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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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      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

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      Senate overrides Donald Trump's veto of defense spending bill

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      Donald Trump’s fellow Republicans in the US Senate on Friday took the atypical rebellious step of overriding his veto for the first time in his presidency.The Senate pushed through a bill on defense spending against Trump’s strong objections – just 20 days before he leaves office.Meeting in a rare New Year’s Day session, the Senate secured the two-thirds majority needed to override the veto with bipartisan support two days before a new Congress will be sworn in on Sunday.Eight previous vetoes of legislation have been upheld. Under the US constitution, the president has the power to veto a bill passed by Congress, but lawmakers can uphold the bill if two-thirds of both the House of Representatives and the Senate vote to override it.The Republican-led Senate, following the Democratic-controlled House on Monday, passed the measure without Trump’s support, voting 81-13 on Friday afternoon.Overriding Trump’s veto marks a striking departure for GOP senators, who have largely stood by the president during his turbulent White House term.But Trump’s objections to the bill angered lawmakers, who had labored for months to put together a bipartisan bill and pride themselves on passing the military bill each year for 60 years, and voted to ignore his opposition to it.The $740bn National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) determines everything from military programs and construction projects to how to address geopolitical threats.Trump refused to sign it into law because of its failure to repeal Section 230, a federal law that provides a legal liability shield for internet companies, and because it includes a provision stripping the names of Confederate generals from military bases.“We’ve passed this legislation 59 years in a row. And one way or another, we’re going to complete the 60th annual NDAA and pass it into law before this Congress concludes on Sunday,” Senate leader Mitch McConnell said.As votes were being counted indicating Trump had lost the battle, the president tweeted, touting a protest planned in Washington on Wednesday when the new Congress officially tallies the electoral college votes certifying Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential victory in November’s election. More

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      What to expect from US politics in 2021: Politics Weekly Extra

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      Jonathan Freedland, Kenya Evelyn, Lauren Gambino and Richard Wolffe look ahead to what we can expect from the first year of Joe Biden’s presidency

      How to listen to podcasts: everything you need to know

      Jonathan Freedland, Kenya Evelyn, Lauren Gambino and Richard Wolffe say goodbye to 2020 and tee up what is likely to be an incredibly interesting 12 months ahead. What will Joe Biden be able to do in his first year? Who will control the Senate? Who will enter the race to take over from Nancy Pelosi? And what will Donald Trump and his family do when they leave the White House on 20 January? Send us your questions and feedback to podcasts@theguardian.com Help support the Guardian by going to gu.com/supportpodcasts More

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      Trump returns to Washington early as allies plot challenge to Biden victory

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      Donald Trump returned to Washington on Thursday, abruptly cutting short a holiday retreat to his private south Florida resort as the president’s allies on Capitol Hill prepare to mount a last-ditch challenge to Joe Biden’s election victory.The president had reportedly been in a stormy mood since his arrival at Mar-a-Lago, where he decamped days before Christmas and was originally expected to remain through the New Year’s Eve celebrations.It was not clear what triggered the president’s change of plans. He declined to answer questions upon boarding for his flight back to the White House on Thursday morning.But hours before the White House announced that Trump would spend New Year’s Eve in Washington, the Republican senator Josh Hawley of Missouri announced that he would object to the electoral college result when Congress meets on 6 January to affirm Biden as the winner of November’s presidential election.Trump had been goading his most loyal backers in Congress to stage a final intervention on the floor of the House to try to overturn the results of the election.The effort to keep Trump in power is all but destined to fail, but it will test Republicans’ loyalty to the president, who maintains a vice-like grip on their party, even after Americans voted to remove him from office after a single term.Many Senate Republicans had hoped to avoid such a showdown over the certification process, typically a formality. The move by Hawley, a conservative freshman believed to have presidential ambitions, will force his colleagues to publicly affirm or oppose the election results.Trump lost several battleground states by clear margins. His volley of lawsuits alleging widespread voter fraud in six states he lost have been almost uniformly dismissed, including by the supreme court.Officials at local and national level declared it the most secure election in American history, and the electoral college voted earlier this month to certify Biden’s 306-232 win.And yet Trump has refused to concede, spending his last holiday season as president fuming over his loss.On Twitter, the president continued to amplify conspiracy theories about voter fraud and lashed out at Republican officials who have refused his demands to overturn his loss in their states.On Wednesday, he called on the Republican governor of Georgia, Brian Kemp, to resign even though multiple recounts affirmed Biden’s narrow, historic victory in the state.Trump’s premature departure from Mar-a-Lago came amid growing concern in Washington that Iran may be planning further military retaliation ahead of the first anniversary of the US killing of the top Iranian military commander Qassem Suleimani on 3 January.His return also comes a day after the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, effectively denied Trump’s demand that Congress increase the size of coronavirus relief checks to Americans from $600 to $2,000.Trump for days delayed signing the massive stimulus package – threatening a government shutdown – over his insistence that the legislation include the $2,000 checks. Trump ultimately relented, but continued to press Republican leaders, calling their inaction “pathetic” and a political “death wish”.On Wednesday, McConnell said there was “no realistic path” for the Senate to pass a House bill that would raise the amount of money disbursed to American families grappling with the public health and economic toll of the virus. The Senate is also preparing to override Trump’s veto of a military defense bill that was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support.As the pandemic rages, officials in Colorado and California announced the discovery of a new and possibly more contagious variant of the coronavirus, while the vaccine rollout fell behind its goals amid complaints of chaos and underfunding for states, Trump maintained a relatively low public profile during the holiday break, remaining mostly out of view.He made no public comment about the Christmas Day bombing in Nashville, nor the death of a newly elected Republican congressman, Luke Letlow, from complications related to Covid-19.Instead, Trump has remained fixated on undermining the results of the November election since he arrived at Mar-a-Lago on 23 December, accompanied by the first lady, Melania Trump.Already sour, his mood was darkened further when he saw the renovations to his private quarters at the club, which had been overseen by his wife in an effort to prepare their family for life after the White House, according to CNN.Trump’s earlier than expected departure means the president will not attend the resort’s annual New Year’s Eve party, a lavish, black tie affair he and his family traditionally attend.According to CNN, as many as 500 reservations had already been confirmed for the event.The network reported that the party is expected to go ahead without the guest of honor, despite a sharp rise in coronavirus cases and pleas from public health officials to stay home and limit the size of holiday gatherings. 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      in Elections

      Pelosi rebukes McConnell for saying 'no realistic path' for $2,000 relief stimulus bill – video

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      The Republican Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, says the bill that would direct $2,000 coronavirus relief payments to Americans has ‘no realistic path to quickly pass the Senate’. After Donald Trump and Democrats pushed for larger relief cheques, McConnell said he would not be ‘bullied’ by Democrats into quickly approving the measure. House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, criticised McConnell for adding a delay to the payments.’These Republicans in the Senate seem to have an endless tolerance for other people’s sadness,’ she said
      Mitch McConnell says ‘no realistic path’ for $2,000 relief checks bill More

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      Mitch McConnell says 'no realistic path' for $2,000 relief checks bill

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      Donald Trump’s demand for $2,000 relief checks to Americans struggling financially with the pandemic was all but dead after Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell said on Wednesday that a proposal from Democrats had “no realistic path to quickly pass the Senate”.Declaring that he would not be “bullied” by Democrats into quickly approving the measure, McConnell effectively denied a final request for legislative action by the president in the waning days of his administration.“We just approved almost a trillion dollars in aid a few days ago,” McConnell said, referring to the passage of a massive $900bn stimulus package that included $600 direct payments to most American adults. “It struck a balance between broad support for all kinds of households and a lot more targeted relief for those who need help most.”Trump, who remained mostly on the sidelines during the negotiations, nearly derailed the agreement when he demanded Congress more than triple the size of the direct payments from $600 to $2,000. He ultimately relented and signed the bill into law on Sunday. But he has continued to press Congress to act, writing on Twitter that “$600 IS NOT ENOUGH”. He has also called Republicans “pathetic” for failing to act, and suggested their inaction amounted to a political “death wish”.“$2000 ASAP!” Trump demanded again on Wednesday before McConnell appeared to extinguish the possibility.Democrats have eagerly embraced Trump’s call to bolster the payments and on Monday, the House approved a bill that would send $2,000 stimulus checks to Americans. But on Tuesday, McConnell prevented Democrats from bringing the House bill to the floor for consideration, instead offering a vague assurance that Senate would “begin the process” of discussing the $2,000 checks.He said the measure would be considered alongside with unrelated items that would almost certainly doom the legislation, including an investigation of election security to root out voter fraud, which Trump has baselessly claimed tainted the presidential vote count, and the removal of legal protections for social media platforms.Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer on Wednesday called McConnell’s plan to tie the checks to the election security and social media provisions a “way to kill the bill”.“There is no other game in town but the House bill,” Schumer said in a floor speech, imploring McConnell to allow a vote on the House bill. “The only way, the only way, to get the American people the $2,000 checks they need is to pass the House bill and to pass it now.”When he finished, Schumer again attempted to bring the House bill to the floor for a vote on Wednesday, but McConnell again objected, dismissing it as a Democratic proposal led by the House.But the effort is not only backed by Democrats. Weeks ago, progressive senator Bernie Sanders joined forces with conservative senator Josh Hawley to demand Congress include direct payments as part of any bipartisan stimulus agreement. After the checks were adopted, they continued to push Congress to dramatically increase the size of the checks.Trump’s support has further shifted the calculus among Republicans, who previously demanded that Democrats pare back their coronavirus relief proposal to keep costs under $1tn. Loath to defy the president, many Republican senators are now dropping their initial concerns about the cost of the package and embracing his call for bigger payments.Georgia senators Davide Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, who are running in competitive re-election races next week that will determine control of the Senate, said they support increasing the size of the checks. And 44 Republicans joined the vast majority of the Democratic caucus to approve the House bill on Monday.As lawmakers continued to spar over the payments, the treasury department said Americans should begin to receive $600 deposits in their bank accounts as early as Tuesday evening, while paper checks would be mailed out starting Wednesday. More

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      Judge orders Georgia counties to halt voter purge ahead of Senate runoff

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      Two Georgia counties must reverse their decision to purge thousands from voter rolls in advance of the state’s 5 January runoff elections that will determine whether Democrats or Republicans control the US Senate.Georgia federal judge Leslie Abrams Gardner said in an order filed late on Monday that these two counties appeared to have improperly relied on unverified change-of-address information to invalidate voter registrations, Reuters reported.“Defendants are enjoined from removing any challenged voters in Ben Hill and Muscogee Counties from the registration lists on the basis of National Change of Address data,” she said in the court order. This judge is the sister of Stacey Abrams, the Democratic activist who lost a race for Georgia governor in 2018.Of the more than 4,000 registrations that officials tried to rescind, the vast majority were in Muscogee County. President-elect Joe Biden won this county during the November election. Another 150 were in Ben Hill county, which Donald Trump won with a sizable margin.Almost 2.1 million people – more than 25% of Georgia’s registered voters – have voted in the Senate runoff election that started on 14 December. This race will decide whether Democrats control both houses of Congress.In turn, the result will also influence the fate of Biden’s policy initiatives as a Republican-controlled Senate – even if held by a slim majority – would probably block his agenda. This also includes Biden’s ability to secure his desired cabinet appointees.Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff are facing off against GOP incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, respectively. Recent data from FiveThirtyEight places Warnock and Perdue slightly ahead of their opponents.Warnock and Ossoff victories would mean that the Senate is divided between 50 Democrats and 50 Republicans. In situations where votes on legislation are evenly split, the tie-breaking vote would be cast by Kamala Harris, as vice-president.The deeply significant runoff has prompted record-breaking fundraising. Ossoff and Warnock each raised more than $100m in a mere two months–surpassing their conservative opponents. Ossoff, who runs a media production business, raised more than $106m from 15 October to 16 December, per his campaign’s most recent financial report. Warnock, the pastor of Ebenezer Baptist church in Atlanta, took in slightly more than $103m.Leaders of both parties have made campaign stops. Biden – the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Georgia since 1992 – and Harris have campaigned in the state. Trump and his daughter, Ivanka, have also campaigned.Reuters contributed to this report More