I realized I hadn’t heard anything about Rudy Giuliani for a couple of days. We know that even during the Wednesday afternoon putsch, and the hours after, he was calling and texting Republican lawmakers to get them to at least delay the certification of the Electoral College votes because there was more evidence! Real evidence this time!

The most recent Rudy news I could find was in the right-wing Washington Times.

President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani said Friday that he is surprised more people did not try to storm the U.S. Capitol during the deadly insurrection they both fomented this week.

Mr. Giuliani, who on Wednesday recommended “trial by combat” as way of resolving the presidential election decisively lost by Mr. Trump, voiced disbelief “so few” people seized the Capitol hours later.

Speaking to Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former aide, Mr. Giuliani also denied “Trump people” scaled the Capitol’s walls during the breach and baselessly laid blame on alleged outsider activists.

“Most of them hadn’t come there with implements to do it and also led on by people from, you know, groups that are experts at it. Believe me, Trump people were not scaling the wall,” Mr. Giuliani said.

“So there’s nothing to it that [Mr. Trump] incited anything,” Mr. Giuliani said on Mr. Bannon’s “War Room: Pandemic” podcast.

It’s a bit remarkable that the Washington Times admitted that the claim that not-Trump-supporters were behind the putsch is “baseless.” Note also that Steve Bannon’s channels since have been removed from YouTube. There is also speculation that Rudy could face charges in connection with the riot. Otherwise, Rudy seems to have crawled under a rock somewhere.

For that matter, we haven’t heard much from Ivanka since she deleted a tweet that called the insurrectionists “patriots.” See also Emily Jane Fox, “The Stink of His Family Is Nearly Impossible to Get Off”: Jared and Ivanka’s Final Chapter in Washington Demolished Their Future at Vanity Fair. In brief, Javanka is now persona non grata among pre-2016 friends and associates. Ivanka was serious about launching her own political career, and after Wednesday let’s just say she’s got a way to go with that.

I was also curious about Kimberly Guilfoyle, last seen dancing in this video made just before the pre-putsch “rally.” She told us the best was yet to come, but I’m not sure Wednesday was what she had in mind.

True story: I couldn’t remember Guilfoyle’s name, so I googled “crazy woman who spoke at Republican convention” and she came right up.

Ben Carson! I occasionally wonder about Ben Carson. I worry that people forget to check on him to be sure he’s still breathing. But in the past few hours he and Donald Trump, Jr., have both criticized Twitter for the lifetime ban of The Donald. Ben Carson also let us know he is aware the U.S. is not China. Well, good on you, Ben! You’re learning world geography!

I don’t wonder about Eric. I don’t want to know about Eric.

Bess Levin at Vanity Fair reports that Hope Hicks is resigning, again, but not because of what happened on Wednesday. Hicks wants everyone to be clear about that. Her second resignation is just a scheduling thing.

I am sad to report that Tiffany Trump is doubling down on family loyalty.

The 27-year-old Georgetown law school graduate hopped on Twitter, a platform she hasn’t much used recently, to issue a series of messages and retweets that repeated his false allegations of election fraud and that blasted Twitter and Facebook for locking his accounts or for removing his content that was seen as promoting election disinformation and inciting violence.

Oh, Tiffany. You got a law degree, girl. In spite of your least-favorite-daughter status and being stuck with a name worthy of a strip-club headliner, you were on the way to making something of yourself and building a life apart from Trump, Inc. And there you go making another appeal for Dad’s Approval. So sad. He doesn’t love anyone, you know.

I also regret to report that Steve Mnuchin has not resigned yet. He’s going to stay on the job until they drag him out. His wife Louise has made a new movie in which her character eats a spider, it says here, so we can still see her, if we want to.

Steve and Louise in happier (for them) times.

Mike Pompeo is also sticking it out. He will be addressing the staff of Voice of America on Monday. VoA staff are pissed they are being required to broadcast the speech, which they consider propaganda. That’s our Mike.

Acting Homeland Security Director Chad Wolf, whom you might remember was all over Portland last summer but who somehow couldn’t be bothered to respond to the riot in the Capitol, did emerge from his secret bunker long enough to issue a tweet condemning the violence on Wednesday. Yeah, we’re not impressed, Chad.

Although she’s not an official part of the Trump Administration, I want to give a special shout-out to Ginny Thomas, wife of Justice Clarence Thomas. She was a big online cheerleader of the “rally” on Wednesday. There are reports she sponsored 80 buses of insurrectionists that went to DC.  Since Wednesday she has been uncharacteristically quiet and, I understand, has even deleted her Facebook page.

Her husband might be concerned that if her involvement in the riots became widely known he might be pressured to resign. He might be right.

Excuse me while I free associate for a while.

Today I ran into a post by Ed Morrisey at Hot Air providing testimony that the November election results matched the Trump campaign’s internal polling on the eve of the election, with the exception of Georgia, which internal polls showed Trump winning. They all knew good and well that Trump was losing and no fraud was going on. This is not a surprise to me, but it’s a surprise to see it reported on Hot Air.

Back in the heyday of political blogs, Morrisey was Captain Ed, a reliably hard-Right voice in support of George W. Bush and against liberalism. He was in lock step with the likes of Power Line and Instapundit, if you recall those blogs. Hot Air is a website founded by Michelle Malkin. So it’s a bit disorienting to find Morrisey being honest about bad actors on the Right. I haven’t been following Morrisey, however, and I don’t know if he was a Trump supporter until recently.

This testimony about internal polling is significant because it is more evidence — like we needed more evidence –that Trump planned to steal the election by declaring himself the winner based on an election night lead and then using courts to stop the counting of mail-in votes. That plot was foiled when Fox News called Arizona for Biden on election night. Trump’s very narrow path to victory required Arizona and Pennsylvania, it says here. Note that Arizona and Pennsylvania were the hills Cruz, Hawley, et al. were still trying to take at the end.

According to a YouGov poll out today, 45 percent of Republican voters approve of the riot in the Capitol building. The same poll showed 68 percent of Republican voters do not consider the assault on the Capitol to have been a threat to democracy. This puts Republicans way out of step with Democratic and Independent voters. But it also tells us that 55 percent of Republican voters don’t approve of the attempted insurrection, and at least some of that 55 percent do think it was a threat to democracy. We can hope some scales fell from at least some eyes.

James Ford, a Zen teacher and Unitarian Universalist minister, cited the YouGov poll on Facebook and quoted Hannah Arendt: “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” James continues,

What was believed as true has been revealed to be a lie. Here as the prince of the lies has been revealed for what he is.

Those 55 percent are at that place. That hard place.

They are being invited to see something about themselves. Personally, I am completely sympthetic. It is something we humans find terribly seductive. I’ve swallowed more than one lie in my life. …

…A painful thing. I know. I know. And. Most almost certainly will not succeed. It is too hard a thing.

But a door has opened.

That’s about how I felt when I saw Ed Morrisey’s post. Look at you, being all factual. What happened? I don’t expect Morrisey to stop being a lot more conservative than I am. But “conservative” doesn’t worry me. Reasonable people can reach different conclusions when they apply different values and philosophies to the same facts. In that case at least everyone is mostly dealing with facts, which hasn’t been the case for the U.S. political Right for some time. There’s a big difference between opposing views on tax policy and not living in the same time-space continuum.

Which brings me to former Missouri senator John Danforth. Danforth may be one of the last living old-school Republicans. Danforth was first elected to the Senate in 1976, a time when the GOP was splitting between the more ideological Goldwater-Reagan wing and the old eastern establishment, sometimes derided as the “Rockefeller Republicans.” As a Senator, Danforth was conservative, and I disagreed with a lot of his votes, but he was more pragmatic than ideological. He didn’t think in talking points. He was respected by reasonable people of both parties. He lived in the standard time-space continuum. And it’s significant that Danforth says today that campaigning for Josh Hawley to take his old seat was “the worst mistake I ever made in my life.”

I think Hawley has done irreparable damage to his political career. I could be wrong about that. Certainly, if you look at Missouri right now you might assume there is no limit to how far Right you can go and still win elections. My sense of things, though, is that the riot in the Capitol could end up being “movement conservatism’s” last hurrah. The pendulum that kept moving further and further Right, from Reagan to Gingrich et al. to Bush-Cheney-Karl Rove to the ascendance of Trump and the MAGA cult may be about to swing the other way. The powers that be on the Right are arrogant and greedy but not stupid; they must see they are on an unsustainable course, politically. The more grounded and traditionally conservative sensibilities of the old Republican establishment may come back into vogue and squeeze out the nutzoids. That would be a good thing.

And if that’s so, Josh Hawley just bet the mortgage money on the wrong horse.

A sign of the times: The Wall Street Journal is calling on Trump to resign. I agree with WSJ that the events of this week have probably finished Trump as a serious political figure. Yes, he still has a devoted following, but Trump probably never realized how much of his power derived from the consent of the Republican establishment and Murdoch media, not to mention the complicity of mainstream media to “normallize” him. If he loses most of that, and I believe he has, there’s no way he wins another presidential nomination. His influence within the Republican party could fade quickly.

And, frankly, this crew is not exactly a solid power base.

Let’s talk about the insurrectionists. They were dangerous, no question. There is evidence some of them were hoping to take hostages. Some of them might have hoped to seize and destroy the ballots. Somebody planted explosives. One security officer was killed by rioters who, as I understand it, smashed in his head with a fire extinguisher. There was vandalism. Offices were looted. Poop was smeared in hallways.

But most of them, once inside, seemed to be a loose ends. Why were they there? What did they expect? They issued no demands and made no statements other than to wave flags — American flags, Trump flags, Confederate flags. Some of them seemed to think this was a big lark, like the time they left a rubber snake in the teacher’s desk back in 6th grade. Like this guy:

WASHINGTON, DC – JANUARY 06: A pro-Trump protester carries the lectern of U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi through the Roturnda of the U.S. Capitol Building after a pro-Trump mob stormed the building on January 06, 2021 in Washington, DC. Congress held a joint session today to ratify President-elect Joe Biden’s 306-232 Electoral College win over President Donald Trump. A group of Republican senators said they would reject the Electoral College votes of several states unless Congress appointed a commission to audit the election results. (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Behold 36-year-old Adam Johnson, a father of five from Parrish, Florida.  And yes, this is what White privilege looks like. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that he’s commiting a crime. Felony? What felony?

At least the fellow who put his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk has been arrested. That’s a start. He is Richard Barnett, 60, from Gravette, Arkansas, and when he left the building he bragged about looting Nancy Pelosi’s office to the New York Times.

See When the Mob Reached the Chamber by Megan Garber at The Atlantic.

The glibness was its own display of dominance. Apathy can be its own kind of weapon. The images of the rioters that came from the Capitol yesterday conveyed glee and anger and many things in between; what they convey very little of, however, is fear. The insurrectionists grinned at the cameras. They waved, merrily. They shuffled through Statuary Hall as the frozen faces of America’s past looked on. They overran the place. And then they were escorted out, calmly—politely—by Capitol Police. They were fueled by lies and fantasies; one thing they got right, though, was that their attack on the government—an attack motivated by their desire to overturn a free and fair election—would incur very few consequences. By the evening, as newspapers ran all-caps headlines about the trauma the Capitol had just endured at the hands of militant invaders, law enforcement had reportedly arrested some 50 people. News networks that had spent years stoking violent delusions scrambled to announce their shock that the delusions had turned violent. Politicians who had demonized peaceful racial-justice protesters this summer found acrobatic new ways to define “law and order.”

Those rioters who returned home and expected a virtual hero’s welcome on social media found something else instead — claims that the riots were the work of antifa! See MAGA World Is Splintering by Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic.Tiffany spoke withTrump fan Bryson Gray, who had attended the insurrection but claims to have remained outside the Capitol Building.

“When I left the Capitol, I actually thought I was going to get on Twitter and see a bunch of support, because it was actually a very beautiful thing,” Gray said. Instead, he was met with a strange message spreading across the site: Trump fans weren’t behind the riots. Instead, it was antifa, the decentralized left-wing group that has become a bogeyman for Republican commentators and politicians, and for President Trump in particular. Many of Gray’s former #StopTheSteal allies had disavowed the insurrection, and a good number of them were using leftist antagonists as their scapegoat. “The first tweet I saw was somebody saying ‘Patriots don’t storm buildings; there were no patriots in the Capitol,’” Gray told me. “I’m like, Uh, that literally makes no sense; what are you talking about?”

I don’t disagree with Greg Sargent often, but today he writes that the insurgency scored a propaganda coup.

I am hopeful that most of the rioters who broke into the Capitol building will be identified, arrested, and convicted of something. And I am hopeful that they receive enough punishments to change their attitudes. Some of them have already lost their jobs. I am also hopeful that any government or security official who in any way colluded to make the insurrection happen will do penitentiary time. We’ll see.

See also David Graham, The Atlantic, The Insurrectionists Would Like You to Know That They’re the Real Victims.

As for Trump, I do hope the House impeaches him. Right now, it appears this will happen.

(As I was writing this, Nancy Pelosi let it be known that another impeachment is on the table. Keep reading for details.)

Today, Trump is holed up in the White House, largely cut off from the world. His social media accounts have all been suspended, at least for a while. There have been no official White House press releases for a couple of days. All we’ve heard from Trump in several hours is this:

…fight to ensure that only legal votes were counted. While this represents the end of the greatest first term in presidential history, it’s only the beginning of our fight to Make America Great Again!”

— Dan Scavino??? (@DanScavino) January 7, 2021

Dan Scavino is White House deputy chief of staff.

At Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilley writes We’ve Lost Contact With the President.

The assumption underneath all of this, seemingly confirmed by a leaked Wednesday email in which Jared Kushner’s father told a friend that Trump’s actions are “beyond our control,” is that the president has gotten untethered; there is no longer anyone at all to mediate, even in a craven or enabling way, between his impulses and those of his most delusional, violent supporters. And with his social media accounts shut down, we lack even the usual level of awful access to the pattern of his thoughts. The man who is nothing but performance has been cut off from the audience that gives him shape and meaning.

What is the president doing? Is there a president right now, really? The safety line has gone slack in the cave, and we are all waiting to see what kind of thing will come back out.

CNN’s Kaitlan Collins reported that Trump’s enthusiasm about the attack on Congress disturbed even his own staff. Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman writes that staffers were actually warned to stay away from Trump.

“What do I do? Resign?” one nervous White House staffer asked a friend on Wednesday afternoon, shortly after news broke that a woman had been shot and killed inside the Capitol. The West Wing staffer told the friend that White House Counsel Pat Cipollone was urging White House officials not to speak to Trump or enable his coup attempt in any way, so they could reduce the chance they could be prosecuted for treason under the Sedition Act. “They’re being told to stay away from Trump,” the friend said. The White House declined to comment.

Cipollone’s purported concern that Trump was committing treason—a federal crime—illustrates the chaos and fear of Wednesday’s unprecedented events. At least one staffer isn’t waiting to flee the ship. On Wednesday night, CNN reported that Stephanie Grisham, the former White House communications director and Melania Trump’s current chief of staff, resigned over the Trump-inspired riot. As staff quit or steer clear, Trump is increasingly isolated and alone. According to a person close to the White House, Trump refused to take calls on Wednesday from business leaders who wanted him to call off the insurrectionists. A former West Wing staffer said Republicans were texting and calling Chief of Staff Mark Meadows to lobby him to intervene, but Meadows wasn’t answering.

Gabriel also says Trump wanted David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler (our guys won! hurray!) to lose the Georgia runoff elections. Trump wanted to hurt Mitch McConnell for not supporting his attempt to overturn the election, and he believes that he will be the most dominant force in the Republican Party if McConnell loses party leadership. However, if anything, the events of yesterday supported McConnell’s continued leadership, even if it’s as Minority Leader. Trump is political kryptonite now.

Today there are resignations. The most significant of these, so far, is Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao. I take it the break between Trump and Chao’s husband Mitch McConnell is irrevocable.

Today Chuck Schumer called for Trump to be removed from office immediately. I emailed my senators to let them know I support Schumer in this. And since one of my senators is Josh Hawley, I also told Hawley he was a disgrace and should resign. The Kansas City Star and St. Louis Post-Dispatch have not been kind to Hawley today, either.

And now I see Nancy Pelosi is calling for Trump to be removed from office immediately, too. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

The person who might do the job is Mike Pence, who has sole power to initiate removal procedures under the 25th Amendment. And Pence would be justified. I almost feel sorry for him now. See CNN’s Jim Acosta, Trump pressured Pence to engineer a coup, then put the VP in danger, source says.

On Tuesday, Pence came under intense pressure from Trump to toss out the election results during a meeting that lasted hours in the Oval Office. The vice president’s chief of staff, Marc Short, was banned by Trump from entering the West Wing, the source said, as the President repeatedly warned with “thinly veiled threats” to Pence that he would suffer major political consequences if he refused to cooperate.

And then Trump sic’d the mob on Pence.

Pence was joined by his wife Karen Pence, daughter Charlotte and brother, Rep. Greg Pence, R-Indiana, for the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes in Congress Wednesday. Several of the violent Trump supporters who were rampaging the US Capitol were heard screaming “where’s Mike Pence,” the source said, frightening the vice president and his family.

Yet, the President and his top aides barely lifted a finger to check in on Pence to make sure he and his family were unharmed, the source added.

If Pence refuses to act, another impeachment isn’t out of the question. Greg Sargent reports that Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee are circulating new articles of impeachment. And this is what Nancy Pelosi said about it:

I join the Senate Democratic leader in calling on the Vice President to remove this president by immediately invoking the 25th amendment. If the vice president and the cabinet do not act, the Congress may be prepared to move forward with impeachment.

And there’s still time; as I recall, Andrew Johnson’s impeachment from start to acquittal in the Senate only took about a week. Sargeant says the position to just leave Trump alone until January 20 is becoming increasingly untenable.

Elsewhere: Anger that the Capitol was so easily broken into is growing. Chuck Schumer has promised to fire the Senate Sargeant-at-Arms as soon as he becomes Majority Leader. The House Sargeant-at Arms is under pressure to resign. There are multiple calls to thoroughly investigate the Capitol Police. The whole topic of how Capitol security failed, and how it almost certainly was compromised, requires a whole ‘nother post.

I am watching the news out of Washington about the thugs who have taken over the Capitol. And I keep hearing that there is still hardly any law enforcement trying to restore order. And we all know that if leftie or BLM protesters had done this, they’d be in jail already.

This is what comes of years of winking at right-wing terrorism. This is what comes of years not holding the Right responsible for bombing abortion clincis and murdering abortion doctors. This is what comes of letting armed thugs storm into statehouses and call it “exercising their rights.”

Right now I’m hearing some guy on the teevee downplaying the severity of what’s happening. It’s a “nuisance,” he says. He doesn’t think it’s a big enough deal to demand immediate deployment of National Guard.

This is bleeping insurrection. And if these thugs are just allowed to go home in a day or two, there will be more of it.

The Georgia runoff elections are tomorrow, although we may not know who won right away. I am making no predictions about winners. I will predict that if Republicans lose the Senate, the Republican establishment will blame Trump and his insane phone call to Brad Raffensperger for it.

It’s Wednesday that worries me. The good news is that as of this writing 20 Senate Republicans have made a firm commitment to certifying the Electoral College votes. There is no way there will be a majority vote in either house to not certify. And now that Trump’s stupid stunt of a phone call is public, I’d be a little surprised if any more GOP senators join the Dirty Dozen in voting to overturn the election.

But that doesn’t put us out of danger. For one thing, I fear all the right-wing crazies in America are going to show up in DC Wednesday, armed and looking for fights. The Proud Boys have announced that instead of their signature black and yellow garb they will wear all black clothes to mimic antifa. So that violence will be blamed on antifa? The Washington Post has reported “Threats of violence, ploys to smuggle guns into the District and calls to set up an ‘armed encampment’ on the Mall.” As I’ve said previously, it would be better if leftie protesters just stayed away. Let the thugs be thugs. It’ll be on teevee. The world will be watching.

A few days ago David Ignatius wrote that he was hearing from Washington officials who were worried that Trump would use the street violence he is actively inciting as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act to mobilize the military. And this takes us to the next area of concern.

At Washington Monthly, David Atkins wonders what other phone calls Trump has been making that we don’t know about. And have any of those phone calls gone to generals?

Barely noticed in the hubbub surrounding the impeachable offense over Georgia’s election was this extraordinary letter from all ten living former defense secretaries, urging against involving the military in domestic election disputes….

… These statements should be shockingly self-obvious. So why did they need to be made? What is happening between Trump and the Pentagon that this would be necessary?

What, indeed?

Given Trump’s desperation to remain in power by any means necessary, his authoritarian instincts, his pretenses at military support, and his general assumption that all branches of the government work for him directly rather than the Constitution, it would be shocking if Trump were not attempting to force Pentagon officials into overthrowing democracy.

And indeed, if he weren’t doing so, why was the letter written? Why did every living former defense secretary sign it? Why did it mention explicitly the duties of the officials involved to respect and facilitate the transition of power?

It wasn’t long after the November election that Trump replaced senior administration officials at the Petagon with his own toadies. As recently as December 30, the Biden transition team was still complaining about being stonewalled by the Department of Defense and OMB. What are the toadies hiding?

I do not believe the heads of the armed services will touch this. But as we saw this summer in Portland and elsewhere, Trump is able to call up military-type “agents” from the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Marshals Service, Customs and Border Protection, the Federal Protection Service, and elsewhere to conduct “police” actions that would have made Augusto Pinochet proud. And violence in the streets of the District of Columbia would give him an excuse to do so.

Yet there’s more. See Greg Sargent, A leading historian of U.S. democracy issues an urgent warning. Right now, since Democrats control the House, even if a majority of Senators were to vote to overturn the election, the effort would fail. But, Sargent asks, what might happen in a future election if Republicans hold a majority in both houses? A leading scholar of election history is warning that Republicans have shown they are willing to go down this path.

So, it’s not just Trump we have to worry about. And while Trump will be gone soon, all those Republicans willing to throw the Constitution under the bus will still be in office.

Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic,

This is sedition, plain and simple. No amount of playacting and rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat.

This is not some handful of firebrands making a stand for the television cameras. In 2005, one Democrat in the House and one in the Senate filed an objection to counting Ohio’s electoral votes, while insisting that they were not contesting the outcome of the presidential election itself. In 2017, a handful of Democratic members of the House objected to the electoral count. Because they lacked support in the Senate, then–Vice President Biden ruled the representatives out of order and declared, “It is over.” In both cases, the Democratic candidate had already conceded.

So, the “Democrats did it first” argument is bogus.

Instead of threatening to gavel these objections into irrelevance, as Biden did four years ago, Vice President Mike Pence “welcomes” these challenges. Pence’s career is finished, but he could have stood for the Constitution he claims to love and which he swore to defend. However, cowardice is contagious, and no mask was thick enough to protect Pence from the pathogen of fear.

It would be a relief, Nichols continues, to think that these officials all sincerely believe that Trump was robbed of an election.

But we are, in the main, dealing with people who are far worse than true believers. The Republican Party is infested with craven opportunists, the kind of people who will try to tell us later that they were “just asking questions,” that they were “defending the process,” and of course, that they were merely representing “the will of the people.” Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are not idiots. These are men who understand perfectly well what they are doing. Senator Mitt Romney sees it clearly, noting that his GOP colleagues are engaged in “an egregious ploy” to “enhance political ambition.”

And for this reason, there must be a reckoning. I still hear people say that once Trump is gone we should just “move on” for the “good of the nation.” Is that really what the nation needs? I say the nation needs to know the entire truth, and that those who protected Trump from the consequences of his corruption should be named and shamed, at the very least. Of course die-hard Trump supporters will go to their graves loving Dear Leader, but this is for posterity.

Whether Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon was the right thing to do is still debatable. But this is not Watergate. Carl Bernstein tells us that this GOP coup attempt is much worse. Those of us old enough to remember Nixon’s impeachment hearings should know this. “The heroes of Watergate were Republicans who would not tolerate Richard Nixon’s conduct,” Bernstein says. That’s hardly the case now.

Trump should be prosecuted for his attempt to overturn a lawful election, and every Republican in Congress supporting him now should also be called to answer for sedition. And let us have a moment of silence for Bill Barr, who must know the whole plot and chose to bail out of his role in it before the plot’s execution. You’ve got a lot of questions to answer, Bill.

We cannot just let this slide. Or it will keep happening.

See also:

Jennier Rubin, The Senate’s coup-staging ‘Dirty Dozen’ shouldn’t be allowed to hold office.

David Frum, Trump Crosses a Bright-Red Line

Richard Hasen, Donald Trump Should Be Prosecuted for His Shakedown of Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger

Marc Caputo, The backstory of Trump’s Georgia call

If you haven’t gone to WaPo to hear highlights of yesterday’s unhinged call from Trump to Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, here it is. Trump tries to bully Raffensperger into changing the election result. You can hear the entire call at WaPo, and there’s also a transcript.

Here’s just a sample of Trump talking:

The Hill reports that eleven more Republican senators have signed on to challenging the Electoral College Results. That makes a dozen, with Josh Hawley.

Eleven Senate Republicans on Saturday announced that they will object to the Electoral College results Wednesday, when Congress convenes in a joint session to formally count the vote.

GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Ron Johnson (Wis.), James Lankford (Okla.), Steve Daines (Mont.), John Kennedy (La.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Mike Braun (Ind.) and Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyo.), Roger Marshall (Kan.), Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) and Tommy Tuberville (Ala.) said in a joint statement that they will object to the election results until there is a 10-day audit.

“Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states,” they said. “Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.

“Accordingly, we intend to vote on Jan. 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed,” they added.

That list of rogue senators could grow. We haven’t heard from Rand Paul yet.

Here are the rules (according to the Electoral Count Act of 1887) for the Joint Session to count Electoral College votes, as compiled by the Congressional Research Service. My inexpert reading of the rules is that overturning a state’s election results requires a majority vote in both houses of Congress, which isn’t going to happen. So I’m not too worried.

However, the Dirty Dozen might possibly use the 1887 rules to cause the Joint Session to drag on for a while, possibly days. The rules appear to say that for every individual objection to a state’s vote the Joint Session must break up and debate for two hours, then vote on that objection. The Joint Session could agree to consider objections to more than one state at once, as was done in 1873, but if they don’t, certifying the EC votes will take a while.

There is also precedent for objecting to Electors individually, not just a state’s entire slate of Electors. And which states are they calling “disputed states”? I assume they’re talking about Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But they might decide to challenge every state Biden won. Like I said, this could go on for days.

Mitch McConnell must be about to blow a fuse. Well, we can hope.

There are also rules for what happens if two lists of Electors show up from the same state, which also could happen. After wading through considerable verbiage I came to understand that the law says a list of Electors certified by the state’s governor takes precedence over a List of Random Bozos Who Were Pissed About the Election. But it’s not impossible seditious elements in Congress would use the anticipated “alternate” Electors to slow down the procedures further.

And it’s possible Mike Pence will throw a wrench in the works, even though he asked a judge to pitch Louie Gohmert’s suit against him.

The suit, which was brought late last year by US Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and a slate of would-be Republican electors in Arizona, asked the US District Court for eastern Texas to grant Vice President Mike Pence the “exclusive authority and sole discretion under the Twelfth Amendment to determine which slates of electors for a State, or neither, may be counted.”

A federal judge in Texas dismissed the suit yesterday. The Vice President has no constitutional authority to choose the next President.

Trump has been promoting mass protests in Washington, DC, on January 6, and there’s a strong likelihood that will get nasty. I would prefer lefties stay out of it so that any violence won’t be blamed on them. And Daily Beast reports that Trump is telling people he plans to continue to file court challenges to the election even after the January 6 Joint Session certifies the win.

Two people familiar with the matter say that in recent days, Trump has told advisers and close associates that he wants to keep fighting in court past Jan. 6 if members of Congress, as expected, end up certifying the electoral college results.

“The way he sees it is: Why should I ever let this go?… How would that benefit me?” said one of the sources, who’s spoken to Trump at length about the post-election activities to nullify his Democratic opponent’s decisive victory.

Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write at Axios:

President Trump is torching his own party and its leaders on his way out of power — and tossing gas on the fire with a public call for mass protest next week and a vote to overturn his defeat.

Why it matters: Trump is demanding Republicans fully and unequivocally embrace him — or face his wrath. This is self-inflicted, self-focused — and dangerous for a Republican Party clinging to waning Washington power.

I liked this part:

He’s trying to burn down the party’s chances in Tuesday’s Georgia runoffs, raising doubts for Republican voters by tweeting yesterday that the state’s elections are “both illegal and invalid, and that would include the two current Senatorial Elections.”

Yeah, keep that up, Trumpie. VandeHei and Allen continue that Trump is trying to burn down Georgia Gov. Kemp, Mitch McConnell, several other Republicans and the Republican party in general. By the time this is over the Republican establishment may want to see Trump in jail even more than Democrats do.

The old year won’t be behind us for awhile, alas. I won’t feel that 2020 is really over until Joe Biden is inaugurated. We’ve got a dicey twenty days ahead. But let’s start on a happy note — Josh Hawley is not feeling the love today.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pressed Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley on a Thursday morning conference call to explain his plans to object to the Electoral College vote next week, which sets up an awkward vote for Hawley’s fellow Senate Republicans while boosting the Missourian’s national profile.

But McConnell was met with silence. Hawley — unbeknownst to some on the call, which was attended by Senate Republicans — was not present. He later emailed GOP colleagues to outline his decision to oppose final certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

Oops.

It’s been clear McConnell did not want to force Senate Republicans to go on record voting for or against Trump, and now a freshman Senator has gone rogue and didn’t even bother to get on the conference call.

The backlash to Hawley’s announcement that he would challenge the EC vote has been swift and hard. Former CIA Director John Brennan called Hawley the “Most Craven, Unprincipled, & Corrupt Senator” in a video here. Former Republican columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote that Josh Hawley reminds us that the GOP is the sedition party.

What is particularly reprehensible about Hawley’s move is that, unlike some of the deluded House members who signed onto the lawsuit, he knows his complaint is groundless. He is a graduate of Yale Law School, the former attorney general of Missouri and a law professor at the University of Missouri School of Law. He clerked for Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and subsequently wrote Supreme Court briefs. He knows that what he is doing is antithetical to the Constitution, his oath of office and his obligations as a lawyer. Yale should ask for its diploma back; the Missouri bar should move to take away his license. Georgia voters should send Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock to the U.S. Senate to deprive Hawley of the gavel on any committee and his party of the majority.

Republican Senator Ben Sasse lumped Hawley together with “ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage.”

The senator, who has emerged as one of the more vocal critics of Trump in a party that is staunchly loyal to the president, warned that the effort amounts to pointing a “loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”

“We ought to be better than that. If we normalize this, we’re going to turn American politics into a Hatfields and McCoys endless blood feud – a house hopelessly divided,” he said.

Former Republican speech writer Michael Gerson weirdly tries to portray Hawley as an innocent victim of corruption.

Yesterday when the news broke that Sen. Hawley plans to contest the Electoral College vote on January 6, I fired off an email to him to explain what I thought of him. Hawley’s plan is, of course, an exercise in grandstanding and attention-seeking. More than one commenter today expects Hawley to try for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. I guess he couldn’t pass up an opportunity to ingratiate himself with the base.

Hawley is a hot shot with boundless ambition in spite of being short of serious accomplishment in political office. He does have a serious resume — “He graduated from Stanford University in 2002 and Yale Law School in 2006. He has clerked for Chief Justice John Roberts; he taught at one of London’s elite private schools, St. Paul’s; and he served as an appellate litigator at one of the world’s biggest law firms,” it says here. In 2011 he became an associate professor at the University of Missouri law school. But as an elected official he hasn’t done much.

In 2016 he won election to be the Missouri attorney general. During his campaign against Democratic incumbent Teresa Hensley it was apparent there was some disagreement about what attorneys general do.

Democrat Teresa Hensley says the attorney general is the state’s top prosecutor, and for people to hold that office they must have courtroom experience.

“I’ve practiced law for 25 years, including 10 as a county prosecutor,” Hensley said. “My opponent is a young man who has never represented a client in a Missouri courtroom. He’s never practiced law in Missouri or stood in front a judge in Missouri. He’s not qualified for this job.”

Republican Josh Hawley says the main function of the attorney general’s office is to defend Missourians from an overreaching government and uphold criminal convictions won by local prosecutors that are on appeal.  …

… Hawley says Missouri’s economy is “being stifled and strangled by over regulation,” and he vows to use the office to “fight back against Washington dysfunction and bureaucratic overreach.”  …

… But Hensley says her opponent has made it clear he’ll use the office to advance an “extreme political agenda” instead of “protecting the people of Missouri from those who would pollute our air and water. From those who would commit consumer fraud. From predatory lenders.”

Hensley was right. Hawley served as state attorney general for only two years before running against Claire McCaskill for U.S. Senate in 2018. He didn’t exactly light the firmament on fire as an AG. The New York Times, October 2018:

A former law professor and clerk for Chief Justice John Roberts, he brought a conservative intellectual pedigree but little management experience to the attorney general’s office, where his campaign says he has gained “a reputation for taking on the big and the powerful.”

But a review of public records and internal documents, as well as interviews with current and former employees, reveals a chaotic tenure as attorney general that has been costly for state taxpayers. Judges have criticized the office over its slow pace of discovery, and Mr. Hawley’s staff had to renege on a settlement in a high-profile civil case.

Mr. Hawley also quietly closed the environmental division and failed to fully vet one of his top supervisors, who departed after a female attorney in the office complained about his conduct. And his deputies took an unusual approach in an investigation of the governor’s office, largely acceding to demands to limit interviews of the governor’s staff to 15 minutes, internal records obtained by The New York Times show.

You’ll remember Eric Greitens, the gun-totin’ Republican Missouri governor who was forced to resign in his first term because of campaign finance issues. Hawley eventually moved against Greitens when it became clear protecting Greitens was getting in the way of his Senate run.

Hawley also got caught using a state vehicle and driver for personal use, such as attending Kansas City Chiefs games. State auditor Nicole Galloway found that Hawley wasted a lot of state money for political and personal purposes, actually. When Galloway ran for governor this year, Hawley got back at her by leveling completely bogus charges against her.

It’s also the case that Hawley sold his home in Missouri in 2019. He doesn’t own a home in the state any more. He uses his sister’s address as his voter’s address, even though he lives full time in Virginia. Figure that one out.

So now Hawley is a U.S. senator, and the question is, does he have the chops to put on the mantle of Trump? Hawley is not the bomastic, over-the-top type that Trump is. Hawley’s thing is more of an affected folksiness. So I don’t think he can pull it off. But lord help us if he does pull it off, because like Trump, he is greedily ambitious and doesn’t let morality and ethics and good of nation stuff get in the way. And unlike Trump, he’s smart.

Peter Wehner writes at The Atlantic:

What is happening in the GOP is that figures such as Hawley, along with many of his Senate and House colleagues, and important Republican players, including the former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, are all trying to position themselves as the heirs of Trump. None of them possesses the same sociopathic qualities as Trump, and their efforts will be less impulsive and presumably less clownish, more calculated and probably less conspiracy-minded. It may be that not all of them support Hawley’s stunt; perhaps some are even embarrassed by it. But these figures are seismographers; they are determined to act in ways that win the approval of the Republican Party’s base. And this goes to the heart of the danger.

The problem with the Republican “establishment” and with elected officials such as Josh Hawley is not that they are crazy, or that they don’t know any better; it is that they are cowards, and that they are weak. They are far more ambitious than they are principled, and they are willing to damage American politics and society rather than be criticized by their own tribe.

Paul Waldman:

But for Hawley, the doomed fight is the point, not the outcome. “Somebody has to stand up here,” he said in an appearance on Fox News. “You’ve got 74 million Americans who feel disenfranchised, who feel like their vote doesn’t matter.”

But this isn’t disenfranchisement. It’s called losing. The votes of Trump supporters mattered; it was just that there were fewer of them than votes for Joe Biden. That’s what happens in an election: One side loses, and if it was your side, it doesn’t mean you got cheated. It just means you lost.

But those voters “deserve to be heard,” Hawley says, as though the problem they have had is an insufficient opportunity to air their deranged conspiracy theories. Never have a group of people so ear-splittingly loud spent so long complaining that they’re being silenced.

No one seriously denies that the Republican base has utterly lost its mind; the only question is how shamelessly GOP politicians will pander to that lunacy. For Hawley, the limit has not yet been reached.

It remains to be seen if Hawley knows any limits where his own self-interest is concerned.

Josh Hawley

Mitch McConnell may eventually kill the $2,000 direct payment, but at the moment he’s about as close to being outmaneuvered as he has been for a long time.

Mike DeBonis and Tony Romm at WaPo:

The shifting Senate winds come a day after the House passed a bill to increase stimulus checks with a bipartisan 275-to-134 vote. That proposal, called the Caring for Americans with Supplemental Help (Cash) Act, aims to boost the $600 payments authorized in the massive year-end spending-and-relief package that Trump signed Sunday by another $1,400 and expand eligibility for them.

McConnell initially blocked consideration of the House bill. But now some Senate Republicans are deserting ship to support the bill, including David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, for some reason (/sarcasm).

Trump is still throwing fits to get people bigger checks and to end tech liability protection.

“Unless Republicans have a death wish, and it is also the right thing to do, they must approve the $2000 payments ASAP,” Trump wrote. “$600 IS NOT ENOUGH! Also, get rid of Section 230 – Don’t let Big Tech steal our Country, and don’t let the Democrats steal the Presidential Election. Get tough!”

I still am not sure what Trump thinks ending the tech liability protection provision will accomplish, although if it makes Facebook and YouTube and Whatever Social Media Company more careful about what they allow to be published, that might be a good thing.

“There’s a major difference in saying you support $2,000 checks and fighting to put them into law,” he said. “The House bill is the only way to deliver these stimulus checks before the end of session. Will Senate Republicans stand against the House of Representatives, the Democratic majority in the Senate and the president of their own party to prevent these $2,000 checks from going out the door?”

Well, look at you, Chuck, getting all confrontational.

Let us also pause to give credit to Bernie Sanders for leading the Senate Democratic charge.

Sanders, with support from the Senate Democratic caucus, plans to use a series of procedural moves to delay a vote on a bipartisan defense authorization bill. These maneuvers can’t prevent the defense bill from becoming law, but that’s not really the point. The bill is considered a must-pass, and Sanders’s objections can delay passage, annoy Senate Republicans, and potentially force Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) to raise a series of objections that could damage his party’s ability to hold onto its Senate majority.

And Sanders also has a clear demand: He will lift his objections to an immediate vote on the defense bill if McConnell permits a vote on legislation providing $2,000 checks to Americans earning less than $75,000 a year.

Of course there’s a lot else to criticize about the relief bill than the size of the direct payments, but it’s not often that Mitch and the Republican Party get snagged in the boy parts this tightly.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., joined from left by Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, dismisses the impeachment process against President Donald Trump saying, “I’m not an impartial juror. This is a political process,” as he meets with reporters at the Capitol in Washington, Tuesday, Dec. 17, 2019. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)