. 

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.

Whether you call it the flaccid stimulus bill or the frustrating relief bill, it appears there will be something passed no later than tomorrow. That’s assuming Trump doesn’t throw a wrench in the works.

[Update: The Mahablog magic strikes again — it was announced a deal has been struck just after I posted this.]

The poison pill provision introduced by Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R, PA) that would have tied the hands of the Federal Reserve has been watered down. Here’s the deal:

Mr. Toomey had sought to bar the Fed and Treasury Department from setting up any loan program similar to those established this year that have helped to keep credit flowing to corporate, municipal and medium-size business borrowers during the pandemic recession.

The agreed-upon alternative, offered by Mr. Schumer and still being drafted near midnight on Saturday, aides familiar with the process said, would bar only programs that were more or less exact copycats of the ones newly employed in 2020.

That sounds annoying but not catastrophic. Yet to be resolved:

Among the outstanding hurdles for lawmakers and aides racing to draft text was a push to expand a paid leave mandate set to lapse at the end of the year, how much money should be allocated to private and parochial schools and whether businesses should be allowed to deduct from their taxes loans given under a popular federal loan program, according to officials involved in the discussions.

However,

One of the potential remaining stumbling blocks is President Trump, who has largely been removed from the stimulus negotiations as he continues to attack the outcome of the Nov. 3 election and undermine President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. Shortly after midnight on Sunday, he tweeted his frustration with Congress for not yet acting on a stimulus and signaled that he would want larger direct payments than the $600 payments currently under discussion.

“GET IT DONE, and give them more money in direct payments,” the president wrote on Twitter.

I’d like to see a larger payment, too, but Mr. Stable Genius should be complaining to Mitch. And I am so happy I am not in Congress. I think at this point I’d be homicidal.

Elsewhere: There has been a lot of talk that Trump is losing it. We might wonder whether he ever had it. But there have been leaked accounts of oval office meetings that claimed Trump talked about martial law and appointing Sidney Powell special counsel to inspect Dominion voting machines. Dominion, meanwhile, has threatened Powell with a defamation suit.

See Peter Wehner, Trump Is Losing His Mind.

Given Trump’s psychological profile, it was inevitable that when he felt the walls of reality close in on him—in 2020, it was the pandemic, the cratering economy, and his election defeat—he would detach himself even further from reality. It was predictable that the president would assert even more bizarre conspiracy theories. That he would become more enraged and embittered, more desperate and despondent, more consumed by his grievances. That he would go against past supplicants, like Attorney General Bill Barr and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, and become more aggressive toward his perceived enemies. That his wits would begin to turn, in the words of King Lear. That he would begin to lose his mind.

So he has. And, as a result, President Trump has become even more destabilizing and dangerous.

“I’ve been covering Donald Trump for a while,” Jonathan Swan of Axios tweeted. “I can’t recall hearing more intense concern from senior officials who are actually Trump people. The Sidney Powell/Michael Flynn ideas are finding an enthusiastic audience at the top.”

Trump today was retweeting crap from Gateway Pundit and a string of people I never heard of that claimed more votes were counted for POTUS than there are registered voters in the U.S. He’s not giving up. We may have to send in marshalls to haul him out of the White House after all. Fun!

The best stimulus? A job.

— Rep. Jim Jordan (@Jim_Jordan) December 18, 2020

I can’t even.

This is juicy. Business Insider reported that Jared Kushner set up a shell company that siphoned off $617 million from the Trump campaign to parts unknown. I wasn’t able to read the Business Insider article because of the popups demanding that I subscribe, but I did pull out some blurbs:

Kushner directed Lara Trump, Vice President Mike Pence’s nephew John Pence, and Trump campaign CFO Sean Dollman to serve on the shell company’s board, the person told Insider.

American Made Media Consultants became the source of consternation for Trump’s own campaign staff, who were kept in the dark about its operations.

Despite its $617 million spending through AMMC, the Trump campaign publicly disclosed little information about the company, including how it used the money.

Here is a report on what BI reported from Daily Beast:

Mitch McConnell has budged just a tad on a mini-stimulus bill that includes direct payments, and yesterday CNN reported why.

During the call with GOP senators, McConnell noted that direct payments for individuals and families have become a major issue in the race.

“Kelly and David are getting hammered” on the issue, he said, according to a source who heard his remarks, a reference to incumbent GOP Sens. Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, who are both facing off against Democratic challengers.

However, they’re talking $600 instead of $1,200 this time, which might seem like an insult to people who are months behind on house and utilities payments. There is also talk of $300 additional weekly unemployment benefits, but it’s not clear to me what might happen to people whose benefits are ending entirely. Beyond that, the negotiations are moving so fast, while still going nowhere, that it’s really hard to keep track of what’s in and what’s out.

Also, even if Congress manages to pass something before Christmas, there will almost certainly be a lapse in benefits to millions of workers. Emily Stewart writes for Vox:

After months of a will-they-or-won’t-they dance that’s left workers, businesses, and much of the economy in limbo, lawmakers yet again have a potential deal: a $748 billion proposal to help boost the economy as the Covid-19 pandemic rages on. While it may have some shortcomings — Democrats dropped state and local government aid from the main bill in exchange for Republicans dropping corporate liability protections — it’s not the worst deal in the world, and it does have new payments for the unemployed.

But there is a hiccup: Even if a bill passes, millions of workers will likely face a lag in receiving those payments while the regulators and states responsible for distributing them iron out the new process.

An estimated 4 million workers have likely already had their benefits run out, some of them for months, after they maxed out the number of weekly payments to them established by the CARES Act, the first stimulus package. However long it takes to get a new system up and running is how long they’ll have to wait before they get another check. Other programs expanded by the CARES Act are set to expire in December, and given the bureaucratic intricacies of the 50-state unemployment insurance system, the transition will probably be a messy one.

At this point, whether Congress passes its mini-relief bill or not, there will be massive evictions. There already is hunger, and that’s getting worse. Lots of people are probably going to try to get through the winter with the heat turned off.

But McConnell is only giving in to a bill to help Kelly and David. That’s because their opponents, Raphael and Jon, are running ads like this:

Kelly and David are selling themselves to voters as a “firewall” against “socialism,” Greg Sargent writes. If Mitch keeps control of the Senate, you can bet there will be no more relief/stimulus bills passed next year, no matter how many businesses close for good and how many families end up living in cars and shelters. But, by damn, Kelly and David will keep us all safe from socialists and antifa! Let’s remember what’s important!

Elsewhere

The Week reports that Trump still genuinely believes he won the election.

President Trump was privately coming to terms with his loss to President-elect Joe Biden, but he “has now reversed and dug in deeper — not only spreading misinformation about the election, but ingesting it himself,” CNN reports, “egged on by advisers like Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis who are misleading Trump about the extent of voting irregularities and the prospects of a reversal.” One adviser told CNN, “He’s been fed so much misinformation that I think he actually thinks this thing was stolen from him.”

Even the Electoral College formalizing Biden’s win “did not appear enough to shake Trump from his delusions of victory,” CNN says, “but it is adding urgency to a push by several of his advisers to gently steer Trump toward reality.” Discussions of Trump’s post-presidency future tend to go nowhere because Trump “all but shuts down,” CNN reports. “In his moments of deepest denial, Trump has told some advisers that he will refuse to leave the White House on Inauguration Day, only to be walked down from that ledge. The possibility has alarmed some aides, but few believe Trump will actually follow through.”

Oh, but it would be so much fun to see him evicted.

A food bank in the Cleveland area.

More reporting has revealed that Mitch had a come-to-Jesus meeting with Republican senators yesterday, and he told them they weren’t going to file any challenges to the presidential election results. So that’s that. Unless Ron Johnson or Rand Paul get the nerve to disobey Mitch, it won’t matter what the minority House Republicans might do. Congress will certify the election results on January 6.

Greg Sargent:

The Electoral College vote was another mile marker on the road of the endless election. The one significant development here is that now several Senate Republicans — including Mitch McConnell — have publicly recognized Joe Biden as the president-elect.

This seems to me to be a reasonably clear signal to Donald Trump that these Senate Republicans do not want him to push his overturn-the-election efforts further. They certainly don’t want to get the Senate involved in the scheme floated recently to use Congress to overturn the election results.

One, it’s doubtful Senate Republicans have the votes to overturn the election. After yesterday’s EC vote, several old establishment GOP senators, including Roy Blunt and Majority Whip John Thune, came out and said it’s over; Biden is the president-elect; time to move on. Even before the EC vote, a few senators had already signaled they were not going to get on the overturn-the-results bandwagon.

Two, after watching Proud Boys chant “Destroy the GOP!” on the streets of Washington last weekend, I suspect Mitch McConnell does not want to force any of his senators to go on record being for or against a second term for Trump. Nothing good could come of that for the Republican Party. Mitch may also be worried that the Trumpers are hurting Republican chances in the Georgia runoff elections.  Mitch’s congratulation to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris was a big, fat signal to Trump that the Senate would not be dragged into his schemes, and also to Republican senators not to try anything stupid.

Aaron Blake, WaPo:

McConnell’s comments should have the effect of taking some pressure off his colleagues, but they also matter practically speaking. The position of the Senate GOP leader is now clear, pretty much negating any chance that Senate Republicans would participate in some kind of unlikely end-run not to accept the verdict of the electoral college. …

… The Senate was the best shot Trump had to at least gum up the works Jan. 6. If one House member and one senator object to accepting a given state’s slate of electors, Congress has to consider it. If a GOP senator does that now, they’ll be acting expressly in opposition to what their leader says. It might still happen, but McConnell’s statement should let some air out of the balloon. The gambit was never going to succeed, mind you, but it could have created some heartburn in our body politic; McConnell is basically signaling he won’t participate in such shenanigans.

It’s not ending, however. Trump is raving that the Republican governor and secretary of state of Georgia should be thrown in jail. Yesterday Stephen Miller was on Fox promising that the Trump team supported “alternate” electors who would send their votes to Congress, neener neener, but that seems to have fizzled out.

And, of course, right-wing media are still pushing “stop the steal.” Just today Trump seized on a new claim of fraud involving Dominion voting machines in Michigan. Although Trump is over the “boy who cried wolf” limit for most folks, the True Believers are lapping it up. As the Arizona electors voted yesterday, an Arizona state legislator called on consituents to “buy more ammo.”

Last night in Missouri, a Republican-led state House committee voted to approve a resolution that declared Missouri lawmakers “have no faith in the validity” of 2020 election results in six battleground states President Donald Trump lost this year. Rudy Giuliani was there, virtually.

That testimony drew an angry response from Rep. Peter Merideth, D-St. Louis, who referenced GOP officials who have certified the results of the presidential election. Merideth also cited statements by U.S. Attorney General William Barr, who said there was no evidence of fraud that would have changed the outcome of the national election.

“Are all these Republicans lying?” Merideth asked Giuliani. “Are they complicit? Are they incompetent?”

Well, good on you, Rep. Merideth. I’m glad to see there’s someone sensible in Jefferson City. Just don’t drink the water there, dude. I think it rots brain cells.

Missouri state Representative Peter Merideth, a Democrat who represents a district within the city of St. Louis. His district includes The Hill (Italian neighborhood; home of Yogi Berra and Joe Garagiola) and the Botanical Garden.

The resolution carries no weight, and the Republican chair of the state House Rules Committee has already said his committee isn’t going to take it up.

And Vladimir Putin has congratulated Joe Biden already. Maybe Trump will get a clue that it’s over. Melania should be done packing by now.

See also:

Jonathan Last, Everyone Trump Touches Dies: The List

Jonathan Swan: Scoop: Trump’s frenetic, fanciful, bitter final plea

Eric Lutz at Vanity Fair:

Normally, the task of state electors is perfunctory, their work in December going unnoticed by the average citizen, who tends to tune out between Election Day and the inauguration in January. But Trump’s relentless effort to overturn his loss have thrust these anonymous functionaries into the spotlight and made them targets of the harassment that other election officials—from Democrats like Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to Republicans like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger—have faced for carrying out their duties against Trump’s wishes.

In swing states, electors are receiving police escorts to the locations where they’ll be casting ballots. In Arizona and Pennsylvania, that location has been kept secret, even from the electors themselves, until Monday, as a safeguard against threats. And in Michigan, where electors will cast their ballots at the State Capitol, “credible threats of violence” have shut down state legislative offices. “This is some scary stuff, man,” Khary Penebaker, a Democratic elector from Wisconsin, told the New York Times. “This is not what America is supposed to be like.”

I’m going to guess that none of these threats are being covered in the right-wing news, including Fox.

After the Supreme Court once again declined to hear one of the frivolous lawsuits filed on his behalf, Trump supporters took to the streets in Washington, D.C., vandalizing Black churches, instigating street fights, and even threatening violence against the president-elect. “Joe Biden will be removed,” the far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones said at one point, “one way or another.” As the nation’s simmering political tensions started to boil (four people were stabbed in D.C. Saturday as the Proud Boys turned the demonstration into a riot; a right-wing protester allegedly shot a counter-protester at a separate demonstration in Washington state), Trump kept turning up the heat. On Sunday, he threatened that electors would be charged with a “severely punishable crime” if they made the results official, and at one point suggested that he will sandbag his own party in the Georgia runoff race next month if Governor Brian Kemp doesn’t give him his way.

The Proud Boys vandalized several historic Black churches over the weekend. If left-wing protesters had damaged church property, none of us would hear the end of it for months. But if right-wingers destroy church property, that’s okay. That’s because righties presume religion belongs to them, just like “patriotism” and “freedom” belongs to them, and the flag belongs to them. Violence, though, belongs to lefties. Or else it seems violence only counts as violence when lefties do it.

Trump and his allies, though, remain undeterred. The president said after his most recent Supreme Court humiliation that “we have just begun to fight.” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, one of 126 Republicans who formally endorsed the lawsuit seeking to disenfranchise millions of Americans, suggested in a Fox News interview Sunday that he still wouldn’t recognize Biden’s win after the Electoral College vote. And Trump adviser Stephen Miller told Fox & Friends Monday that an “alternate slate of electors from the contested states” would be voting at the same time as the actual electors, and would send those bogus results to Congress to help fuel the next stage of the challenge there. This is all corrosive to democracy, as even a majority in a recent Fox News poll recognized. But if the temperature continues to rise, so too will the risk of things boiling over into something even more dangerous.

Overturning the election in Congress requires several steps, including a majority vote of both houses, which ain’t gonna happen.

See also Assessing the threat from America’s far right at The Economist.