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Georgia Senate runoff elections – live results
Voters in the state of Georgia are back to the polls today to cast their ballots in two runoff elections that will determine control of the US Senate. This will significantly affect the extent to which President-elect Joe Biden will be able implement his agenda.
Why these elections matter
In the November general election the Democrats maintained their hold on the House of Representatives, but fell short of the 51 seats needed to retake the Senate, where the Republicans have had a majority for the past six years.
Tom McCarthy said: “Control of the US Senate is on the line. If the Democrats win both races, the president-elect will gain a big opportunity to build a progressive legacy. If Democrats lose one or both races, the country will enter at least a two-year period of divided government, with the Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, retaining power and likely frustrating Biden’s agenda.
“If Democrats win both races, the Senate would be split 50/50, but Democrats would effectively control the body with Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, in her role as president of the Senate, breaking any ties in a strict party-line vote.
“The runoff races are being held in accordance with state election laws because no candidate in either race won 50% of the vote in the November elections.”
Who are the candidates?
Tom McCarthy said: “The Republican candidates include one sitting senator – the wealthy appointee Kelly Loeffler, 50 – and one senator whose term has just ended, David Perdue, 71.
“Challenging the Republicans are fresh faces on the Democratic side. Documentary film-maker Jon Ossoff, 33, a former congressional staffer and failed House candidate, is running to replace Perdue, while Atlanta pastor and first-time candidate Rev Raphael Warnock, 51, is running to unseat Loeffler.” More - in Elections
Josh Hawley dodges question during Fox News grilling on election challenge
A prominent Republican senator has declined to clearly answer a question about whether he is involved in a bid to reverse the result of the 2020 presidential election that Democrat Joe Biden won convincingly in November.Asked if he was trying to “overturn the election” and keep Donald Trump in power, Missouri senator Josh Hawley told Fox News: “That depends what happens on Wednesday.”That is when Congress will meet to count Joe Biden’s 306-232 electoral college victory, which has been certified by all 50 states. Formal objections due to be raised by Hawley, around a dozen other senators and more than 100 Republicans in the House will not overturn the result – as Trump and his supporters hope they will.Democrats hold the House, guaranteeing defeat there, and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and other senior Republicans in that chamber also oppose the objections.Speaking on Monday night, Hawley at first avoided questions about whether he was trying to overturn an election and thereby disenfranchise millions of Americans, insisting he was objecting to the handling of the presidential election in states including Pennsylvania.“I just want to pin you down,” anchor Bret Baier said, eventually, “on on what you’re trying to do. Are you trying to say that as of 20 January [inauguration day] that President Trump will be president?”“Well,” said Hawley, “that depends on what happens on Wednesday. I mean, this is why we have to debate.”Baier answered: “No it doesn’t. The states, by the constitution, they certify the election, they did certify it by the constitution. Congress doesn’t have the right to overturn the certification, at least as most experts read it.”“Well,” Hawley said, “Congress is directed under the 12th amendment to count the electoral votes, there’s a statute that dates back to the 1800s, 19th century, that says there is a right to object, there’s a right to be heard, and there’s also [the] certification right.”Baier countered: “It’s from 1876, senator, and it’s the Tilden-Hayes race, in which there were three states that did not certify their electors. So Congress was left to come up with this system this commission that eventually got to negotiate a grand bargain.”That bargain left a Republican president, Rutherford Hayes, in power in return for an end to Reconstruction after the civil war. In August, the historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “Part of the deal was the surrender of the rights of African Americans. I’m not sure that’s a precedent we want to reinvigorate, you know?”Baeir continued: “But now all of the states have certified their elections. As of 14 December. So it doesn’t by constitutional ways, open a door to Congress to overturn that, does it?”“My point,” Hawley said, “is this is my only opportunity during this process to raise an objection and to be heard. I don’t have standing to file lawsuits.”Trump’s campaign has filed more than 50 lawsuits challenging electoral results, losing the vast majority and being dismissed by the supreme court.Hawley dodged a subsequent question about whether his own White House ambitions are the real motivation for his objection – as they seem to be for other senators looking to appease the Trumpist base of the party.Also on Monday night, activists from the group ShutDownDC held what they called an “hour-long vigil” at Hawley’s Washington home. Demanding he drop his objection, they said they sang, lit candles and delivered a copy of the US constitution.Hawley, in Missouri at the time, complained that “Antifa scumbags” had “threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel. They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door.” More
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During this miserable lame-duck period, we must trust in a better future | Art Cullen
We are stuck in this interregnum, between a maladroit trying to burn down the Republic and a Normal Joe, wondering what sort of rabbit someone might pull out of a hat, waiting on a vaccine, trusting it will pass.Control of the US Senate hangs in the balance, as Georgia voters head to the polls this Tuesday. It took 10 days to get presidential results out of the Peach State. Now we are again awaiting word, this time of whether Chuck Schumer or Mitch McConnell will control the 2021 calendar. In the meantime, the economy teeters alongside our constitutional order.On Wednesday, Congress is set to consider certifying election results. A dirty dozen of Republican senators – plus 140 members of the House of Representatives – have said they will contest the results from certain swing states, despite Mitch McConnell’s urgings not to do so. They called this sedition in Abe Lincoln’s day.You could ignore it all by immersing your head in football games you don’t care about any more. Some drink – these are the holidays, after all, and there is nothing else to do, hasn’t really been anything to do since March, so why not?All the experts say we should remain calm and stay safe. But Normal Joe doesn’t raise his right hand and pledge on the Bible until January 20. A lot of weirdness gets sucked into the vacuum in the interim. On Saturday, Trump threatened to criminally charge the Georgia secretary of state, a Republican, for not cooking up the 11,780 ballots that the loser needs to win. Even Rudy Giuliani couldn’t dream up this kind of scheme.The good folks at the nursing homes are in the dark about when they might get vaccine doses. We old folks at home are in the dark with them. We have no idea how to find out when or where we will get the jab. The state is working on it, we are told. So we sit here and drink anxiety with our morning toast.During more ordinary times, these quadrennial weeks leading up to the inauguration are supposed to be a celebration of the world’s longest-running experiment in democracy. Instead, the president has called assorted wingnuts to Washington to protest what they believe is the Big Steal. “It’s going to be wild!” the tweeter in chief tweeted. Wild is not what democracy needs right now.Then there’s Congress’s so-called Covid relief. The out-of-work bartender currently forced to choose between paying rent and paying for medical prescriptions probably needs a lot more than $600. Maybe Biden can wrangle some more, depending on how that Georgia vote count goes, followed by recounts and court filings. Maybe the bar owner can get a second swing at a payroll protection grant, but maybe not. It all seems out of our hands.The Iowa legislature says its priorities are tax cuts, not supplementing unemployment benefits. You don’t know what will happen in one-party government. How far will Republicans go? There appear to be no limits when our congressman is calling to repudiate our electoral process.Everything should clear up by 20 January if it all doesn’t blow up in the next week or two. The vaccines will show up sooner or later. Local budgets and property tax rates will get nailed down, not without pain. The Fox propaganda machine is cracking under pressure from the rest of the rightwing looneysphere. The Republican party is morphing by the day. Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska says Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri is playing with fire, one young Republican Ivy League midwesterner to another.Are these the death rattles of a discredited movement of narcissism and fear, or the birth of something worse that endures? The November election suggests the former but we are going to play hell getting there.Until the Bidens are sleeping in the White House and not in a Delaware bunker, we sit in this helpless tumult of between. It’s about to turn. I believe this will pass. Let’s pray that hope will prevail.Art Cullen is editor of the Storm Lake Times in north-west Iowa, where he won the Pulitzer prize for editorial writing. He is a Guardian US columnist and author of the book Storm Lake: Change, Resilience, and Hope in America’s Heartland More
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Biden and Trump head to Georgia for dueling rallies ahead of Senate runoffs
Donald Trump and Joe Biden will stage dueling rallies in Georgia on the eve of two runoffs that will determine control of the Senate as the president continues his increasingly brazen effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Three million Georgia voters cast ballots during the early voting period, which ended Thursday – a record for runoff elections in the state. Tens of millions of dollars have poured into the state, as residents spent the last several weeks bombarded by political ads and outreach encouraging them to vote in Tuesday’s elections.
If Democrats win both seats – no easy feat – the Senate would be evenly divided, with Kamala Harris, the vice-president-elect, serving as the tie-breaking vote. If Republicans win at least one of the races, Mitch McConnell will remain the Senate majority leader, making it far more difficult for the president-elect to deliver on top policy priorities such as healthcare, taxation and climate.
Biden and Trump’s visits to the state on Monday highlight the urgency – and the stakes – of the twin races that will shape the political landscape for the first years of the incoming administration.
Biden was the first Democratic presidential nominee in nearly three decades to win Georgia, where changing demographics and a political realignment across the Atlanta suburbs have turned this once reliably Republican southern state into a presidential battleground. Multiple recounts affirmed Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from continuing to amplify false claims about the state’s election process and its results.
In an hour-long phone call to the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Saturday, Trump implored him to “find 11,780 votes” – just enough to reverse his defeat in the state’s presidential election.
The conversation, a recording of which was first published by the Washington Post, may further damage Republicans, who were already nervous that Trump’s fixation on his electoral loss – based on meritless claims and debunked conspiracy theories about voter fraud – could depress turnout among his supporters.
The races have drawn firepower from some of the biggest names in American politics. In addition to Trump and Biden, Barack Obama narrated an ad for Jon Ossoff while Michelle Obama recorded a message for the Rev Raphael Warnock, the two Democratic contenders.
Mike Pence was in Milner, Georgia on Monday to campaign on behalf of the Republican candidates, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. The vice-president exhorted voters at Rock Springs church to turn up at the polls on Tuesday to protect the conservative victories Trump had achieved over the last four years.
“We need Georgia to defend the majority,” he told said. “In one more day, we need people of faith to stand with two leaders who will support life and liberty and the freedom of every American. In one more day, we need to win Georgia and save America.”
Pence’s visit came a day after Harris held a drive-in rally with the Democratic candidates Ossoff and Warnock in Savannah. In her remarks, Harris assailed Trump for his call with Georgia’s secretary of state, calling it a “bald-faced, bold abuse of power” and “most certainly the voice of desperation”.
Loeffler is expected to appear with Trump at his Monday night rally in Dalton, a heavily Republican area in north Georgia that has seen relatively low turnout during the early voting period. Perdue, who is in quarantine after being exposed to a staff member with the coronavirus, told Fox News that he would attend Monday’s rally virtually.
Since the November election, Trump has continued his sustained assault on Georgia’s Republican leaders, who he has accused without evidence of ignoring instances of voter fraud. He has relentlessly attacked Raffensperger, a Republican, who has resisted enormous pressure from the president and Republican leaders to subvert the election results. And last month, Trump called Georgia’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, a “fool” and said he should resign.
Trump’s attacks have further cleaved the party at the very moment they would benefit from unity. During a rally in Georgia last month, Trump devoted considerably more time to airing his own political grievances with the state’s Republican leaders than promoting the Republican candidates he was there to campaign for.
During his last visit to the state, Biden warned that Perdue and Loeffler would be “roadblocks” in the Senate, focused more on obstructing a Democratic administration than working to deliver for Georgia. A vote for Ossoff and Warnock, Biden said, was a “vote for two United States senators who know how to say the word ‘yes’ and not just ‘no’”.
Perdue, who has served one term in the Senate, and Loeffler, who was appointed to the seat in December 2019, have largely embraced that characterization, warning voters that they are the last line of defense against a “radical liberal agenda”.
In an appearance on Fox News on Monday, Perdue said he was doubtful the conversation between Trump and Raffensperger would have any impact on the election and appeared more dismayed that participants on the call would leak the recording, a decision he called “disgusting”.
Perdue earlier said he supported an effort led by a group of Republican senators to indulge Trump’s desperate attempts to remain in power by objecting to the results of the elections in several states when Congress votes this week. “I’m encouraging my colleagues to object,” Perdue said during an appearance on Fox News on Sunday. “This is something the American people demand right now.”
Perdue’s term expired on Sunday and therefore will not vote on Wednesday, when Congress meets to certify the results of the Electoral College.
Loeffler, who has made loyalty to Trump a central theme of her campaign, declined to answer the question directly. In an interview on Fox News Sunday, Loeffler said she was “seriously looking” at the plot, backed by nearly a quarter of Senate Republicans, but did not commit to supporting it.
“Everything is on the table,” she said. More - in Elections
Revealed: David Perdue bought bank stocks after meeting financial officials
David Perdue, the Georgia Republican facing a Senate runoff election on Tuesday, has twice bought a significant number of shares in a US bank shortly after meeting with financial policy makers, raising more questions about his prolific stock trading while in office.In one case, in May 2015, Perdue bought between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in Regions Financial Corporation two days after a 10-minute phone call with then treasury secretary Jack Lew.Perdue bought additional shares in the bank two years later, on 18 May 2017, two days after a half-hour meeting with then Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen.It is not clear in either case if Perdue discussed relevant financial regulation or other market-sensitive issues with Lew or Yellen or whether the discussions influenced his decision to buy the stock.At the time of the call with Lew, members of the Senate banking committee, on which Perdue sits, were engaged in close talks over a potential trade deal.But the purchase of more Regions stock in the wake of Perdue’s meeting with Yellen – who will be nominated to serve as treasury secretary by Joe Biden once the president-elect takes office – is possibly significant, because it came about two months before Yellen publicly discussed her support for raising the $50bn asset threshold for systemically important institutions, a change that meant Regions bank could see an easing of important financial regulations.As Yellen’s views on the topic publicly evolved in her role as chair of the Fed, so did Perdue’s buildup of stock in Regions. Perdue separately sought to advance deregulatory legislation that would be favorable for banks like Regions, which Regions and more than a dozen other banks publicly endorsed.Public records show that Perdue sold his full stake in Regions on 11 October 2019 and on 23 October 2019, suggesting that Perdue may have made a 21% return on his earlier investment. He then bought more shares of the stock in November 2019 and January 2020.John Burke, Perdue’s communications director, has said that Perdue does not handle day-to-day decisions about his portfolio, which Perdue claimed is managed by outside financial advisers.It is not uncommon for policy makers like Yellen to have meetings with senators. On the day of her meeting with Perdue in 2017, Yellen also met with Lord Mervyn King, the former governor of the Bank of England, had lunch with Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin, and then met with another senator, Ohio Democrat Sherrod Brown.Former government insiders say policy makers try to be cautious in such meetings, and try to avoid sharing information that could move markets. At the same time, it can be difficult to avoid the sharing of potentially valuable information if senators and policy makers are discussing any issue in depth, and a senator might be able to gauge an evolving policy position that could be market-sensitive.The new revelations come as Perdue’s frequent stock trading while in office has come under increased scrutiny in the press ahead of his runoff Senate election on Tuesday. If Democrats win two runoff elections, it will transfer control of the Senate from Republicans to Democrats.Previous media reports have focused on how Perdue has faced federal scrutiny for his frequent stock trading while in office, and whether his position as a senator with access to market-sensitive information, especially during the pandemic, may have influenced some trades. The New York Times, citing multiple anonymous sources, said Perdue’s sale of $1m in stock in a financial company called Cardlytics, where he served on the board, drew the attention of investigators at the Department of Justice last spring, who were undertaking “a broad review of the senator’s prolific trading around the outset of the coronavirus pandemic for possible evidence of insider trading”.The investigators ultimately concluded that a personal message that had been sent to Perdue from the company’s chief executive, alluding to “upcoming changes”, was not “nonpublic information”, and declined to pursue charges. Perdue sold his stock two days after he received the personal message from the CEO. About six weeks later, the chief executive resigned and the company revealed that results were below expectations, causing the stock to tumble.The New York Times separately reported that, as a member of the Senate’s cybersecurity committee, Perdue and others sought out the protection of the National Guard against data breaches. The newspaper said that beginning in 2016, Perdue bought and sold shares in a cybersecurity firm called FireEye on 61 occasions. Nearly half of those trades, the New York Times reported, occurred while Perdue sat on the cybersecurity committee, which could have given him access to sensitive information.Perdue’s senate campaign did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. He has formerly denied having any conflict of interest.But Perdue’s challenger in this week’s senator runoff, Democrat Jon Ossoff, has repeatedly raised the issue, and accused Perdue of using his office to enrich himself.Perdue’s spokesman has called the criticism “baseless” and he has emphasized being “totally exonerated” by federal investigators. More
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Trump's Republicans have dumped Lincoln – they're the Confederacy now | Lloyd Green
On Wednesday, the Republicans’ transition to the party of the Confederacy will be complete. A day after Georgia’s runoff elections, at least a dozen lawmakers in the Senate and more than half of the party’s House membership will seek to overturn the results of the 2020 election and disenfranchise the majority of US voters. A coup attempt in all but name, this is how democracy dies.Sadly, a statement issued on Saturday by seven sitting senators and four senators-elect dispelled any doubts about the nexus between the end of the US civil war, more than 150 years ago, and Donald Trump’s desperate attempt to cling to power. Predictably, America’s racial divide again stands front and center.After regurgitating for the umpteenth time unproven and unsubstantiated charges of electoral fraud, the senators invoked the election of 1876. Back then, the Democrats contested the outcome, conceding after the Republicans agreed to halt Reconstruction.As framed by Ted Cruz and his posse, “the most direct precedent” for their actions “arose in 1877, following serious allegations of fraud and illegal conduct in the Hayes-Tilden presidential race”. In their telling, “elections in three states” were “alleged to have been conducted illegally”. Left unsaid is that after the end of Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the toxic legacy of “separate but equal” followed.To these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the timeTo quote Mississippi’s William Faulkner, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Senators from states that were part of the Confederacy, or territory where slaveholding was legal, provide the ballast for Cruz’s demands. At least one senator each from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas is on board.Apparently, Trump’s defeat at the hands of Joe Biden, formerly vice-president to the first black man in the White House, and Kamala Harris, a black woman, is too much for too many to bear. Said differently, to these Republicans the right to vote is only for some of the people, some of the time – those people being this president’s supporters.Trump’s equivocation over Charlottesville, his debate shoutout to the Proud Boys and his worship of dead Confederate generals are of the same piece. The vestiges of an older and crueler social order are to be maintained, at all costs.Likewise, the reluctance of Trump appointees to the federal judiciary to affirm the validity of Brown v Board of Education, the supreme court ruling that said school segregation was unconstitutional, is a feature not a bug.As for the Declaration of Independence’s pronouncement that “All men are created equal”, and the constitution’s guaranty of equal protection under law, they are inconveniences to be discarded when confronted by dislocating demographics.“Stand back and stand by,” indeed.Since the civil war, there has always been a southern party, frequently echoing strains of the old, slave-owning south. Practically, that has meant hostility towards civil rights coupled with wariness towards modernity.To be sure, southern did not automatically equal neo-Confederate, but the distinction could easily get lost. And to be sure, the Democrats were initially the party of the south. During debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Republicans gave Lyndon Johnson the votes he needed. Not anymore.Cruz and Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator who kicked off the attempt to deny the electoral college result, are the products of places like Harvard, Stanford and Yale. John C Calhoun, the seventh vice-president, argued in favor of slavery and the right of states to secede. He went to Yale too. Joseph Goebbels had a doctorate from Heidelberg. An elite degree does not confer wisdom automatically.For the record, Cruz also clerked for a supreme court chief justice, William Rehnquist. Hawley did so for John Roberts.On Sunday, as the new Congress was being sworn in, a recording emerged of Trump unsuccessfully browbeating Georgia’s secretary of state into finding “11,780 votes, which is one more than we have”. From the sound of things, Trump’s fear of prosecutors and creditors, waiting for him to leave the White House, takes precedence over electoral integrity.Back in May, after Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, predicted 240,000 deaths from Covid, and as armed protests to public health measures grew, an administration insider conveyed that Trump’s America was becoming a “bit” like the “late” Weimar Republic. Eight months later, the death toll is past 350,000 and climbing unabated.Come nightfall on 6 January, the party of Abraham Lincoln will be no more. Instead, the specters of Jim Crow and autocracy will flicker. Messrs Trump, Cruz and Hawley can take a collective bow. More
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'I just want 11,780 votes': Trump pressed Georgia to overturn Biden victory
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
