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There are fewer and fewer senators that are from the opposite party of how their state voted for president

But the possibility that consecutive Democratic wave elections — ones in which the party has expanded its appeal to rural voters and working-class white voters — could deliver them only a narrow majority drives home the party’s disadvantage.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has issued a series of apocalyptic warnings. Democrats are threatening to “disfigure the Senate,” he said in a speech on the Senate floor.

“We are in a time where our nation needs to heal, not just from the COVID, but from this leadership that encourages divisiveness,”

Bollier, at times, can seem frustrated with rural voters’ focus on cultural issues.

“When election time comes, the focus seems to be on partisan hot-button issues rather than on the most important things — a job, health care, safety. It’s disappointing.”

While Democrats have made all of these Republican-leaning states competitive, public surveys and internal polling from both parties indicates they’re not favored to win any of them.

Kander said Democratic candidates don’t need to run to the center or right to win in rural states, but that the party needs to do a better job of explaining why their policies will benefit rural communities

The rural bias of the Senate has existed for a long time, though partisan shifts have meant it only started directly damaging Democrats recently

But it’s how the Senate discriminates against racial minorities that may force the hand of a party increasingly focused on racial injustices. The average Black voter has 16% less power in determining who controls the Senate than the average American.

he average Latino has 32% less power than the average American in determining who controls the Senate

The average white person? They have 13% more power.

And this tilt against racial minorities will only grow worse in the future: Even as demographers expect the country’s population to become majority people of color around the year 2050

National Republicans have attacked Democratic candidates who support ending the filibuster, accusing them of trying to “change the rules” to pass left-wing policies.

Democrats are forecast to gain two to six seats. Control of the Senate remains a jump ball days out from Election Day. These are the races that will decide it:

Sen. Doug Jones is the only Democratic incumbent in a tough race this year. He is expected to lose to former Auburn University football coach Tommy Tuberville, the Republican challenger. Trump remains wildly popular in Alabama, and it would be very difficult for Jones to overcome that advantage in a nationalized political climate.

GOP Sen. Martha McSally is running against Democrat Mark Kelly, the popular and well-known former astronaut turned gun control advocate after the 2011 Tucson shooting of his wife, then-Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz. Kelly has led in all but one public poll in 2020.

Republican Sen. Cory Gardner is running against former Gov. John Hickenlooper, a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate. Hickenlooper initially indicated he was not interested in a Senate run but jumped in after his presidential campaign faded. He has run a lackluster campaign, but the overall Democratic pull of the state is probably enough to carry Hickenlooper to victory.

First-term GOP Sen. Joni Ernst is running against real estate developer Theresa Greenfield. This race has gotten increasingly competitive in the closing months of the campaign. Ernst had been the early favorite for reelection, but the race has become a toss-up in the close.

Republican Sen. Susan Collins is running against Democrat Sara Gideon, the state's House speaker. Few others have seen their political stock fall as fast as Collins has. Once one of the most popular senators in the U.S., she now ranks at the bottom.

Republican Sen. Steve Daines is running against term-limited Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock, arguably the only Democrat who could make Montana competitive for the party.

Appointed GOP Sen. Kelly Loeffler is running to serve out the term of former Republican Sen. Johnny Isakson, who retired early for health reasons.

Republican Sen. Thom Tillis is running against attorney Cal Cunningham, a former state senator. This is widely viewed as the tipping-point race — whoever wins here will likely represent the party in control of the Senate.

GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan is running against orthopedic surgeon Al Gross, who is technically an independent but will appear on the ballot as a Democrat. Trump won Alaska by 16 points in 2016, and Sullivan should be able to pull out a win. But Gross has run a surprisingly strong campaign aided by waves of grassroots Democratic fundraising, including after the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Republican Sen. David Perdue is running against Democrat Jon Ossoff, best known for running and losing a high-profile 2017 special election for a U.S. House seat. Perdue has been a Trump loyalist in a state that is increasingly more purple than red. Republicans are bullish that Perdue can win reelection, but the risk of a Jan. 5 runoff is real unless a candidate wins at least 50%. A third-party candidate, Libertarian Shane Hazel, is complicating that path.

Montana is a red state that wants to stay that way, and that helps Daines. A Bullock victory would be a telling sign of a broader Democratic wave.

Loeffler has to fend off both a Republican challenge from Rep. Doug Collins and the top expected Democratic vote-getter, Raphael Warnock.

If control of the Senate comes down to Georgia, it might not be known until January 2021.

This is an open-seat race because Republican Sen. Pat Roberts is retiring. Republican Rep. Roger Marshall is running against doctor and state Sen. Barbara Bollier. Marshall is the GOP establishment's pick and is favored to win. Bollier is a Republican turned Democrat who has focused on her medical background during the pandemic.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham is running against former Democratic congressional aide Jaime Harrison. Trump won South Carolina by 14 points in 2016, and Graham has transformed from Trump critic to Trump champion since then. Harrison has been able to turn a long-shot bid into a well-funded campaign that is polling competitively. The conservative roots of the state keep Graham as favored to win. A loss could be an indication of a massive Democratic-wave election.

Republican Sen. John Cornyn is favored against Democratic challenger MJ Hegar and has consistently led in public polling. A Democratic victory here would be a major upset and would likely be contingent on a surprise Joe Biden win in the state. Texas is also seeing a surge in voter turnout across the state, fueling Democratic hopes that the polls are wrong and 2020 is the year Texas goes blue.

One spring day in 1994, Dole, then the Senate’s Republican minority leader, passed a note to his longtime Democratic friend Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York, who as the powerful chairman of the Senate Finance Committee had jurisdiction, asking, “Pat, Are we ready for the Moynihan-Dole Bill?” But the Clinton White House said no compromise, the Republican House leader Newt Gingrich said no dice, and Dole, who wanted nothing so much as to win the Republican nomination for president in 1996, realized he had to give up

Long-shot efforts at compromise by John Chafee, a Republican from Rhode Island and veteran of Guadalcanal who had been John F. Kennedy’s Navy secretary, and John Breaux, a laissez les bon temps rouler Democrat from Louisiana, also came to naught. Months later, the Democrats lost both houses of Congress and, arguably, nothing in Washington has ever been quite the same.

The House Intelligence Committee chair received an unsought assist from Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, who said in an interview yesterday that the Senate would forever be known as a body that “shirks its responsibilities” if the trial concludes without calling witnesses.

Analysis of district-level voting patterns suggests that Republicans enjoy an inbuilt 2.1 percentage-point advantage in contests for the House majority. Joe Biden won the national vote by 4.6 points in 2020. He won the median House seat, Illinois’s Fourteenth Congressional District, by 2.5 points.

Not since the mid-1990s have Republican senators represented a majority of American voters. The 50 Democratic senators elected in 2020 represent nearly 42 million more Americans than the 50 Republicans.

Shifting power from an overmighty presidency to a Congress that overindulges reactionary minorities will do democracy no good. The post-Watergate reformers recognized that logic, and joined their limits on the presidency to an attempted modernization of Congress.

the reformers of the 1970s understood the architecture of American democracy. Power flowed from Congress to the presidency precisely because the presidency was the most accountable branch of the federal government. If the flow was to be reversed, Congress needed to be democratized. This same problem presents itself with even greater force in the 2020s.

The 60-vote Senate has become an accepted fact of American politics, along with presidents who lose the popular vote, and state legislatures where 45 percent of the vote is converted into 55 percent of the seats, or more.

The Senate is defended by a sequence of rationalizations: It’s good that a Wyoming vote counts 68 times more than a California vote. It’s good that garnering 59 out of 100 votes does not suffice to enact laws. It’s good that any one legislator is able to disrupt the proceedings. These rationalizations have proved contagious. If minority rule is good sometimes, why not more of the time?

As the Senate has deviated further and further from majoritarian norms, the House and the state legislatures have followed. Among the great merits of Jentleson’s Kill Switch is that it reminds us how recent this trend is.

In the era of the 67-vote filibuster, the tools of minority rule were used to defend racial segregation, a cause that even its supporters did not like to defend openly.

In an important new book, Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson offers a harrowing portrait of how anti-majoritarian dysfunction has paralyzed the U.S. Senate.

The Framers’ constitutional design balanced majority rights as they were understood at the time—the rights of a majority of those persons possessed of full citizenship who voted in state and House elections—against a federal Senate to protect the rights of smaller states and a judiciary insulated from passing political passions

it’s one thing to respect regional and cultural minorities; it’s another to let those minorities impose hostile preferences upon an unwilling majority, year in, year out, with every exit from federal minority rule blocked by even more obdurate systems of minority rule at the state level.

Jentleson offers a program for reform that begins with the outright elimination of the filibuster. But without constitutional change more radical than anything contemplated today, the Senate will always remain counter-majoritarian—and Senate reform can accordingly take the country only so far toward the reanimation of the majority-rule principle.

the House, often falsely complimented as the “people’s House,” is the part of the government most in need of democratic change. Change to the House depends on change to the anti-majoritarian state legislatures that redraw congressional districts—and that change depends on renewal of the voting-rights laws the federal courts have so weakened over the past decade and a half.

In the meantime, the federal and state executive branches are the tools most available to the disempowered majority.

America got the imperial presidency in the first place in great part because of the defects of Congress. From free trade to civil rights, the post-1945 presidency would act to do things in the broad public interest over the truculent obstruction of Congresses dominated by narrow and backward-looking minority interests.

But presidents, even the greatest of them, are not magicians. Since 2010, the U.S. political system has been ever more extremely biased toward its narrow and backward-looking ideological minorities. Weaken the executive branches, federal and state, and you privilege those ideological minorities.

don’t overcorrect, and don’t overdo it. Under present rules and conditions, the executive power, state and federal, is the least antidemocratic power in the American political design.

The only hope for bringing majority rule to the rest of American politics is voting-rights enforcement by the federal Department of Justice—and maybe some forward-thinking governors—against the probable resistance of the U.S. Senate, the Republican-dominated federal courts, and the minority-rule state legislatures.

The presidency and the governorships have not always advanced the cause of majority rule in the past. They will not always do so in the future. But at this moment, that’s precisely what they’re poised to do. The enemies of the majority-rule principle understand that fact. The friends of majority rule should absorb it too.

Murkowski, took aim at her GOP colleagues Thursday night for moving to block the measure -- and was critical of the rationale by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell that such a commission could prove politically problematic for the GOP ahead of the 2022 midterms.

The meetings highlighted the emotional toll that the riot has taken on the Capitol Hill community.

At least eight Republicans requested time to speak on the floor overnight -- for up to an hour each — to voice their objections to the legislative package aimed at China, known as "the US Innovation and Competition Act," and those GOP senators slammed what they said is a rushed process to make last-minute changes they have yet to review.

The bill aimed at China and US competitive would invest over $200 billion in American technology, science and research and had broad bipartisan support. Its struggles to advance highlight the difficulty Democrats will have to advance any legislation through the narrowly divided Senate, as several major issues are in negotiations among lawmakers.

The commission would attempt to find bipartisan consensus. The Democratic and Republican leaders of the House and Senate evenly split the selection of its 10 members. A subpoena can only be issued to compel witness testimony if it has the support of the majority of members, or if the commission's chairperson, chosen by Democrats, and the vice-chairperson, chosen by Republicans, come to an agreement.The commission is also required to submit to the President and Congress a final report by the end of 2021 and dissolve 60 days thereafter -- about nine months before the 2022 elections.

The filibuster is believed — wrongly, in my view — to promote bipartisanship, and so it maintains a symbolic appeal for those who wish for a more bipartisan Senate. “There is no circumstance in which I will vote to eliminate or weaken the filibuster,” Senator Joe Manchin wrote in The Washington Post. “The time has come to end these political games, and to usher a new era of bipartisanship.”

But even senators who’ve reluctantly come to the conclusion that the rules do need to change, like Klobuchar, are caught between reform and regret. And so I want to pose an argument that will clash with the catechisms of American politics: Bipartisan governance isn’t innately better than partisan governance. In fact, it’s often worse.

But put that aside. Let’s make this easier for bipartisanship and imagine the only condition that needs to be fulfilled is that both parties think a bill is a good idea.

Virtually the entire Republican Party signed a pledge to oppose any and all tax increases, so a truly bipartisan approach would mean taxes were simply off the table for policymaking. That would plainly be absurd. But even where more reasonable compromise is possible, problems abound.

They are considering ideas they actually think are right for the country — and popular with voters — as opposed to the narrow set of ideas Republicans might support. The question they will face in the coming months is whether they want to embrace partisan legislating, repeatedly using budget reconciliation and even ridding the Senate of the filibuster, or abandon their agenda and leave the rest of the country’s problems unsolved.

Think of the major partisan bills of the past few decades. Liberals loathed the Bush tax cuts and Medicare Part D, and promises of repeal were constant.

Similarly, Republicans professed themselves desperate to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but when they took power, it turned out they didn’t have 50 Senate votes to do anything but defang the individual mandate.

President Donald Trump then reversed that order, and then President Biden reversed Trump’s reversal. If the Dream Act — which passed the House and got 55 Senate votes — had been made law in 2010, I think it would have had a better shot at surviving the Trump era intact.

We are a divided country, but one way we could become less divided is for the consequences of elections to be clearer. When legislation is so hard to pass, politics becomes a battle over identity rather than a battle over policy. Don’t get me wrong: Fights over policy can be angry, even vicious.

This whole debate is peculiarly American. In parliamentary systems, the job of the majority party, or majority coalition, is to govern, and the job of the opposition party is to oppose. Cooperation can and does occur, but there’s nothing unusual or regrettable when it doesn’t, and government does not grind to a halt in its absence.

The other argument for bipartisanship is that bipartisan policy is more stable — you avoid, for example, the Republicans’ 10-year war to repeal Obamacare, or the Democratic Party’s long fight against the Bush tax cuts. This is a fear Senator Jon Tester voiced to me when we appeared together on “Real Time With Bill Maher” in February. If you get rid of the filibuster and embrace partisan lawmaking, he said, “every time Congress changes hands, what you did two years ago will be repealed and you’ll go in a different direction.”

It will surprise no one to hear that I think Democrats should get rid of the filibuster. But it’s not because I believe Democrats necessarily have the right answers for what ails America. It’s because I believe the right answers are likelier to be found if one party, and then the other, can try its hand at solving America’s problems.

The year after that shameful vote, Democrats lost their Senate majority and Senate Republicans blocked life-saving gun bills for the following six years.

These votes came after a gun sold without a completed background check was used to kill nine African Americans during a Bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. These bills were the only two gun violence prevention measures to pass out of the House that year and they ended up on Senate Majority Leader McConnell's desk in his "Senate Graveyard."

On March 11, the House passed Thompson and Clyburn's background check bills once again. Sen. Chris Murphy who introduced S.529, the companion bill to Rep. Thompson's bill, is tasked with passing the bill in the Senate.

The Brady background check and the assault weapons ban bills were signed into law more than 27 years ago, the last time Congress passed a meaningful gun control bill.

The gun violence prevention movement worked tirelessly to secure a Democratic majority in the House, the Senate and the White House. It's time for Democratic senators to reform the rules to force an up-or-down vote on lifesaving gun violence prevention measures. They must not squander this opportunity to take meaningful action to end the gun violence crisis in our nation.

Without ending the Senate filibuster, public safety policies with broad American support will not make it onto President Biden's desk. That means we can expect more than 100 Americans to keep dying by guns every single day.

Ms. Harris faces the prospect of being called on to break ties on confirming Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees, some of whom have drawn GOP criticism and would likely have to be confirmed on party-line votes. She is also expected to be a negotiator—and potentially a tiebreaking vote—for the administration’s legislative priority: passing a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

Mr. Biden, who served in the Senate for 36 years, has a long and respectful relationship with GOP leader Mitch McConnell.

North Dakota GOP Sen. Kevin Cramer said Senate Republicans have a cordial relationship with Ms. Harris and will have to be open to working with her. “I think the fact that she was a senator is helpful—both to her and to us,” he said. “Because she understands the culture of the Senate and personality of the Senate.”

“I became confident then that she was running for president,” said Sen. Mike Lee (R., Utah) of Ms. Harris’s questioning of Mr. Kavanaugh in 2018.

Indeed, this election isn't just about Georgia and the Senate majority. It's about Trump's legacy. If Republicans lose in Georgia, Trump will be to blame

It's hard not to assign Perdue and Loeffler's troubles at least partially to Trump. He was the weak link for Republicans running statewide in Georgia this past year. He lost by 0.2 points and his margin was more than a point worse than the Republican candidates in both Senate races.

Meanwhile, turnout in the more White rural areas of the state has been lagging

As it turns out, the turnout level for these runoffs (over 3 million voters) has already exceeded that of any statewide Georgia runoff by about a million voters. Keep in mind, this has occurred with voting on the day of the election still to occur.

But so far, the turnout swing seems to be favoring Democrats. Black voters have consistently been making up 3 to 4 points more of voters through the early voting period than they did at the equivalent points in the general election.

He has attacked Georgia's November election as fraudulent without any proof and gone after the Republican governor and secretary of state. He elevated the issue of $2,000 stimulus checks and has allowed Ossoff and Warnock to point out that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has made it hard for such a stimulus to pass through the Senate. (The stimulus is popular.)

If Republicans hold onto even one of their Senate seats in Georgia, Trump perhaps isn't as toxic to Republicans as some might assume. No doubt, you'd hear Trump trumpet a Republican win in Georgia for months to come.

They joined a handful of others, including Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri and Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who have backed increasing the checks to $2,000.

While Democrats all support larger checks, they are unlikely to endorse a hasty overhaul of the legal shield currently in place for social media companies, especially measures put forward by Republican senators aimed at confronting what they believe is anti-conservative bias.

The House voted on Monday evening to increase the size of the checks to $2,000, daring Senate Republicans to either approve the heftier sum or defy Mr. Trump.

In signing the relief bill on Sunday night, Mr. Trump claimed in a statement that the Senate would “start the process for a vote” on legislation that would increase direct payments and pledged that “much more money is coming.”

Republican lawmakers in the House were visibly frustrated with Mr. Trump’s demand. Some of the president’s closest allies, including Representatives Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, and Jim Jordan of Ohio, voted against the measure, and Representative Kevin Brady of Texas, the top Republican on the Ways and Means Committee, complained on the House floor that the proposal had been “hastily dropped on us at the last minute” and wouldn’t assist those who needed it most.

For 80 years it has been the practice that the Senate has not confirmed any nomination made during an election year, and we shouldn’t make an exception now.8

Biden — and this is not something we’ve said very often — was absolutely correct.10 It’s a political cauldron to avoid.11 There should be no hearings. There should be no confirmation.12 Not during a presidential election year, with millions of votes having been cast in highly charged contests.13

This year is a tremendous opportunity for our country to have a sincere and honest debate about the role of the Supreme Court in our constitutional system of government.19

The Supreme Court seat doesn’t belong to any president or any political party.24

Our view is this: Give the people a voice.30

Efforts to impose sanctions on the Nord Stream 2, an undersea gas pipeline from Russia to Germany that would give Moscow enormous leverage over Europe, have long drawn bipartisan support on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers have enthusiastically sought to bolster Ukraine against Russian aggression.

the timing of the vote — amid continuing diplomatic talks between Russia and the United States in the hopes of averting war — as well as the Biden administration’s vocal opposition ultimately helped fuel the measure’s defeat.

Six Democrats — some of them facing difficult re-elections in 2022 — defected from their party’s position and voted in favor of the measure,

The Biden administration and its allies in Congress argued the legislation, led by Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, would do little to counter Russian influence because the pipeline’s construction is nearly completed.

Instead, they said, the sanctions would drive a wedge between the United States and Germany, which has championed the pipeline as vital to its industrial success, and give up a key point of leverage during diplomatic negotiations.

“If this bill passes, it won’t make the Nord Stream pipeline any less likely,” said Senator Christopher S. Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut. “It won’t stop Russia from invading Ukraine. In fact, it will do the exact opposite.

On a Christmas Eve video call with a bipartisan group of more than 20 lawmakers, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine cast Nord Stream 2 as an existential threat to his country, arguing that the pipeline posed as much risk to Ukraine as the Russian troops amassing on its border,

“I would suggest if Joe Biden were not president, if Donald Trump were sitting in the Oval Office today, every single Democrat in this chamber would vote for these sanctions.”

“The pipeline itself is the wedge,” Mr. McConnell said. “That’s the whole point. That’s been Putin’s goal: decoupling Ukraine from Europe and making Europe even more reliant on Russian gas.”

Republicans accused Democrats of allowing Russian aggression to go unchecked, painting their reluctance to impose sanctions as politically motivated.

An email sent on Monday to Senate offices by the lobbyist, which was forwarded to The New York Times, included a screenshot of Mr. Zelensky’s tweet, and added the message, “Ukraine Pres. Zelensky calls on all senators to vote in favor of Nord Stream 2 sanctions.”

The next day, the issue came up again as senators met with Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken in a closed-door meeting to discuss an upcoming delegation trip to Ukraine.

Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, unveiled on Wednesday a Democratic alternative to Mr. Cruz’s bill that would impose sanctions on top Russian government officials, including Mr. Putin, if Russia engages in or supports “a significant escalation in hostilities or hostile action in or against Ukraine.”

It likely did not help Mr. Cruz’s cause that many Democrats are furious with him for depriving President Biden of a slew of national security officials who are still awaiting Senate confirmation.

Last month, he agreed to stop blocking the confirmation of 32 of Mr. Biden’s State Department and Treasury Department nominees in exchange for Thursday’s vote.

Mr. Hochstein had also served on a supervisory board of Naftogaz until he resigned in late 2020, citing concerns about the Ukrainian government’s willingness to combat corruption.

“We have an opportunity to do it now with the height of  everything happening,” Manchin said. “For us not to do anything, just sit here and be mum would be just as bad.”

“We need to renew the assault weapons ban. We need to end the sale of high capacity magazines. We need to make gun trafficking a federal crime and give law enforcement the tools they need to get illegal guns off of the streets. We need to close the gun show loophole as well as loopholes that allow gun purchasers to buy a gun after the waiting period expires without a completed background check.”

That episode remains the closest the Senate has come to a consensus on gun control and will likely remain a big part of the debate.

“The problem with these mass shootings, which seem to be happening with increasing frequency, is too often we propose either more restrictions on gun ownership or more background checks for gun purchasers, versus mental health reform — when in fact we need both. That’s what I would like to see.”

To counter Feinstein’s amendment, Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) proposed a measure that would give the attorney general the power to impose a 72-hour delay for individuals on the terror watch list seeking to purchase a gun and it could become a permanent ban if a judge determines there is probable cause during that time window.

“To use Sen. Kennedy – let him be on the watch list, he’s not going to go buy a gun and hurt anybody,” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) argued, calling Cornyn’s alternative “dangerous” and “ridiculous.”

Democratic leaders said Grassley’s proposal would roll back gun laws, not improve them

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Collins and Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) also voted in favor of Manchin’s amendment to expand background checks. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.), who is facing a tough reelection campaign in 2016, abstained from the vote on Manchin’s proposal, though he voted with Republican Party on the other gun control amendments Thursday.

Pelosi said she believes there are sufficient votes in the House to expand background checks to Internet sales and gun shows and to block individuals on the terrorist watch list from purchasing weapons.

Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chair Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) pledged Democrats won’t give up the battle.

With the San Bernardino rampage marking the 355th mass shooting this year, Congress has repeatedly talked about action but hasn’t taken it. Senate Democrats recently tried unsuccessfully to jump-start a campaign to pass gun control legislation in the wake of a deadly shooting at a college campus in Roseburg, Ore.

“To be honest with you, I don’t see it moving now,” said Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.), who noted he has been sponsoring the bill for the last nine years.

Overall, Democrats do not support the budget reconciliation package, which would repeal large portions of Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood.

Senate Bill 1530 would set a gradually more stringent cap on statewide carbon dioxide emissions and require polluters from the transportation fuels, utility and industrial sectors to acquire “emissions allowances” to cover every metric ton of their emissions.Democrats have made concessions to Republicans and other opponents of the bill, including exempting a geographically large portion of the state from fees on gas and diesel indefinitely. But Democrats, who hold supermajorities in both chambers, have also voted down numerous amendments proposed by Republicans.

Brown left open the possibility she might call lawmakers back in a special session, and Courtney said he’s holding out hope Republicans will return before the March 8 deadline in the current session and take up those important bills, as they did in 2019 during a marathon final weekend of the session. “I want to continue to work very hard on all these other things so that if we ever did come back, we could really run the budgets and run everything as fast as we could the way we did on that famous Sunday in the general session when we passed I don’t know how many bills in two hours.

what the administration should have been doing in January to prepare us for today.

She cites the delay on tests, without which “cases go undetected and people continue to circulate” as a leading issue along with other missed federal government responses—many of which are still not fully operational

The prescient recommendations from experts across disciplines in the period before COVID-19 reached American shores—about testing, equipment, and distancing—make clear that more than any single factor, it was Trump’s squandering of out lead-time which should have been used to prepare for the pandemic that has exacerbated this crisis.

What follows is an annotated timeline revealing the warning signs the administration received and showing how slow the administration was to act on these recommendations.

The Early Years: Warnings Ignored

2017: Trump administrations officials are briefed on an intelligence document titled “Playbook for Early Response to High-Consequence Emerging Infectious Disease Threats and Biological Incidents.” That’s right. The administration literally had an actual playbook for what to do in the early stages of a pandemic

February 2018: The Washington Post writes “CDC to cut by 80 percent efforts to prevent global disease outbreak.” The meat of the story is “Countries where the CDC is planning to scale back include some of the world’s hot spots for emerging infectious disease, such as China, Pakistan, Haiti, Rwanda and Congo.”

May 2018: At an event marking the 100 year anniversary of the 1918 pandemic, Borio says “pandemic flu” is the “number 1 health security issue” and that the U.S. is not ready to respond.

One day later her boss, Rear Adm. Timothy Ziemer is pushed out of the administration and the global health security team is disbanded

Beth Cameron, former senior director for global health security on the National Security Council adds: “It is unclear in his absence who at the White House would be in charge of a pandemic,” Cameron said, calling it “a situation that should be immediately rectified.” Note: It was not

January 2019: The director of National Intelligence issues the U.S. Intelligence Community’s assessment of threats to national security. Among its findings:

A novel strain of a virulent microbe that is easily transmissible between humans continues to be a major threat, with pathogens such as H5N1 and H7N9 influenza and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus having pandemic potential if they were to acquire efficient human-to-human transmissibility.”

Page 21: “We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or large scale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support.”

September, 2019: The Trump Administration ended the pandemic early warning program, PREDICT, which trained scientists in China and other countries to identify viruses that had the potential to turn into pandemics. According to the Los Angeles Times, “field work ceased when funding ran out in September,” two months before COVID-19 emerged in Wuhan Province, China.

2020: COVID-19 Arrives

anuary 3, 2020: The CDC is first alerted to a public health event in Wuhan, China

January 6, 2020: The CDC issues a travel notice for Wuhan due to the spreading coronavirus

Note: The Trump campaign claims that this marks the beginning of the federal government disease control experts becoming aware of the virus. It was 10 weeks from this point until the week of March 16 when Trump began to change his tone on the threat.

January 10, 2020: Former Trump Homeland Security Advisor Tom Bossert warns that we shouldn’t “jerk around with ego politics” because “we face a global health threat…Coordinate!”

January 18, 2020: After two weeks of attempts, HHS Secretary Alex Azar finally gets the chance to speak to Trump about the virus. The president redirects the conversation to vaping, according to the Washington Post. 

January 21, 2020: Dr. Nancy Messonnier, the director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Disease at the CDC tells reporters, “We do expect additional cases in the United States.”

January 27, 2020: Top White House aides meet with Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney to encourage greater focus on the threat from the virus. Joe Grogan, head of the White House Domestic Policy Council warns that “dealing with the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”

January 28, 2020: Two former Trump administration officials—Gottlieb and Borio—publish an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal imploring the president to “Act Now to Prevent an American Epidemic.” They advocate a 4-point plan to address the coming crisis:

(1) Expand testing to identify and isolate cases. Note: This did not happen for many weeks. The first time more than 2,000 tests were deployed in a single day was not until almost six weeks later, on March 11.

(3) Prepare hospital units for isolation with more gowns and masks. Note: There was no dramatic ramp-up in the production of critical supplies undertaken. As a result, many hospitals quickly experienced shortages of critical PPE materials. Federal agencies waited until Mid-March to begin bulk orders of N95 masks.

January 29, 2020: Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro circulates an internal memo warning that America is “defenseless” in the face of an outbreak which “elevates the risk of the coronavirus evolving into a full-blown pandemic, imperiling the lives of millions of Americans.”

January 30, 2020: Dr. James Hamblin publishes another warning about critical PPE materials in the Atlantic, titled “We Don’t Have Enough Masks.”

January 29, 2020: Republican Senator Tom Cotton reaches out to President Trump in private to encourage him to take the virus seriously.

Late January, 2020:  HHS sends a letter asking to use its transfer authority to shift $136 million of department funds into pools that could be tapped for combating the coronavirus. White House budget hawks argued that appropriating too much money at once when there were only a few U.S. cases would be viewed as alarmist.

Trump’s Chinese travel ban only banned “foreign nationals who had been in China in the last 14 days.” This wording did not—at all—stop people from arriving in America from China. In fact, for much of the crisis, flights from China landed in America almost daily filled with people who had been in China, but did not fit the category as Trump’s “travel ban” defined it.

January 31, 2020: On the same day Trump was enacting his fake travel ban, Foreign Policy reports that face masks and latex gloves are sold out on Amazon and at leading stores in New York City and suggests the surge in masks being sold to other countries needs “refereeing” in the face of the coming crisis.

February 4, 2020: Gottlieb and Borio take to the WSJ again, this time to warn the president that “a pandemic seems inevitable” and call on the administration to dramatically expand testing, expand the number of labs for reviewing tests, and change the rules to allow for tests of people even if they don’t have a clear known risk factor.

Note: Some of these recommendations were eventually implemented—25 days later.

February 5, 2020: HHS Secretary Alex Azar requests $2 billion to “buy respirator masks and other supplies for a depleted federal stockpile of emergency medical equipment.” He is rebuffed by Trump and the White House OMB who eventually send Congress a $500 million request weeks later.

February 4 or 5, 2020: Robert Kadlec, the assistant secretary for preparedness and response, and other intelligence officials brief the Senate Intelligence Committee that the virus poses a “serious” threat and that “Americans would need to take actions that could disrupt their daily lives.”

February 5, 2020: Senator Chris Murphy tweets: Just left the Administration briefing on Coronavirus. Bottom line: they aren't taking this seriously enough. Notably, no request for ANY emergency funding, which is a big mistake. Local health systems need supplies, training, screening staff etc. And they need it now.

February 9, 2020: The Washington Post reports that a group of governors participated in a jarring meeting with Dr. Anthony Fauci and Dr. Robert Redfield that was much more alarmist than what they were hearing from Trump. “The doctors and the scientists, they were telling us then exactly what they are saying now,” Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) said.

the administration lifted CDC restrictions on tests. This is a factually true statement. But it elides that fact that they did so on March 3—two critical weeks after the third Borio/Gottlieb op-ed on the topic, during which time the window for intervention had shrunk to a pinhole.

February 20, 2020: Borio and Gottlieb write in the Wall Street Journal that tests must be ramped up immediately “while we can intervene to stop spread.”

February 23, 2020: Harvard School of Public Health professor issues warning on lack of test capability: “As of today, the US remains extremely limited in#COVID19 testing. Only 3 of ~100 public health labs haveCDC test kits working and CDC is not sharing what went wrong with the kits. How to know if COVID19 is spreading here if we are not looking for it.

February 24, 2020: The Trump administration sends a letter to Congress requesting a small dollar amount—between $1.8 billion and $2.5 billion—to help combat the spread of the coronavirus. This is, of course, a pittance

February 25, 2020: Messonier says she expects “community spread” of the virus in the United States and that “disruption to everyday life might be severe.” Trump is reportedly furious and Messonier’s warnings are curtailed in the ensuing weeks.

Trump mocks Congress in a White House briefing, saying “If Congress wants to give us the money so easy—it wasn’t very easy for the wall, but we got that one done. If they want to give us the money, we’ll take the money.”

February 26, 2020: Congress, recognizing the coming threat, offers to give the administration $6 billion more than Trump asked for in order to prepare for the virus.

February 27, 2020: In a leaked audio recording Sen. Richard Burr, chairman of the Intelligence Committee and author of the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness Act (PAHPA) and the Pandemic and All-Hazards Preparedness and Advancing Innovation Act (reauthorization of PAHPA), was telling people that COVID-19 “is probably more akin to the 1918 pandemic.”

March 4, 2020: HHS says they only have 1 percent of respirator masks needed if the virus became a “full-blown pandemic.”

March 3, 2020: Vice President Pence is asked about legislation encouraging companies to produce more masks. He says the Trump administration is “looking at it.”

March 7, 2020: Fox News host Tucker Carlson, flies to Mar-a-Lago to implore Trump to take the virus seriously in private rather than embarrass him on TV. Even after the private meeting, Trump continued to downplay the crisis

March 9, 2020: Tom Bossert, Trump’s former Homeland Security adviser, publishes an op-ed saying it is “now or never” to act. He advocates for social distancing and school closures to slow the spread of the contagion.

Trump says that developments are “good for the consumer” and compares COVID-19 favorably to the common flu.

March 17, 2020: Facing continued shortages of the PPE equipment needed to prevent healthcare providers from succumbing to the virus, Oregon Senators Jeff Merkeley and Ron Wyden call on Trump to use the Defense Production Act to expand supply of medical equipment

March 18, 2020: Trump signs the executive order to activate the Defense Production Act, but declines to use it

At the White House briefing he is asked about Senator Chuck Schumer’s call to urgently produce medical supplies and ventilators. Trump responds: “Well we’re going to know whether or not it’s urgent.” Note: At this point 118 Americans had died from COVID-19.

March 20, 2020: At an April 2nd White House Press Conference, President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner who was made ad hoc point man for the coronavirus response said that on this date he began working with Rear Admiral John Polowczyk to “build a team” that would handle the logistics and supply chain for providing medical supplies to the states. This suggestion was first made by former Trump Administration officials January 28th

March 22, 2020: Six days after calling for a 15-day period of distancing, Trump tweets that this approach “may be worse than the problem itself.”

March 24, 2020: Trump tells Fox News that he wants the country opened up by Easter Sunday (April 12)

As Trump was speaking to Fox, there were 52,145 confirmed cases in the United States and the doubling time for daily new cases was roughly four days.

“We haven’t given up on changing the American health care system,” Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after a lunchtime meeting of Republican senators. “We are not going to be able to do that this week, but it still lies ahead of us, and we haven’t given up on that.”

Mr. McConnell said Republicans would move on to their next big legislative goal: overhauling the tax code, a feat that has not been accomplished since 1986.

Democrats, who have spent all year fighting to protect the Affordable Care Act, a law that is a pillar of President Barack Obama’s legacy, responded by calling for the resumption of bipartisan negotiations to stabilize health insurance markets.

“We hope we can move forward and improve health care, not engage in another battle to take it away from people, because they will fail once again if they try,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader.

The decision by Senate Republican leaders may prove to be a milestone in the decades-long fight over health insurance in the United States, suggesting that the Affordable Care Act had gained at least a reprieve and perhaps a measure of political acceptance.

health care is sure to be an issue in next year’s midterm elections.

For their part, Democrats have tried to use health care as a bludgeon against the few Senate Republican targets they have next year, mainly Senators Dean Heller of Nevada and Jeff Flake of Arizona.

“We know Republicans like Dean Heller and Jeff Flake won’t stop until they force Americans to pay more for less, and we will make sure voters hold them accountable for it,”

The Graham-Cassidy bill would have taken money provided under the Affordable Care Act for insurance subsidies and the expansion of Medicaid and sent it to states in the form of block grants.

If the political reforms in H.R. 1 are not undertaken at the federal level, Republican leaders will continue to entrench minority rule. That’s happening already in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, where Republican-drawn maps give them large legislative majorities despite winning fewer votes statewide than Democrats. It’s happening in dozens of other states that have passed hundreds of voting restrictions and are pushing hundreds more, under the guise of protecting election security.

Last week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1. The bill, a similar version of which the House passed in 2019, is a comprehensive and desperately needed set of reforms that would strengthen voting rights and election security, ban partisan gerrymandering, reduce big money in politics and establish ethics codes for Supreme Court justices, the president and other executive branch officials

. If America is to be governed competently and fairly — if it is to be governed at all — the filibuster must go.

The filibuster doesn’t require interparty compromise; it requires 60 votes. It says nothing about the diversity of the coalition required to pass legislation. It just substitutes 60 percent of the Senate for 51 percent as the threshold to pass most legislation. If the Senate was designed to be a place where both parties come together to deliberate and pass laws in the interest of the American people, the filibuster has turned it into the place where good legislation goes to die.

The filibuster doesn’t only fail to ensure extended debate on a bill; today it curtails the opportunity for any debate at all. A single senator can signal he or she intends to filibuster by typing an email and hitting send. No need to stand on the Senate floor to make your impassioned case.

But hey, who’s bitter?Not Biden, who’s ready to move on to the rest of his agenda: immigration, climate change, education, infrastructure …

Or you can worry about filibusters. The only thing standing between Biden and real White House happiness is Republicans’ ability to demand 60 votes for passage of important legislation in a body that has 50 Democrats.

When it comes to something like the rules of the Senate, filibustering is a superstar. In our mind’s eye, we have a vision of an exhausting marathon in which a brave senator has the gumption to stand up and keep orating until his or her colleagues see the point.

The bottom line on the filibuster is that it’s really, really hard to get anything ambitious through the U.S. Senate. There are exceptions — like nominations. And, as we just saw, some money bills. And, the Republicans insist, tax cuts. But once we get past celebrating Biden’s big coronavirus victory, all those proposals on immigration, voting rights, the environment and protecting union organizers are going to run into a Republican demand that the 50 Democrats produce a 60-vote majority or throw in the towel.

While he has said he is personally opposed to impeachment, he and other party leaders did not mount an official effort to defeat the push, and Mr. McCarthy was working on Tuesday to build support for a censure resolution to rebuke the president for his actions.

After four years of backing the president at nearly every turn and refusing to condemn even his most extreme behavior, party leaders were racing to distance themselves from a president many of them now regard as a political and constitutional threat.

“It is true that the president’s remaining term is limited — but a president capable of fomenting a violent insurrection in the Capitol is capable of greater dangers still,” they wrote. “He must be removed from office as swiftly as the Constitution allows. He must also be disqualified to prevent the recurrence of the extraordinary threat he presents.”

The Republican Party’s rapid turn against Mr. Trump unfolded as the House met into the night on Tuesday to debate and vote on a resolution formally calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to strip the president of his powers, a move that Mr. Pence shot down hours before the House passed it along party lines.

In a letter to Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Mr. Pence argued that the amendment was meant to address medical emergencies or presidential “incapacity” and that using it as “a means of punishment or usurpation” would set a “terrible precedent.”

Mr. Trump has shown no trace of contrition. On Tuesday, in his first public appearance since the siege of the Capitol, he told reporters that his remarks to supporters at a rally that day — in which he exhorted them to go to the Capitol and “fight” so Republicans would reject the election results — had been “totally appropriate.”

In a veiled reference to impeachment, he urged Congress “to avoid actions that would further divide and inflame the passions of the moment” and pledged to work in “good faith” with Mr. Biden’s transition team.

Mr. McConnell has indicated he wants to see the specific article of impeachment that the House is set to approve on Wednesday, and to hear the eventual arguments in the Senate. But the Senate Republican leader has made clear in private discussions that he believes now is the moment to move on from Mr. Trump, whom he blames for causing Republicans to lose the Senate.

“Our nation was founded precisely so that the free choice of the American people is what shapes our self-government and determines the destiny of our nation.”

On Monday, Mr. Biden telephoned Mr. McConnell to ask whether it would be possible to set up a dual track that would allow the Senate to confirm Mr. Biden’s cabinet nominees and hold a Senate trial at the same time, according to officials briefed on the conversation who disclosed it on the condition of anonymity. Far from avoiding the topic of impeaching Mr. Trump, Mr. McConnell said it was a question for the Senate parliamentarian, and promised Mr. Biden a quick answer.

“The bottom line is that Leader McConnell has the ability to call us back into session and we can then move to convict Donald Trump, draw on the impeachment trial and try him,” Mr. Schumer told reporters in New York. “And that’s what we hope McConnell will do.”

For Mr. McConnell and other Republicans, the crisis offered an opportunity to bar Mr. Trump from seeking the presidency again in 2024, as he has repeatedly mused with allies about doing.

But that prospect has created a conundrum for Republicans who, understanding the deep affection for Mr. Trump among a powerful segment of their party’s core supporters, are concerned they could pay a steep political price for abandoning him.

Mr. Biden has made clear, in public and private, that he will not oppose the Democratic push to impeach Mr. Trump, even though his advisers and some lawmakers in his party are concerned about the impact it could have on his first days in office.

With Republicans fractured after the president’s bid to overturn the election inspired a rampage, many of them were trying to gauge the dynamics of a vote to convict Mr. Trump. Doing so would open the door to disqualifying him from holding office in the future.

The House has never impeached a president so close to the end of his term, and no former president has ever been tried in the Senate.

With Mr. McConnell sending mixed signals about where he would come down, Republican strategists and senior aides on Capitol Hill believed he could ultimately swing the result one way or another.If the Senate did convict, it could proceed to disqualify Mr. Trump from holding office again with only a simple majority vote, a prospect motivating some on both sides.

Ms. Murkowski joined a small group of other Republicans — including Senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Mitt Romney of Utah, Patrick J. Toomey of Pennsylvania and Susan Collins of Maine — who have said they hold the president responsible for the siege and will weigh the impeachment charge.

Democrats faced the vexing task of trying to manage a trial just as Mr. Biden will take office, and as they claim control of the chamber. Once the House formally sends its article to the Senate, a trial must commence almost immediately and rules dictate that all other business come to a near immediate halt and remain frozen until a verdict is reached.