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)

Trump signed the omnibus/relief bill and then released a statement calling for changes to the bill. Please, somebody send him that Schoolhouse Rock video.

According to Mike Allen at Axios, SecTres Mnuchin and House Republican Leader McCarthy got Trump to cave with a combination of flattery and empty promises. I take it that when Trump signed the bill, he believed Senate Republicans would go ahead and pass the $2,000 benefit and eliminate the tech liability protection I wrote about a couple of days ago.  I will be very surprised if Senate Republicans even bother to go through the motions. At this point, they’re probably about as ready to get rid of Trump as are the rest of us.

Today House Democrats are planning to vote to override Trump’s veto of the annual defense bill and pass a stand-alone $2,000 benefit bill. The latter probably will be blocked again. I expect the override to pass and the Senate to support it also, but we’ll see.

Paul Waldman offers a recap of Trump’s latest episode:

Cementing his status as quite possibly the worst deal-maker ever to sit in the Oval Office, President Trump once again created a crisis, made some impulsive demands, then backed down at the last minute without actually obtaining anything other than some increased suffering for millions of Americans.

If there is a silver lining to any of this, Waldman continues, it’s that it shows us how weak Trump has become and how easy it will be for Congress, and the rest of us, to ignore him. I don’t believe there’s any critical legislation left for him to sign, which means not even Senate Republicans need him for anything any more. They might even prefer that he stay away from Georgia, although today Rupert Murcoch’s New York Post is telling Trump to give up on overturning the election to focus on Georgia.

Back to Waldman:

At The Week, Joel Mathis writes that Trump has learned nothing. “It is remarkable that he spent four years in the White House without showing any real growth in his ability to get stuff done,” Mathis says. A big part of Trump’s problem is that he has no patience or appreciation of process. All along he has treated the details of policy making as irrelevant. He wants to rule by edict, like a king — declare what he wants done and let the little people figure out how to do it — but Washington doesn’t work that way.

Jake Sherman and Anna Palmer at Politico:

THAT’S IT? President DONALD TRUMP made all this noise about the Covid relief and government funding bill only to sign it and get nothing in return?

TRUMP got taken to the cleaners.

WHAT A BIZARRE, embarrassing episode for the president. He opposed a bill his administration negotiated. He had no discernible strategy and no hand to play — and it showed. He folded, and got nothing besides a few days of attention and chaos. People waiting for aid got a few days of frightening uncertainty.

ZIP. ZERO. ZILCH. If he was going to give up this easy, he should’ve just kept quiet and signed the bill. It would’ve been less embarrassing.

Trump’s last hurrah will be on January 6, when we will hopefully see his last attempt to overturn the election fizzle out.

David Horsey, Seattle Times

At WaPo: Mass confusion over Trump’s endgame as Washington barrels toward shutdown, economic crisis.

A large spending bill that Congress passed last week must be signed into law by midnight on Monday in order to prevent many federal agencies from dramatically scaling back their operations. After Congress passed the bill, Trump posted a video on Twitter announcing his objections to it, claiming stimulus benefits were too small and that foreign aid was too excessive.

Since he posted the video on Dec. 22, White House aides have not offered any public briefings on Trump’s strategy or plans. Instead, Trump has issued a series of tweets reiterating his demand for changes but not saying much more. Vice president Mike Pence is in Vail, Colo. and has also been out of sight in recent days.

The consequences of inaction are immense.

Well, yeah. Immense and ruinous for everybody. See Countdown to shutdown: Here’s what happens if Trump doesn’t enact the stimulus law by midnight Monday. It’s bad. Back to the earlier WaPo article:

The White House has provided virtually no information about what its plans are to head off the potential economic calamity of a shutdown and the failure of the relief effort. A White House spokesman declined to comment when asked about the president’s intentions. Negotiations between congressional leaders and the White House appear to be at a complete standstill, and a back-up plan had not yet materialized as of Sunday afternoon.

All kinds of people, especially Republicans, in Washington are baffled over Trump’s inaction. Nobody does this.

“Everybody in the White House is trying to figure out what’s in Trump’s head, if this is a bluff or if he’s going to carry this out. He’s been confronted with all the facts and evidence,” said one person briefed by several White House officials over the weekend, speaking on the condition of anonymity to reveal internal discussions. “Nobody knows what Trump is going to do. It’s a bizarre situation.”

By all accounts, Trump is still primarily obsessed with overturning the election he’s lost several times already. And I would say there’s no point expecting Trump to be rational. He’s like an abusive man. Abusers have to be in control, and when control is taken away from them — when the victim tries to leave — they become more dangerous.

“The statistics are that women in abusive relationships are about 500 many times more at risk when they leave,” said Wendy Mahoney, executive director for the Mississippi Coalition Against Domestic Violence. “Domestic violence is all about power and control, and when a woman leaves, a man has lost his power and control.”

Trump hit the jackpot of all big, shiny toys — he got to be president! — and now it’s being taken away from him, and he can’t deal. He can’t deal with losing the election. He can’t face the loss of status and power. He doesn’t understand why other people with power — senators, governors, Supreme Court justices — aren’t helping him keep what he wants. And if he can’t have what he wants, he’s going to hurt as many people as he can hurt while he can, before power is taken away from him. Nobody burns bridges more effectively than an abusive man who loses control.

So I don’t expect him to sign anything. I hope I’m wrong.

Nancy Pelosi says she’s going to make another attempt to pass a stand-alone $2,000 direct benefit tomorrow. As with the last attempt, this isn’t expected to pass. It’s about forcing Republicans to go on record opposing it. IMO if Republicans had half a brain they’d pass it and send it to Trump asap. He still might not sign the bill, of course.

Bill Barr is now gone. This analysis by David Graham on Barr’s departure is from December 14, but it’s still worth reading. Barr has been such a perfect toady. Before election day, he was making noises about voter fraud, and after the election he authorized federal prosecutors to investigate fraud claims. But at some point, there was a line Barr wouldn’t cross. We may never know what that line was. He stopped supporting the fraud claims. He’s out. Whatever Barr expected to accomplish with his lies and deceit and degradation of his office, all that is gone.

See also On His Way Out the Door, Barr Drops a Bombshell About the Durham Investigation by Nancy LeTourneau. In his last interview as Attorney General, Barr more or less exonerated the CIA and other intelligence agencies that investigated potential connections between the Trump campaign and Russia before the 2016 elections. The investigation was initiated for justifiable reasons, Barr said; the CIA was not out of line. For some reason, Barr decided he was done lying for Trump.

Another big loser here is Steve Mnuchin. Jeff Stein, WaPo:

The president’s denunciation of the agreement represented a stunning public broadside against his own treasury secretary, who for four years loyally shielded the president’s tax returns, endured repeated presidential tirades in private, and defended even Trump’s most incendiary and contradictory remarks. Through it all, Mnuchin had emerged with the unique ability to walk a tightrope between Trump and congressional leaders, serving as an emissary in difficult negotiations. That all ended on Tuesday, when Trump posted a video on Twitter ridiculing the agreement. …

…Mnuchin had described the bipartisan deal as “fabulous” one day before Trump called it a “disgrace.”

Update: The Mahablog magic works again. I am seeing reports that Trump signed the bill, although he still says the bill is a disgrace.

I hope you had a pleasant Christmas. Donald Trump appears to have had a pleasant Christmas. News stories say he played golf with Lindsey Graham on Christmas day. Then Miz Lindsey tweeted this:

After spending some time with President @realDonaldTrump today, I am convinced he is more determined than ever to increase stimulus payments to $2000 per person and challenge Section 230 big tech liability protection.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) December 26, 2020

The tech liability protection thing is in the defense funding part of the omnibus bill, I take it. I confess I haven’t followed this issue closely. There’s a discussion of it here. Righties want to revise Section 230, “a 25-year-old law that lets websites moderate third-party content as they see fit without being liable for that content (with a few exceptions). Simply put, you can sue a Twitter user if they tweet something defamatory about you, but you can’t sue Twitter.” In rightie world, social media companies should somehow be forced to publish content righties like no matter how inflammatory, dangerous, false, or libelous it is.  How removing liability protection would accomplish that eludes me, however.

Anyway, I say that if Trump wants to make a deal, give folks the $2,000 and strip out the tech liability protection and insist that he sign the damn bill asap. And be clear there will be no more negotiations with him. A lot of people lost unemployment benefits today. Millions will be in a world of hurt if this bill doesn’t become law, like, now. Before the end of the year, at the latest.

Unfortunately Trump is probably just delaying the bill so he can stay in the news. I wish there were some way to declare a news media embargo on him if he doesn’t sign the damn bill. That would probably be the one thing that would motivate him.

Joe Biden released a statement today that begins:

It is the day after Christmas, and millions of families don’t know if they’ll be able to make ends meet because of President Donald Trump’s refusal to sign an economic relief bill approved by Congress with an overwhelming and bipartisan majority.

This abdication of responsibility has devastating consequences. Today, about 10 million Americans will lose unemployment insurance benefits. In just a few days, government funding will expire, putting vital services and paychecks for military personnel at risk. In less than a week, a moratorium on evictions expires, putting millions at risk of being forced from their homes over the holidays. Delay means more small businesses won’t survive this dark winter because they lack access to the lifeline they need, and Americans face further delays in getting the direct payments they deserve as quickly as possible to help deal with the economic devastation caused by COVID-19. And while there is hope with the vaccines, we need funding to be able to distribute and administer them to millions of Americans, including frontline health care workers.

But for Trump, not signing the bill is the equivalent of holding his breath or screaming his head off until he gets want he wants. The problem is, he wants everything. If you made him emperor of the world, that still wouldn’t be enough. He’s like a black hole of neediness.

A day before unemployment benefits for millions of Americans were set to expire, President Donald Trump had a different insult in mind: his former-model wife has yet to appear on the cover of a fashion magazine as first lady.

“Fake news!” he complained on Twitter from Palm Beach, concerned for Melania’s social station on Christmas as Americans hunkered at home, enduring a holiday diminished by pandemic, darkened by the prospect of an imminent government shutdown and shaken by an eerie explosion in Nashville that authorities said was intentional.

A day later, as those jobless benefits for gig workers and self-employed Americans were lapsing, Trump was issuing a string of angry messages about his own perceived injustices: the election he falsely claims was stolen from him and the growing roster of people he’s upset won’t help him reverse it.

I understand he’s blamed Bill Barr, the CIA, Mitch McConnell, pretty much the entire Republican establishment, for his election loss. This is truly a temper tantrum for the ages. I don’t think in all of world history there’s been an explosion of sheer arrested emotional development that was this big or consequential.

. 

The graphic is a bit faded, but so are we all about now, I suspect.

Millions of Americans are facing eviction and hunger now, for no fault of their own. They had a brief bit of hope — next week there’d be a little money, extended unemployment benefits, an extended eviction moratorium — and now that’s been snatched away again. A better package in a few weeks, assuming there is one, is going to be too late for a lot of people. The help needs to come now. It just breaks my heart.

And Donald Trump played golf today.

Trump is angry at the world now. It would be like him to let people starve and freeze in the streets because he lost the election. There is speculation he’s going to stay in Florida and not come back to Washington, ever. He may very well blow off whatever duties he is supposed to attend to until the end of his term. I’m betting he doesn’t sign the bill, and it will die.

I just hope most Americans are told the truth about why this disaster happened. I fear they’re being told it’s Nancy Pelosi’s fault, somehow.

Greg Sargent thinks Trump will sign the bill, because Trump doesn’t want to disrupt distribution of the covid vaccines, which he considers to be his great achievement. He probably threw the bomb about the $600 payment just to get attention. I hope he’s right.

It’s not clear to me if a government shutdown would immediately disrupt vaccine distribution, but it probably wouldn’t be long before states run out of funds for distribution and begin to scale back vaccinations.

Amber Phillips writes that Trump really is out of options to take back the election. Maybe now that he’s away from the White House — and maybe not going back — he’ll come to terms with that and sign the freaking bill. But not before ruining a lot of Christmases.

Alex Isenstadt reports at Politico that Trump is now checking out the 2022 midterms and is preparing to support primary challengers to Republican incumbents he considers insufficiently disloyal to him. See also Greg Sargent, Republicans raging at Trump are getting exactly what they deserve. The Republican establishment must secretly hope Trump falls into a water hazard on his golf course and is eaten by an alligator.

I’ve long enjoyed Christmas Eve because of the way the world suddenly gets quiet in the evening. It’s push, hustle, shop right up until the sun sets, and suddenly the stores close and everyone goes home. This year there’s just the relentless, grinding passage of time and a lot of people staring into an abyss.

I do hope that wherever you are you have some cheer and company this holiday. And as always I appreciate all of you for helping me stay sane.

I never liked reality television shows that didn’t involve cute animals, like “Dr. Chris: Pet Vet.” But now we’re all stuck in one. I am not happy.

Along with yesterday’s shameful and disgraceful pardons, Trump apparently threw a fit over the frustrating relief bill and threatened to not sign it. Jordan Weissmann writes at Slate that Trump’s threat revealed he has no clue what the bill is.

So Donald Trump took a breather from plotting history’s most ineffectual coup on Tuesday night in order to toss a grenade into Washington’s holiday plans, tweeting a surprise video in which he announced he did not support the crucial coronavirus relief bill Congress passed earlier this week. Calling the legislation a “disgrace,” he complained that the $600 checks it included for most households were “ridiculously low” and asked Congress to increase them to $2,000.

It would have been nice if he’d done that several days ago.

Echoing deceptive criticisms that have circulated online over the past couple of days, Trump also criticized the coronavirus package for including unrelated spending like foreign aid to Egypt and Belize as well as funding for Asian carp removal. “It’s called the COVID relief bill, but it has almost nothing to do with COVID,“ he said. This is blatantly misleading; what actually happened is that for procedural reasons Congress inserted the coronavirus deal into a larger end-of-the-year spending bill necessary to keep the government open, which contains money for basic government efforts like fishery management. Unfortunately, our president is fundamentally a low-information Twitter and Fox News junkie, and according to the Washington Post, some of his aides who disliked the bill used the foreign provisions “as a way to turn Trump against the measure, knowing that American money going to other countries raises the president’s ire.” History, as usual, is playing out as farce.

My sense of things is that Trump’s cognitive abilities have deteriorated since the election, and of course they weren’t that great before the election. I wouldn’t call this a psychotic break; it’s more like dementia mixed with paranoia.

Sorry you killed the impeachment now, Mitch? See also Jonathan Chait, Trump Has Reached the ‘Railing Against Mike Pence’ Bunker Phase.

So how much damage can Trump do? Back to Jordan Weissmann.

In theory, lawmakers passed the COVID relief and government funding bill with enough votes to override a veto from the president. The problem is that it appears Trump could kill the legislation through a so-called pocket veto, which cannot be overturned, simply by choosing not to sign it before Congress ends its term in January. The next House and Senate would have to start over with a new bill, which could be a lengthy process.

This would not have been a concern if Capitol Hill had actually gotten its act together and sealed a relief deal earlier. Under Article 1, Section 7 of the Constitution, the president has 10 days, not including Sundays—so basically the 18^th century equivalent of 10 business days—from the time he receives a bill to either sign or veto it. After that period, the legislation automatically becomes law unless Congress has already adjourned, in which case the bill dies. The problem is that the current Congress is set to end by noon on Jan. 3, meaning that even if lawmakers sent him the bill tomorrow, they will have to adjourn before the 10-day window runs out. Trump can kill the bill permanently without lifting a finger while he sits in bed at Mar-a-Lago binging on Newsmax. (And no, Congress can’t delay the end of its term; that would require passing a law.)

Yes, this would be just the time to fail to pass a spending bill and shut down the government. Greg Sargent:

Trump’s threat not to sign the deal makes a government shutdown more likely, and it puts congressional Republicans who supported it in a terrible spot. As one GOP observer noted, Trump “just pulled down the pants of every Republican who voted for it.”

There might be a silver lining to this, eventually, which is that it could help Democrats in the Georgia runoff elections.

Republican Senate candidates Perdue and Loeffler have run on being loyal to Trump and have refused to acknowledge that he lost the election. Will they now support the $2,000? Or go against Trump and stick with $600?

Meanwhile, Nancy Pelosi seized on Trump’s announcement to call for a stand-alone bill that would provide the $2,000 direct payment. The House plans to bring it up tomorrow, Christmas Eve.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, in a letter to Democrats, challenged Republicans to block the measures and said top Democrats were waiting to hear from Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, to see if there would be an objection from a House Republican. Any lawmaker willing to return to Washington in person can block the bill from moving forward by denying unanimous consent.

Make ’em be on the record, in other words.

Within minutes of Mr. Trump’s public opposition to the bill, Ms. Pelosi declared her agreement with the president’s call for $2,000 checks, as did Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, and some of Congress’s most liberal members.

“We need to send a clean bill with just $2,000 survival checks and a separate spending/covid relief bill,” Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota and a frequent target of Mr. Trump’s ire, wrote Tuesday evening on Twitter, adding, “since Trump wants to sign a bill with survival checks, let’s send one to his desk right away.”

Of course, this measure will probably die in the Senate, because Mitch. But this is a great opportunity for Democrats to show America that Republicans killed it. And again, this has put Republicans in a real box.

The two Republican candidates in Georgia, Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, were already proclaiming passage of the coronavirus relief bill as a triumph, but they have also pledged fealty to the president, who called the bill a “disgrace.”

Still, a number of Republicans are likely to resist increasing the amount of direct payments after months of insisting that a relief package should be as small as possible. In the days before a bipartisan deal was struck, Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, blocked attempts to raise the payments to $1,200.

Unemployment benefits are about to expire. Evictions are going to start. People are desperate. Mnuchin has been prancing around saying that people could start getting their $600 next week, but now that’s all in the crapper. Things could get really ugly really fast.

“Most working Americans don’t need a check right now,” said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky, on “Fox and Friends” Wednesday morning. “It’s a really foolish, egg-headed left-wing socialist idea to pass out free money to people.”

If this is a reality TV show, and we have to vote somebody off the island, let’s make it Kentucky.