(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)

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.