo to colleagues.“Over the years,” she wrote, “we have experienced many challenges in the House, but no situation matches the Trump presidency and the Trump disrespect for the will of the people.”Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois, tweeted: “This is absolutely appalling. To every member of Congress considering objecting to the election results, you cannot – in light of this – do so with a clean conscience.”Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock’White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer, were also on the call, during which Trump ran through a laundry list of debunked claims regarding supposed electoral fraud and called Raffensperger a “child”, “either dishonest or incompetent” and a “schmuck”.Characteristically, Trump also threatened legal action.“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” he said. “You know, that’s a criminal offence. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”Referring to runoffs on Tuesday that will decide control of the Senate, Trump said Georgia had “a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to the president – you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam.“Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative, because they hate what you did to the president. OK? They hate it. And they’re going to vote. And you would be respected, really respected, if this can be straightened out before the election.”Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, seeking to beat Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, have ranged themselves behind Trump. But Georgia Republicans fear his attacks could suppress his own party’s turnout as Democrats work to boost their own.Early voting has reached unprecedented levels and on Sunday, former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams told ABC’s This Week: “What we’re so excited about is that we haven’t stopped reaching those voters. Millions of contacts have been made, thousands of new registrations have been held. We know that at least 100,000 people who did not vote in the general election are now voting in this election.”Trump told Raffensperger: “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock.’”Trump also said he knew the call wasn’t “going anywhere”. Raffensperger ended the conversation.On Twitter on Sunday, Trump said Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”Twitter duly applied a standard disclaimer: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”Raffensperger also responded: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.” More

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      New Congress sworn in as Georgia runoffs loom and Trump runs amok

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      Congress convened for its 117th session on Sunday, swearing in lawmakers amid extraordinary political turmoil as Republicans worked to overturn Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump, crucial Senate runoffs in Georgia loomed and the coronavirus surge imposed severe limits on familiar Capitol ceremonies.The Democrat Nancy Pelosi was set to be re-elected as House speaker. But most attention was focused on the Senate, where Mitch McConnell could be carrying out his final acts as Republican majority leader.If Democrats John Ossoff and Raphael Warnock unseat Republicans Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue in Georgia on Tuesday, the chamber will split 50-50. As vice-president, Kamala Harris would then hold a deciding vote, boosting Biden’s hopes of legislative success.In an extraordinarily acrimonious campaign, early voting has shattered runoff records, with 3m ballots cast. African American turnout, critical to the Democrats’ chances, has been robust: about a third of ballots have come from self-identified Black voters, up from around 27% in the November contests which did not produce conclusive winners.On Sunday Stacey Abrams, the defeated Democrat in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial election who now advocates for voting rights, told ABC’s This Week her party “did very well in vote by mail, we did very well in early vote, but we know election day is going to be the likely high-turnout day for Republicans, so we need Democrats who haven’t cast their ballots to turn out.“What we’re so excited about is that we haven’t stopped reaching those voters. Millions of contacts have been made, thousands of new registrations have been held. We know that at least 100,000 people who did not vote in the general election are now voting in this election.”Harris was to campaign in Georgia on Sunday, with Biden following on Monday. Trump has alarmed Republicans with attacks on GOP state officials and the integrity of the runoffs, as part of his baseless claims of electoral fraud in November. In a bombshell report, the Washington Post detailed a Saturday call in which Trump pressured Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn the presidential result, saying a failure to do so could damage Republican chances in the Senate runoffs.Nonetheless, on Monday Trump will rally in support of Loeffler and Perdue.Perdue continues to quarantine after contact with a Covid-19 infected person. Nonetheless, the four candidates have been at each others’ throats.On Fox News Sunday, Loeffler, a keen Trump ally, aired allegations at Warnock regarding a child abuse investigation and domestic violence and continued to deny his claims she enriched herself in stock dealings following private Covid-19 briefings.“Why has he refused to denounce Marxism and socialism?” Loeffler said. “He’s attacked our police officers calling them gangsters, thugs and bullies, he said ‘You can’t serve God and the military’, he’s praised Fidel Castro [and] Karl Marx.”Warnock and Ossoff have seized on allegations of stock-dealing impropriety by Perdue, who dumped assets damaged by the pandemic and bought cheap stock that Covid-19 restrictions then caused to soar in value.In contests in which the Black vote is so important, race has also assumed a central role. Warnock is senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Luther King Jr once preached. Loeffler has run attack ads using pieces of Warnock’s sermons.“The Republican attack is not just against Warnock, it’s against the Black church and the Black religious experience,” the Rev Timothy McDonald III, pastor of First Iconium Baptist Church in Atlanta and assistant pastor of Ebenezer from 1978 to 1984, told Reuters.McDonald described Warnock’s views as consistent with the church’s opposition to racism, police brutality, poverty and militarism.“I don’t care what you think about Warnock,” he said. “We’ve got to defend our church, our preaching, or prophetic tradition, our community involvement and engagement. We’re going to defend that.”Loeffler said in a tweet last month she was not attacking the church. “We simply exposed your record in your own words,” she wrote.Ossoff courted controversy when he recently accused Loeffler of “campaigning with a Klansman”. In fact Loeffler posed, she said unknowingly, with a former member of the far-right group.Asked on CNN’s State of the Union if it was “important for candidates to tell the truth”, Ossoff said: “It is. And it’s even more distressing that this isn’t an isolated incident.“Kelly Loeffler has repeatedly posed for photographs and been seen campaigning alongside radical white supremacists. And I believe they’re drawn to her campaign, because her campaign has consisted almost entirely of racist attacks on the Black Lives Matter movement and on the Black church.“…And it’s happening at the same time that Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue and Georgia Republicans are mounting a vicious assault on voting rights in Georgia, lawsuit after lawsuit to disenfranchise black voters, purge the rolls, remove ballot drop boxes.“And I believe that one of the reasons we’re seeing such record-shattering turnout … is that Georgians are defying those efforts to rip away their voting rights and standing up and saying, ‘We’re going to make our voices heard.’”Developments in Washington have also touched the Georgia races. Loeffler and Perdue both backed Trump’s demands for Congress to increase $600 Covid relief payments to $2,000, which McConnell blocked.Ossoff leapt on the opportunity to point out Perdue’s “hypocrisy” for opposing last year’s first relief payment of $1,200 and “obstructing” efforts to provide further direct relief for more than eight months.Whichever of the candidates wins a passage to Washington will join a new Congress already home to a politician from the extremities of Georgia politics.Among House newcomers sworn in Sunday was Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has supported the Q-Anon conspiracy theory and was among a group of Republicans who visited Trump at the White House recently, to discuss the effort to undo the election. More

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      The Guardian view on Trump's strategy: overturn result, cheat democracy | Editorial

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      This week, Donald Trump will undermine democracy in the US by supporting the claim that Democrat Joe Biden did not fairly win last November’s presidential election. A peaceful handover of power in a democracy requires losing candidates and their followers to admit defeat. But Mr Trump has manufactured a controversy purely to maintain power and to overturn a legitimate election.US courts have repeatedly thrown out Mr Trump’s evidence-free cases. This has not stopped the president’s accomplices in Congress. They, backed by Mr Trump’s vice-president, on Wednesday plan to challenge Mr Biden’s win to force a debate and votes in Congress. Some scholars point to a historical precedent as offering a slim, perhaps vanishing, chance that the nightmare will continue. Mr Trump will not let an opportunity pass to relitigate an election he lost.For the good of America, he must fail. The alternative is ultimately the collapse of political norms and civil strife. A classic demagogue, Mr Trump is signalling to his supporters that they, like him, should refuse to respect the election’s outcome and reject Mr Biden’s presidency. There is a well-grounded fear that protests could erupt, some of them armed. Mr Trump might call out the national guard or send federal agents to deal with demonstrations. This chaos, Mr Trump no doubt hopes, will pave the way for an autocratic takeover.Mr Trump is a sore loser who cannot stand that he was beaten in a fair election. He should move on but sees no reason why he should yield. After all, Mr Trump has not been punished for his transgressions against tradition, decency and the law. Instead, he has been rewarded. He thinks he can get away with almost anything. The Republican party has only itself to blame for incubating Trumpism, a parasitical ideology that threatens to take over the host.Mr Trump has thrown open the door to the argument of power rather than the power of argument in US electoral politics. With the help of social media, the president has polarised the electorate, building a “counter Republic” online, in which anger and fear are motivating emotions. In this world, the US apparently is being engulfed by socialism and liberal values. Mr Trump sells his chimerical fight as a necessary one, even if it cheats democracy itself. This has allowed him to frame the undoing of a presidential election as just an extension of other anti-democratic Republican tactics – such as gerrymandering and voter suppression – to constrain political opponents.Politicians in the US need to give up on the fantasy of a Trump second term. Questioning the integrity of the presidential election without proof of wrongdoing threatens the idea of liberal democracy. It leaves the US distracted by canards when its real problems are painfully obvious. No one outside of Trump’s orbit thinks that Washington DC ought to play host to rival inaugurations on 20 January. Mr Trump is not embracing chaos to express dissent. He is seeking to bring down the system that defeated him. More

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      Can Kamala Harris as vice-president be both loyal deputy and heir apparent?

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      [embedded content]
      American vice-presidents occupy what can be one of the most powerful positions in all of the federal US government and yet it can also be one of the least powerful. Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris is going to soon find out where her tenure will land.
      Harris is in a unique position among the near 50 vice-presidents in American history. She enters the office with the strong possibility that the incoming president, Joe Biden, won’t run for re-election, thus teeing her up as a future occupant of the Oval Office far more than normal.
      That has triggered intense speculation on how Harris will approach her job over the next four years as she treads a fine line between being Biden’s loyal deputy but also his heir apparent.
      Thus far the division of labor between Biden and Harris has only been described in broad terms. Incoming administration officials expect Harris not to have a separate policy portfolio and the issues Biden focuses on will be the ones she focuses on.
      Biden and Harris have said the Biden administration will follow the example of the Obama administration when Biden was President Barack Obama’s go-to man for greasing the wheels of Congress. Even before he nominated Harris, Biden described his own vice-presidential relationship with Obama as a model for the way he would work with his own deputy.
      Yet Biden and Harris bring remarkably different experiences and assets to the role. While Biden helped offset criticism that Obama was too young and inexperienced, Harris has helped ease concern about Biden’s age and excite legions of Democrats who were disappointed to see a white man lead the ticket.
      Harris, the daughter of immigrants from Jamaica and India, will be the first woman and first woman of color to serve as vice-president.
      “She comes into office with real star quality and that goes a long way because she’s got sway with various constituencies,” said Roy Neel, who served as chief of staff to Vice-President Al Gore during Bill Clinton’s presidency. “She ran for president. She’s smart and able and she’s got relationships in the Senate – not as deep as Biden. They have an opportunity to be a helluva team.”
      Harris has been active in the weeks since Biden won the election. She headlined a rally for the Democratic candidates in the upcoming Georgia runoff elections that will decide control of the US Senate. The vice-president-elect has had a major role in Biden’s cabinet selections as well. More

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      Biden seeks term-defining wins in Georgia runoffs Trump called 'illegal'

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      Campaigning continued in Georgia on Saturday in two Senate runoff elections which will define much of Joe Biden’s first term in office.Regardless of Donald Trump’s bizarre New Year’s Day decision to call the runoffs “illegal and invalid”, the contests on Tuesday will decide control of the Senate and therefore how far Biden can reach on issues such as the pandemic, healthcare, taxation, energy and the environment.Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Rev Raphael Warnock must win to split the chamber 50/50. Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, would then act as tiebreaker as president of the Senate. Responding to that threat, Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue have placed themselves squarely behind Trump, making hugely exaggerated claims about the dangers their opponents supposedly pose.In Perdue’s and Loeffler’s telling, a Democratic Senate would “rubber stamp” a “socialist agenda”, from “ending private insurance” and “expanding the supreme court” to adopting a Green New Deal that would raise taxes by thousands each year.Besides misrepresenting the policy preferences of Biden and most Democratic senators, that characterization ignores the reality of a Senate in which centrist Democrats and Republicans are set for a key role.At one campaign stop this week, Ossoff said Perdue’s “ridiculous” attacks “blow my mind”. He also scoffed at the claim that his ideas, aligned closely with Biden, amount to a leftist lunge. But he agreed with his opponent on how much Georgia matters.“We have too much good work to do,” Ossoff said, “to be mired in gridlock and obstruction for the next few years.”Ossoff also made headlines this week with his response to a Fox News reporter about Loeffler’s claims that her opponent, Warnock – pastor of a church formerly led by Martin Luther King Jr – is “dangerous” and “radical”.“Here’s the bottom line,” Ossoff said. “Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a klansman. Kelly Loeffler has been campaigning with a klansman and so she is stooping to these vicious personal attacks to distract from the fact that she’s been campaigning with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan.”The claim was misleading: Loeffler was pictured with a former member of the Klan but did not campaign with him. Loeffler responded by calling Ossoff “a pathological liar” and “a trust-fund socialist whose only job has been working for the Chinese Communist party in recent years”, a reference to payments to Ossoff’s media company from a Hong Kong conglomerate.Perdue entered quarantine this week after exposure to Covid-19. He and Loeffler must also contend with a deepening Republican split over Trump’s refusal to concede defeat in the presidential election.Trump has spread unfounded assertions of voter fraud and blasted Georgia Republicans including the governor, Brian Kemp, who have defended the elections process, attacks which led to his Friday night tweet about the legality of the runoffs. As Perdue and Loeffler have backed up Trump’s claims, some Republicans have expressed concern it could discourage loyalists from voting. Others are worried the GOP candidates have turned off moderates repelled by Trump.“No Republican is really happy with the situation we find ourselves in,” said Chip Lake, a longtime Georgia Republican consultant. “But sometimes when you play poker, you have to play the hand you’re dealt, and for us that starts with the president.”Trump will visit Georgia for a final rally with Loeffler on Monday evening, hours before polls open. It is unclear whether Perdue will attend.Democrats are fine with their opponents’ decision to run as Trump Republicans and use exaggerated attacks.“We talk about something like expanding Medicaid. We talk about expanding Pell grants” for low-income college students, Ossoff said at a recent stop in Marietta, north of Atlanta. “David Perdue denounces those things as socialism?”Ossoff noted Perdue’s claims that a Democratic Senate would abolish private health insurance. Ossoff and Warnock in fact back Biden’s proposal to add a federal insurance plan to private insurance exchanges.“I just want people to have the choice,” Ossoff said.Biden beat Trump by about 12,000 votes out of 5m in Georgia, making him the first Democrat to carry the state since 1992. His record vote total for a Democrat in the state was fueled by racially and ethnically diversifying metropolitan areas but also shifts in key Atlanta suburbs where white voters have historically leaned Republican.Yet Perdue landed within a few thousand votes of Trump’s total and led Ossoff by about 88,000. Republican turnout also surged in small towns and rural areas and Democrats disappointed down-ballot, failing to make expected gains.“We’ve won this race once already,” Perdue has said. His advisers think they can corral the narrow slice of swing voters by warning against handing Democrats control of the House, Senate and White House.Biden sold himself as a uniter and a seasoned legislative broker. But even a Democratic-held Senate would not give him everything he wants, as rules still require 60 votes to advance most major legislation. Biden must win over Republicans.A Democratic Senate would, however, clear a path for nominees to key posts, especially on the federal judiciary, and bring control of committees and floor action. A Senate led by current majority leader Mitch McConnell almost certainly would deny major legislative victories, as it did in Barack Obama’s tenure.Biden will travel to Atlanta on Monday to campaign with Ossoff and Warnock. Harris will campaign on Sunday in Savannah. In his last visit, Biden called Perdue and Loeffler “roadblocks” and urged Georgians “to vote for two United States senators who know how to say the word ‘yes’ and not just ‘no’.” More

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      Biden wants to fill federal court seats – but he needs to win the Senate first

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      During the disastrous first presidential debate in September, Donald Trump mocked Barack Obama, and Joe Biden by extension, for leaving office with so many federal court seats unfilled.“I’ll have so many judges because President Obama and him left me 128 judges to fill,” Trump said, slightly inflating the 105 vacancies he inherited. “When you leave office, you don’t leave any judges. That’s like, you just don’t do that … If you left us 128 openings, you can’t be a good president.But as is often the case with Trump’s attacks, there is much more to the story than that. It is true that Trump inherited nearly twice as many federal court vacancies as Obama did in 2009. However, Democrats blamed the high number of vacancies on what they described as an unprecedented level of obstruction from Republicans after they took control of the Senate in 2015.Over Trump’s lone term as president, he and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, have successfully remade the federal judiciary, and Democrats are anxious to confirm liberal judges once Biden takes office. But some Democratic lawmakers are already voicing concern that Republicans will once again obstruct judicial nominations if they keep the Senate by winning at least one of the Georgia runoff races next month.Dick Durbin, who is seeking to become the top Democrat on the Senate judiciary committee, raised that concern in late November, predicting Biden would have “very little” impact on the federal judiciary if Republicans maintain control of the chamber.“If the last two years of the Obama administration were any indication, they’ll freeze them out,” Durbin told Politico. “Hope springs eternal, but I believe in history.”Daniel Goldberg, the legal director of the progressive Alliance for Justice, said Durbin’s comments underscored the importance of the Georgia Senate elections. If Democrats were to win both of the 5 January runoff races, the Senate would be 50-50, and Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris could provide a tie-breaking 51st vote.“I think Senator Durbin just made clear how important the Georgia elections are. The stakes could not be higher,” Goldberg said.If Republicans were to win at least one of the Georgia races and keep control of the Senate, Chuck Grassley is expected to chair the judiciary committee, and the Iowa senator would have the ability to block Biden’s nominees from receiving hearings.“If Grassley decides to play hardball, he could just not bring them up for hearings, and there’s nothing the other side can do,” said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston and an adjunct scholar at the libertarian Cato Institute.That possibility is distressing to Democrats, who have watched with dismay as the Senate has approved more than 200 of Trump’s judicial nominees since 2017. While Obama was able to have 55 of his nominees to the federal appeals courts approved over eight years, 54 of Trump’s nominees have been confirmed over just four years. Roughly a quarter of all trial-level federal judges are now Trump appointees.Risk for RepublicansJosh Blackman also warned there could be potential consequences for Republicans if they choose to “play hardball” with Biden’s nominees. “If the Democrats take the Senate in 2022, they could just fill the vacancies then, so you may get more moderate nominees now to fill the void,” Blackman said. “If you wait two more years, they might become less moderate.”That calculus may be part of why some Democrats are more optimistic than Durbin about the likelihood of Biden’s judicial nominees being confirmed.“I think the dynamic is very different than the dynamic with Donald Trump as president,” said Russ Feingold, a former Democratic senator from Wisconsin. “Having served in the Senate for 18 years, 16 years on the judiciary committee, I can tell you people back home want those seats filled. And there is pressure from newspapers, from the legal community when that doesn’t happen.”Feingold, the president of the American Constitution Society (ACS), argued Biden’s team has also prioritized judicial nominations in a way that the Obama administration didn’t.“Because of the economic situation and the need to pass healthcare, this didn’t get the attention it deserved” during Obama’s presidency, Feingold said. “I believe the Biden transition and the Biden administration will give it the attention it deserves and make it a higher priority.”The ACS has already provided Biden’s team with extensive lists of potential nominees, in the hope of ensuring a smooth nomination process once a seat on the federal judiciary opens up.“It’s not just getting past McConnell,” Feingold said. “It’s being ready and getting those names moving and being ready when there are vacancies.”Legal experts argue that, if McConnell were to blockade Biden’s judicial nominees, the repercussions for the country would be severe. Not only would courts probably struggle to handle their caseloads with vacancies piling up, but the potential standoff could jeopardize the reputation of both the federal judiciary and the Senate.“The American people just repudiated Donald Trump, and they elected Joe Biden to the presidency, and one of the critical roles of the presidency is nominating individuals to sit on our federal courts,” Goldberg said. “I think what the American people expect is the Senate to not have one set of rules for Donald Trump and one set of rules for Joe Biden.”Although Feingold is more optimistic than Durbin about Biden’s judicial nominees receiving hearings, he acknowledged it was likely to be a hard-fought fight. If Democrats lose the Senate, Feingold said, they should not wallow but instead prepare for battle.“I understand it will be a challenge, a tremendous challenge that will involve a lot of negotiating, should the Democrats not be able to control the Senate,” Feingold said. “But it’s a challenge that I think can be met … We shouldn’t despair. We should be ready for the fight.” More

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      What to expect when Congress meets to certify Biden's victory

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      US Congress meets on 6 January to certify Joe Biden’s election victory – here’s what to expect.
      A joint session of the US Congress meets at 1pm on Wednesday formally to count the votes cast by the electoral college – 306 for Biden, 232 for Donald Trump – in the last step of the process for certification of the new president.
      Under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, members of the House of Representatives and the Senate meet in the Capitol. Mike Pence will preside in his role as president of the senate.
      The vice-president opens certificates of the electoral votes delivered from each state – whose electors met to cast their ballots on 14 December – and hand them to party “tellers” to read aloud. As they read each state’s certification, Pence will ask if there are official objections.
      Any such objections are then read out, resulting in a suspension of the session and members of the two legislative houses considering them separately.
      Discussion on each objection is limited to two hours. Both houses then vote on the objection, with a simple majority required to toss out that state’s votes. After all votes are counted, the vice-president declares the winner of the election. More

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      Republican plan to challenge election signals ‘cult of Trump’ will live on in Biden era

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      Maverick super-loyalists to Donald Trump are set to make an audacious spectacle in Washington next week by voting against the formal counting of electoral college votes certifying Joe Biden’s victory.While the tactic by outliers won’t be enough to stop Biden becoming the 46th president, it will serve to disrupt Congress, bolster Trump and establish an acidic tone to political co-operation with the incoming Democratic administration.Two Republican members of the House of Representatives are reported to have told CNN, without releasing their names, that they expect around 140 GOP colleagues to vote against a procedural certification vote in a joint session of Congress on 6 January. The strategy speaks to the continuing stranglehold the outgoing president maintains over a significant faction of the party, political observers said on Friday.Peter Wehner, vice-president at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative thinktank, and speech writer for three Republican presidents, called the prospect of many Republican lawmakers voting against certification “a disturbing sign”.“It’s an indication that this is a secession-from-reality caucus,” Wehner told the Guardian.“It’s illiberal, anti-democratic, pernicious and widespread in the Republican party. It’s not just a closing act for the Trump-era but an opening act for the post-Trump era. It’s virtue-signaling to the base that after Trump leaves, these people still consider themselves to be Trump acolytes and part of the cult of Trump.”Democratic consultants concurred.“This is still the Trump party,” said strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “They may see this as an act of survival, and may not even believe in the reality of what they’re doing. What they do believe in is getting re-elected in [midterm elections in] 2022. If we had a president who was prepared to leave quietly, this would not be a discussion.”The looming spectacle comes despite the failure of Trump’s legal team to win any of at least 40 lawsuits involving allegations of voter fraud in November, an election officials called the most secure in American history.On Wednesday, Trump ally and Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley announced he would object to certifying the electoral votes during the joint session on 6 January .In an essay published Wednesday in the conservative commentary magazine The Blaze, editor Mark Levin backed up Hawley, claiming that states failed to follow their own election laws.But in a conference call on Thursday, Senate majority leader and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell reportedly said that his 6 January vote certifying Biden’s victory will be “the most consequential I have ever cast”.McConnell has told senators not to join any attempt to delegitimize the electoral votes, believing that the effort could cause Republicans to lose two Senate seats being contested in the run-offs in Georgia on 5 January.Wehner believes McConnell opposes Hawley’s effort because it forces Republicans to go on record and potentially threatens his control of the Senate. “If they go on the record against what Hawley is doing it’s going to inflame the Republican base; if they agree it with it, it’s so transparently ludicrous that it’s going to hurt some Republicans in more moderate states,” Wehner said.In a blistering open letter on Wednesday, Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse also opposed Hawley, warning that “all the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party”.“We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Sasse wrote. “But they’re wrong … adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”According to Jim Sleeper, retiring professor of political science at Yale University, the House Republicans’ rebel plan aspires to assist the kind of McConnell-led obstructionism he practiced against the Obama administration.“Beyond January 20, we’re looking at a Republican party that is gearing up to make sure – assuming Democrats don’t win control of the Senate – that McConnell will be able to repeat his act of stymying almost everything that Democrats could hope to do.”Any effort to block certification goes along in tandem to suppress voting, Sleeper believes, that springs from organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).He said it was part of a larger operation to restrict mechanisms that an open, democratic process make possible.“It’s part of a creeping coup d’etat that we’ve seen Trump going along with in his own loopy-minded way,” he said. More