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Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

Clinton was referring to the GOP grooming Gabbard, not Russians.

Gabbard reacted by tweeting that Clinton is “the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that sickened the Democratic Party for so long."

Trump attacked Clinton for the suggestion earlier this week, and said Clinton and other Democrats claim everyone opposed to them is a Russian agent.

ratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said Thursday that she will not run for re-election for her U.S. representative seat, saying she wants to focus on trying to secure her party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump.Gabbard, who represents Hawaii, made the announcement in a video and email to supporters."I believe that I can best serve the people of Hawaii and our country as your president and commander-in-chief," Gabbard said in the video.Let our news meet your inbox. The news and stories that matters, delivered weekday mornings.Sign UpThis site is protected by recaptcha Privacy Policy | Terms of Service She also expressed gratitude to the people of Hawaii for her nearly seven years in Congress.In January, Hawaii state Sen. Kai Kahele, a Democrat, said he would run for Gabbard's seat, NBC affiliate KHNL of Honolulu reported.An Iowa Democratic caucus poll out this week put Gabbard at 3 percent, with former Vice President Joe Biden, Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg in the top three spots.She is in a crowded field of Democrats seeking the nomination to run for president. Another candidate, U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan, D-Ohio, ended his long-shot presidential campaign Thursday.RecommendedvideovideoMcConnell: If the House impeaches Trump, Senate will hold trial 'until we finish'2020 Election2020 ElectionTim Ryan drops out of presidential raceHillary Clinton recently suggested that she believed Republicans were grooming one of the Democrats for a third-party candidacy. Clinton did not mention Gabbard by name but said she believes one candidate is "the favorite of the Russians."

The president relented only after Republican lawmakers persuaded him to sign the legislation on Sunday. He said that he had been assured Congress would take up his demands for bigger checks, along with removing a legal shield for tech companies and investigating “very substantial voter fraud.” His claims that the election was stolen have been repeatedly contradicted by state election officials and judges across the nation.

Democrats, who have long called for increased direct payments, have sought to use the issue as a political cudgel in the Georgia runoff. Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock, who are running against Ms. Loeffler and Mr. Perdue, have both called for higher stimulus checks, criticizing the $600 as insufficient and rebuking their opponents for not agitating to put more money in Georgians’ pockets.

“Working Americans have borne the brunt of this pandemic,” Mr. Hawley wrote on Twitter. “They’ve been hammered, through no fault of their own. They deserve $2000 in #covid relief - a fraction of what the banks & big business got. Let’s vote now.”

Despite the lack of action on a bigger check, the Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said in a tweet on Tuesday that the $600 checks could begin arriving in bank accounts as early as Tuesday evening and would continue into next week, while paper checks will start being mailed on Wednesday.

Color me alarmist, but that sounds like an invitation to do more than just watch. Trump put an exclamation point on it by exhorting those supporters to vote twice, once by mail and once in person, which is of course blatantly against the law.

On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t. He prattled anew about mail-in ballots and voter fraud and, perhaps alluding to all of the election-related lawsuits that his minions have filed, said: “There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

“sheriffs” and “law enforcement” who would monitor the polls on his behalf. At a rally in North Carolina, he told supporters: “Be poll watchers when you go there. Watch all the thieving and stealing and robbing they do.”

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

And the day after Ginsburg died, I felt a shudder just as deep.

This was an omen — and a harrowing one at that.

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

Is a fair fight still imaginable in America? Do rules and standards of decency still apply? For a metastasizing segment of the population, no.

Right on cue, we commenced a fight over Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat that could become a protracted death match, with Mitch McConnell’s haste and unabashed hypocrisy

On Wednesday Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transfer of power in the event that he lost to Joe Biden. Shockingly but then not really, he wouldn’t

“There won’t be a transfer, frankly. There will be a continuation.”

We’re in terrible danger. Make no mistake.

Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground.

The week since Ginsburg’s death has been the proof of that. Many of us dared to dream that a small but crucial clutch of Republican senators, putting patriotism above party,

Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.

Most politicians — and maybe most Americans — now look across the political divide and see a band of crooks who will pick your pocket if you’re meek and dumb enough not to pick theirs first.

“If the situation were reversed, the Dems would be doing the same thing.”

Ugliness begets ugliness until — what? The whole thing collapses of its own ugly weight?

The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?

What’s the far side of a meltdown? America the puddle? While we await the answer, we get a nasty showdown over that third Trump justice. Trump will nominate someone likely to horrify Democrats and start another culture war: anything to distract voters from his damnable failure to address the pandemic.

University of California-Irvine School of Law, with the headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”

you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.

“I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.”

“Tribal,” “identity politics,” “fake news” and “hoax” are now mainstays of our vocabulary, indicative of a world where facts and truth are suddenly relative.

“The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,”

But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.

This country, already uncivil, is on the precipice of being ungovernable, because its institutions are being so profoundly degraded, because its partisanship is so all-consuming, and because Trump, who rode those trends to power, is now turbocharging them to drive America into the ground. The Republican Party won’t apply the brakes.

At some point, someone had to be honorable and say, “Enough.”Hah. Only two Republican senators, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, broke with McConnell, and in Collins’s case, there were re-election considerations and hedged wording. All the others fell into line.

So the lesson for Democrats should be to take all they can when they can? That’s what some prominent Democrats now propose: As soon as their party is in charge, add enough seats to the Supreme Court to give Democrats the greater imprint on it. Make the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico states, so that Democrats have much better odds of controlling the Senate. Do away with the filibuster entirely. That could be just the start of the list

And who the hell are we anymore? The world’s richest and most powerful country has been brought pitifully and agonizingly low. On Tuesday we passed the mark of 200,000 deaths related to the coronavirus, cementing our status as the global leader, by far, on that front. How’s that for exceptionalism?

he might contest the election in a manner that keeps him in power regardless of what Americans really want.

The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery,

this election might well degenerate into violence, as Democratic poll watchers clash with Republican poll watchers, and into chaos, as accusations of foul play delay the certification of state vote counts

headline: “I’ve Never Been More Worried About American Democracy Than I Am Right Now.”

“The republic is in greater self-generated danger than at any time since the 1870s,” Richard Primus, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, told me, saying that Trump values nothing more than his own power and will do anything that he can get away with

“If you had told Barack Obama or George W. Bush that you can be re-elected at the cost that American democracy will be permanently disfigured — and in the future America will be a failed republic — I don’t think either would have taken the deal.” But Trump? “I don’t think the survival of the republic particularly means anything to Donald Trump.

What gave Primus that idea? Was it when federal officers used tear gas on protesters to clear a path for a presidential photo op? Was it when Trump floated the idea of postponing the election, just one of his many efforts to undermine Americans’ confidence in their own system of government?

Or was it when he had his name lit up in fireworks above the White House as the climax of his party’s convention? Was it on Monday, when his attorney general, Bill Barr, threatened to withhold federal funds from cities that the president considers “anarchist”? That gem fit snugly with Trump’s talk of blue America as a blight on red America, his claim that the pandemic would be peachy if he could just lop off that rotten fruit.

The deadly confrontations recently in Kenosha, Wis., and Portland, Ore., following months of mass protests against racial injustice, speak to how profoundly estranged from their government a significant percentage of Americans feel.

Litigation to determine the next president winds up with the Supreme Court, where three Trump-appointed justices are part of a majority decision in his favor. It’s possible.

Rush Limbaugh — you know, the statesman whom Trump honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom earlier this year — has urged McConnell not even to bother with a confirmation hearing for the nominee in the Judiciary Committee and to go straight to a floor vote. Due diligence and vetting are so 2018

You know who has most noticeably and commendably tried to turn down the temperature? Biden. That’s of course its own political calculation, but it’s consistent with his comportment during his entire presidential campaign, one that has steered clear of extremism, exalted comity and recognized that a country can’t wash itself clean with more muck.

He’s our best bid for salvation, which goes something like this: An indisputable majority of Americans recognize our peril and give him a margin of victory large enough that Trump’s challenge of it is too ludicrous for even many of his Republican enablers to justify. Biden takes office, correctly understanding that his mandate isn’t to punish Republicans. It’s to give America its dignity back.

Maybe we need to hit rock bottom before we bounce back up.But what if there’s bottom but no bounce? I wonder. And shudder.

“I have never in my adult life seen such a deep shudder and sense of dread pass through the American political class.”

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

The shift, less than three weeks before the election, indicates that many Republicans have concluded that Mr. Trump is heading for a loss in November. And they are grasping to save themselves and rushing to re-establish their reputations for a coming struggle for their party’s identity.

eviscerating the president’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and accusing him of “flirting” with dictators and white supremacists and alienating voters so broadly that he might cause a “Republican blood bath” in the Senate.

Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, one of the president’s most vocal allies, predicted the president could very well lose the White House.

On Friday, the president issued his latest Twitter attack on Senator Susan Collins of Maine, one of the most endangered Republican incumbents, apparently unconcerned that he might be further imperiling her chances, along with the party’s hopes of holding on to the Senate.

Senate Republicans — who have rarely broken with the president on any major legislative initiative in four years — are unwilling to vote for the kind of multitrillion-dollar federal aid plan that Mr. Trump has suddenly decided would be in his interest to embrace.

“Voters are set to drive the ultimate wedge between Senate Republicans and Trump,

Republicans could very well hang onto both the White House and the Senate, and Mr. Trump still has a firm grip on the party base, which may be why even some of those known for being most critical of him, like Mr. Sasse and Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, declined to be interviewed about their concerns.

But their recent behavior has offered an answer to the long-pondered question of if there would ever be a point when Republicans might repudiate a president who so frequently said and did things that undermined their principles and message. The answer appears to be the moment they feared he would threaten their political survival.

McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has been more outspoken than usual in recent days about his differences with the president, rejecting his calls to “go big” on a stimulus bill.

Mr. Romney assailed the president for being unwilling to condemn QAnon, the viral pro-Trump conspiracy movement that the F.B.I. has labeled a domestic terrorism threat,

Yet Mr. Romney and other Republicans who have spoken up to offer dire predictions or expressions of concern about Mr. Trump are all sticking with the president on what is likely his final major act before the election: the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, a favorite of conservatives, to the Supreme Court.

The dichotomy reflects the tacit deal congressional Republicans have accepted over the course of Mr. Trump’s presidency, in which they have tolerated his incendiary behavior and statements knowing that he would further many of their priorities, including installing a conservative majority on the nation’s highest court.

the grim political environment has set off a scramble, especially among Republicans with political aspirations stretching beyond Mr. Trump’s presidency, to be on the front lines of any party reset.

“As it becomes evident that he is a mere political mortal like everyone else, you’re really starting to see the jockeying taking place for what the future of the Republican Party is,”

“Most congressional Republicans have known that this is unsustainable long term, and they’ve just been — some people may call it pragmatic, some may call it opportunistic — keeping their heads down and doing what they have to do while they waited for this time to come,”

It is unclear whether Republicans will seek to redefine their party should the president lose, given that Mr. Trump’s tenure has shown the appeal of his inflammatory brand of politics to the crucial conservative base.“He still has enormous, enormous influence — and will for a very long time — over primary voters, and that is what members care about,”

last-ditch bid to preserve Republican control of the Senate.

On the campaign trail, Republicans are privately livid with the president for dragging down their Senate candidates, sending his struggles rippling across states that are traditional Republican strongholds.

“His weakness in dealing with coronavirus has put a lot more seats in play than we ever could have imagined a year ago,

“We always knew that there were going to be a number of close Senate races, and we were probably swimming against the tide in places like Arizona, Colorado and Maine. But when you see states that are effectively tied, like Georgia and North Carolina and South Carolina, that tells you something has happened in the broader environment.”

Despite repeated public entreaties from Mr. Trump for Republicans to embrace a larger pandemic stimulus package, Mr. McConnell has all but refused, saying senators in his party would never support a package of that magnitude. Senate Republicans revolted last weekend on a conference call with Mark Meadows, the president’s chief of staff, warning that a big-spending deal would amount to a “betrayal” of the party’s base and tarnish their credentials as fiscal hawks.

A more personal rebuke came from Mr. McConnell last week when the Kentuckian, who is up for re-election, told reporters that he had avoided visiting the White House since late summer because of its handling of the coronavirus.“My impression was their approach to how to handle this was different from mine and what I insisted that we do in the Senate,” Mr. McConnell said.

Trump and Leo, a prominent conservative lawyer influential in his first term, have not spoken since 2020, according to people familiar with the matter. Their relationship ended over a heated fight in 2020 at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump accused Leo of picking Rod J. Rosenstein to be deputy attorney general, a person familiar with the matter said. Trump’s anger around Rosenstein centered on his decision to appoint special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to oversee the Justice Department’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election

Trump has signaled that he wants the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, and his associates have drafted plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to send the military against civil demonstrations. Near the end of his time in the White House, he repeatedly complained that his White House Counsel’s Office wasn’t doing enough to help him overturn the election results. His attorney general resigned after he would not back up his claims.

“He’s the leading candidate, so I don’t know that it matters what I think,” said Brent O. Hatch, a lawyer who is on the board of the Federalist Society.

Although Trump reshaped the Supreme Court while in office, leading to the overturning of Roe, he has sometimes told others that the decision is a political albatross for Republicans. And he has complained recently at rallies about the Supreme Court and the decisions the judges make, saying without evidence they rule too often against Republicans to show “independence.”

Trump is running on a campaign focused, at least in part, on vengeance and retribution. The former president has made it clear that loyalty would be a key criteria in how he makes decisions if returned to office.

Most members of the Federalist Society board of directors declined to comment on the record or did not respond to a request for comment. Interviews with a dozen other prominent lawyers suggested most had serious misgivings about Trump returning to power but were resigned to the high likelihood he will be the nominee, and many expressed openness to working for another Trump administration.

There is a heated debate underway in conservative legal circles about how GOP lawyers should interact with what increasingly appears to be the likely nominee, according to conservative lawyers who described the private talks on the condition of anonymity. The discussions include whether they would return to work for Trump.

One prominent lawyer described a November dinner he attended where almost all the attorneys in the room said they would prefer another nominee — but were split on whether to back Trump if he wins

Leo, McConnell and McGahn have expressed reservations about what another Trump term would look like, though they have largely stayed away from a public fight.

Some of the informal conversations and debates underway in conservative legal circles about a second Trump term include Project 2025, a coalition of right-wing groups that has outlined plans for the next Republican administration. Clark, who is working on the Insurrection Act for Project 2025, has been charged with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law, in the case alleging Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark pleaded guilty.

The involvement of Clark with that effort has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as a potentially disastrous choice to take a senior leadership role at the department because of his past activities around the 2020 election.

Rob Kelner, a prominent conservative lawyer, said more conservative lawyers should have spoken up against Trump, but that it would cost them business and relationships.

“There were so many positions he took and so many statements that he made that flatly contradicted the foundational principles of the conservative movement and the Federalist Society, and yet it was so rare to hear conservative lawyers speak out against Trump,” Kelner said.

or decades, complaints about “voter fraud” have been a core component of Republican right-wing folklore — and one of their most useful election-year tools, particularly in places where winning the white vote isn’t enough to win elections.

the extent to which blocking voting opportunities for Democratic constituencies had become baked into conservative Republican culture became evident when Jimmy Carter proposed a package of electoral reforms in March of 1977. These included national same-day registration.

Ultimately, that year Barr reported that his workers had “discouraged or successfully challenged 50,000 illegally registered voters.” This claim was baldly fantastical. Meanwhile, in Arizona, future Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist ran Operation Eagle Eye in Phoenix’s Maricopa County. Federal judge Charles Hardy later recalled that Eagle Eye workers in Democratic-majority precincts challenged “every black or Mexican voter,” demanding that they read a passage from the Constitution

Barr expanded Operation Eagle Eye to help Senator Barry Goldwater’s bid for the presidency in 1964. The RNC sent 1.8 million letters to registered voters nationwide — a practice called voter caging. If a letter couldn’t be delivered for any reason, it would represent a reason to challenge the voter as illegitimate.

One document from state-level GOP operations obtained by the Democratic National Committee instructed workers to stall lines in Democratic precincts. In another document, a state ballot security office in Louisiana explained that “all sheriffs in the state of Louisiana, except one, are sympathetic with Senator Goldwater’s election. We should take full advantage of this situation.”

Unsurprisingly, the effort did less to restore confidence than it did to stoke paranoia. In Houston, the Austin American newspaper looked for the more than a thousand “fictitious” or ineligible registrations claimed by the GOP county chairman. It found nothing but some simple clerical errors. In Long Beach, California, another newspaper investigation found that seven of eight people on a list of ineligible voters “were just as eligible as can be.” In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, annoyed voters called the police on the Eagle Eyes. In Miami, a circuit court judge enjoined Citizens for Goldwater for “illegal mass challenging without cause, conducted in such a manner as to obstruct the orderly conduct of the election.

The effect was immediate. In 1961, the Republican National Committee launched a “ballot security program,” explained in a pamphlet published by its Women’s Division. Party workers were advised to place poll watchers outside the polls with cameras.

As historian Greg Downs recently wrote for TPM, the entire system of voter registration had been designed, back in the nineteenth century, to dampen democratic participation by immigrants and black Southerners that threatened native-born white dominance. A century later, conservatives went to the mat to preserve it.

At first, legislators from both parties enthusiastically endorsed same-day registration. Then, conservatives convinced the Republican Party establishment that, as the conservative newspaper Human Events put it, it would represent “Euthenasia for the GOP,” because “the bulk of these extra votes would go to the Democratic Party.” It pointed to a political scientist who said national turnout would go up 10 percent under the plan, but made it clear that the wrong people would be voting: most of the increase would come from “blacks and other traditionally Democratic voter groups.” The Heritage Foundation argued the reforms would “allow eight million illegal aliens in the U.S.” to vote

Weyrich made the dubious nature of the New Right’s definition of “free elections” more explicit. Speaking at an Evangelical gathering in 1980 alongside Reagan, he warned Christians against the “good government syndrome.

“I don’t want everyone to vote,” he said. “Elections are not won by a majority of the people… As a matter of fact, our leverage in the election quite candidly goes up as the voting population goes down. We have no responsibility, moral or otherwise, to turn out our opposition. It’s important to turn out those who are with us.”

The DNC and the New Jersey Democratic Party sued, and finally, as part of a settlement designed to stanch voter intimidation, the RNC entered a consent decree agreeing not to run any ballot-security efforts specifically targeting districts for their racial makeup.

The state Republican Party sent 125,000 postcards to recipients in Democratic areas who turned out to be 97 percent black, falsely claiming that a voter who had moved within 30 days of the election couldn’t vote, and noting that giving false information to an election official was punishable by up to five years in jail.

Both the 1986 and 1990 incidents led to new consent decrees. Neither dampened Republican enthusiasm to use fraud allegations as a political tool. In fact, by this time, it had become one of the conservative movement’s go-to responses to all kinds of perceived threats.

So too were ongoing Republican efforts to fight the liberalization of voter registration. In 1988, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell — having been first elected to the Senate in a close vote in 1984 — argued in the American Bar Association Journal against a bill that would require mail-in registration systems nationwide. Liberal registration systems might be fine in places like North Dakota and Minnesota, he wrote, but “for other states like mine, and regions where one party dominates and people are poor, election fraud is a constant curse.”

Taking a page from Reagan and Weyrich, McConnell wrote that “relatively low voter turnout is a sign of a content democracy,” an observation that was, he argued, “heresy to some, blasphemy to others, and worst of all, politically incorrect.” Motor Voter could “foster election fraud and thus debase the entire political process,” he wrote. And anyway, “We should ask ourselves: How easy should voting be? Is it too much to ask that people have a passing interest in the political process, 10, 20, or 30 days prior to an election and that they go down to the courthouse, or the library, to register?”

Rep. Spencer Bachus of Alabama was more explicit, alleging that the Motor Voter bill would register “millions of welfare recipients, illegal aliens, and taxpayer funded entitlement recipients.”

In 1992, George H.W. Bush vetoed Motor Voter, calling it an “open invitation to fraud and corruption.” But it passed the next year, essentially on a party line vote, and Bill Clinton signed it into law.

Motor Voter was responsible for tens of millions of new voter registrations. But its roll-out wasn’t smooth. Many states resisted implementing parts of it, particularly the part about letting people sign up to vote at the offices where they received government benefits. In 1994, McConnell pushed to remove WIC offices from the list of places where voter registration must be offered. This had nothing to do with his original opposition to Motor Voter, he insisted. He was just concerned that “WIC workers will have to spend valuable time and money on an activity that is totally unrelated to the mission of the WIC program.”

Between 1999 and 2000, the Jeb Bush administration carried out a voter purge with a sloppy vengeance. It contracted with a private company, DBT, to produce “scrub lists” of ineligible voters. In her recounting of this episode, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer notes that DBT received an award for “innovative excellence” in 1999 by a conservative group called the Voting Integrity Project, which had been pushing states to purge their rolls. DBT’s lists ended up including almost 1 percent of Florida’s electorate and nearly 3 percent of its black voters. But they were enormously messy.

voters were identified as candidates for the purge just because “their name, gender, birthdate and race matched — or nearly matched — one of the tens of millions of ex-felons in the United States.” DBT proposed refining its lists using address histories or financial records, but the state declined to take it up on the offer.

Similar purges went down across the country. A report drawn up by the House Judiciary Committee’s Democratic staff after the 2000 election found that “voters in the majority of states reported being improperly excluded or purged from voting rolls.”

As Joshua A. Douglas, a University of Kentucky law professor, tells the story, Bond took the stage at an Election Night rally, pounding the podium and screaming “this is an outrage!” He blamed Ashcroft’s loss on votes cast by dead people and dogs. Specifically, Bond spoke frequently of a Springer Spaniel named Ritzy Mekler. As it turned out, someone had indeed registered Ritzy, but the dog never cast a vote. Later investigations found only six definitively illegitimate votes out of the more than 2 million cast in all of Missouri that year.

But the post-election chaos in Florida that year was, of course, of a whole different order, and would refocus the GOP for more than a decade on the potency of a handful of votes

Today, though, Griffin is happily serving as lieutenant governor of Arkansas. Gonzales avoided criminal charges and now serves as dean of Belmont University in Tennessee. Hans von Spakovsky and one of the conservative activists Bradley Schlozman had hired as a DOJ attorney, J. Christian Adams, reprised their Bush-era roles by becoming members of Trump’s voter fraud commission last year. Few of the other people responsible for spreading the voter fraud myth faced any consequences at all.

for Republicans, one clear lesson from 2000 was that any move to keep potential Democratic voters away from the polls might win them an election.

Ultimately, the federal ID requirement wasn’t terribly onerous, but Minnite writes that it was significant; it “embedded a party tactic into federal law and signaled approval for a new partisan movement in the states to encumber voters with unnecessary identification requirements.”

In the next presidential election year, 2004, talk of voter fraud was everywhere. Conservative activists targeted the community group ACORN in multiple states where it was registering voters. (In several cases, the organization’s employees turned out to have forged the registration forms — but not in the hope of casting illegitimate votes. Instead, they were trying to hit a quota set by the organization that required volunteers to collect a certain number of registrations.) In Washington State, after a super-close gubernatorial election, Republican Dino Rossi refused to concede until nearly six months after his opponent was sworn in, claiming there was illegal voting. And back in Florida, the Bush campaign got caught with caging lists made up of mostly African-American voters that it planned to use to challenge people at the polls.

Rove was convinced that some U.S. attorneys weren’t doing enough to make hay over voter fraud charges. Between 2005 and 2006, the administration fired nine U.S. attorneys. It would become one of the major scandals of the Bush presidency.

One of the fired attorneys, David C. Iglesias of New Mexico, later explained that he’d been asked to resign after declining to file corruption charges against local Democrats. Another, John McKay of Washington, said he suspected his firing had to do with his decision not to call a grand jury to investigate voter fraud in the governor’s race in 2004, which Rossi lost by just a few hundred votes. The Washington Post reported that five of the 12 U.S. attorneys the administration dismissed or considered for dismissal in 2006 oversaw districts that Rove and his deputies saw as “trouble spots for voter fraud,” including New Mexico, Nevada, Washington State, Kansas City and Milwaukee

Gonzales and the Justice Department later acknowledged that they had fired U.S. Attorney Bud Cummings in Arkansas to make way for Tim Griffin, a former Rove aid who had been involved with the caging in Florida in 2004. Griffin ended up stepping down from the post in 2007 after the scandal broke, and Gonzales lost his own job later that summer.

Given the astoundingly slim final official margin of 537 votes, it was easy for observers to rightfully attribute the outcome to any number of efforts to skew the vote or accidents of history: If Republicans hadn’t convinced state officials to count overseas absentee ballots that didn’t comply with state laws, or if the state hadn’t disenfranchised thousands of people falsely judged to be felons, or if Ralph Nader hadn’t run, or if Palm Beach County hadn’t used weirdly designed ballots, everything might have been different.

This past January, a judge allowed the 1982 consent decree that banned the RNC from racially motivated voter security operations to expire. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that Ohio could purge occasional voters from its voter rolls if they don’t return a mailed address-confirmation form.

Thinking that they could ultimately control Hitler while enjoying the benefits of his popular support, the conservatives were initially gratified by the fulfillment of their agenda: intensified rearmament, the outlawing of the Communist Party, the suspension first of freedom of speech, the press, and assembly and then of parliamentary government itself, a purge of the civil service, and the abolition of independent labor unions. Needless to say, the Nazis then proceeded far beyond the goals they shared with their conservative allies, who were powerless to hinder them in any significant way.

If the US has someone whom historians will look back on as the gravedigger of American democracy, it is Mitch McConnell. He stoked the hyperpolarization of American politics to make the Obama presidency as dysfunctional and paralyzed as he possibly could. As with parliamentary gridlock in Weimar, congressional gridlock in the US has diminished respect for democratic norms, allowing McConnell to trample them even more. Nowhere is this vicious circle clearer than in the obliteration of traditional precedents concerning judicial appointments. Systematic obstruction of nominations in Obama’s first term provoked Democrats to scrap the filibuster for all but Supreme Court nominations. Then McConnell’s unprecedented blocking of the Merrick Garland nomination required him in turn to scrap the filibuster for Supreme Court nominations in order to complete the “steal” of Antonin Scalia’s seat and confirm Neil Gorsuch. The extreme politicization of the judicial nomination process is once again on display in the current Kavanaugh hearings.

Like Hitler’s conservative allies, McConnell and the Republicans have prided themselves on the early returns on their investment in Trump. The combination of Trump’s abasement before Putin in Helsinki, the shameful separation of families at the border in complete disregard of US asylum law (to say nothing of basic humanitarian principles and the GOP’s relentless claim to be the defender of “family values”), and most recently Michael Cohen’s implication of Trump in criminal violations of campaign finance laws has not shaken the fealty of the Republican old guard, so there is little indication that even an explosive and incriminating report from Special Counsel Robert Mueller will rupture the alliance.

Republicans begin with a systemic advantage in electing senators and representatives, because the Democratic Party’s constituency has become heavily concentrated in big states and big cities. By my calculation every currently serving Democratic senator represents roughly 3.65 million people; every Republican roughly 2.51 million. Put another way, the fifty senators from the twenty-five least populous states—twenty-nine of them Republicans—represent just over 16 percent of the American population, and thirty-four Republican senators—enough to block conviction on impeachment charges—represent states with a total of 21 percent of the American population. With gerrymandering and voter suppression enhancing even more the systemic Republican advantage, it is estimated that the Democrats will have to win by 7 to 11 points (a margin only obtainable in rare “wave” elections) in the 2018 elections to achieve even the narrowest of majorities in the House of Representatives

In France the prospect of a Popular Front victory and a new government headed by—horror of horrors—a Socialist and Jew, Léon Blum, led many on the right to proclaim, “Better Hitler than Blum.” Better the victory of Frenchmen emulating the Nazi dictator and traditional national enemy across the Rhine than preserving French democracy at home and French independence abroad under a Jewish Socialist.

The fascist movements of that time prided themselves on being overtly antidemocratic, and those that came to power in Italy and Germany boasted that their regimes were totalitarian. The most original revelation of the current wave of authoritarians is that the construction of overtly antidemocratic dictatorships aspiring to totalitarianism is unnecessary for holding power

the most apt designation of this new authoritarianism is the insidious term “illiberal democracy.” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in Turkey, Putin in Russia, Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines, and Viktor Orbán in Hungary have all discovered that opposition parties can be left in existence and elections can be held in order to provide a fig leaf of democratic legitimacy, while in reality elections pose scant challenge to their power. Truly dangerous opposition leaders are neutralized or eliminated one way or another.

Total control of the press and other media is likewise unnecessary, since a flood of managed and fake news so pollutes the flow of information that facts and truth become irrelevant as shapers of public opinion. Once-independent judiciaries are gradually dismantled through selective purging and the appointment of politically reliable loyalists. Crony capitalism opens the way to a symbiosis of corruption and self-enrichment between political and business leaders. Xenophobic nationalism (and in many cases explicitly anti-immigrant white nationalism) as well as the prioritization of “law and order” over individual rights are also crucial to these regimes in mobilizing the popular support of their bases and stigmatizing their enemies.

Both Mussolini and Hitler came to power in no small part because the fascist-conservative alliances on the right faced division and disarray on the left. The Catholic parties (Popolari in Italy, Zentrum in Germany), liberal moderates, Social Democrats, and Communists did not cooperate effectively in defense of democracy.

In the five presidential elections of the twenty-first century, Democrats have won the popular vote four times. Two of these four (2000 and 2016) nonetheless produced Republican presidents, since the Electoral College reflects the same weighting toward small, more often Republican states as the Senate. Given the Supreme Court’s undermining of central provisions of the Voting Rights Act (Shelby County v. Holder), its refusal to take up current flagrant gerrymandering cases (Gill v. Whitford for Wisconsin; Benisek v. Lamone for Maryland), and its recent approval of the Ohio law purging its voting rolls (Husted v. Randolph Institute), it must be feared that the Court will in the future open the floodgates for even more egregious gerrymandering and voter suppression.

The unprecedented flow of dark money into closely contested campaigns has distorted the electoral process even further. The Supreme Court decision declaring corporations to be people and money to be free speech (Citizens United v. FEC) in particular has greatly enhanced the ability of corporations and wealthy individuals to influence American politics

To consolidate his dictatorship, Hitler had to abolish the independent unions in Germany in a single blow. Trump faces no such problem. In the first three postwar decades, workers and management effectively shared the increased wealth produced by the growth in productivity. Since the 1970s that social contract has collapsed, union membership and influence have declined, wage growth has stagnated, and inequality in wealth has grown sharply. Governor Scott Walker’s triumph over public sector unions in Wisconsin and the recent Supreme Court decision striking down mandatory public sector union dues (Janus v. AFSCME) simply accelerate a process long underway.

Alongside the erosion of an independent judiciary as a check on executive power, other hallmarks of illiberal democracy are the neutralization of a free press and the steady diminution of basic human rights

In Trump’s presidency, those functions have effectively been privatized in the form of Fox News and Sean Hannity. Fox faithfully trumpets the “alternative facts” of the Trump version of events, and in turn Trump frequently finds inspiration for his tweets and fantasy-filled statements from his daily monitoring of Fox commentators and his late-night phone calls with Hannity. The result is the creation of a “Trump bubble” for his base to inhabit that is unrecognizable to viewers of PBS, CNN, and MSNBC and readers of The Washington Post and The New York Times. The highly critical free media not only provide no effective check on Trump’s ability to be a serial liar without political penalty; on the contrary, they provide yet another enemy around which to mobilize the grievances and resentments of his base. A free press does not have to be repressed when it can be rendered irrelevant and even exploited for political gain.

the curtailment of many rights and protections Americans now enjoy is likely. Presumably marriage equality will survive, given the sea change in American public opinion on that issue. But the right of businesses and individuals to discriminate against gays is likely to be broadly protected as a “sincerely held religious belief.” Chief Justice John Roberts’s favorite target, affirmative action, is likely to disappear under his slogan that to end racial discrimination, one must end all forms of racial discrimination. And a woman’s right to abortion will probably disappear in red states, either through an outright overturning of Roe v. Wade or more likely through narrower rulings that fail to find any “undue burden” in draconian restrictions that in practice make abortion unavailable. And equal protection of voting rights is likely to be eroded in red states through ever more insidiously designed voter suppression laws and gerrymandering once the Supreme Court makes clear that it will not intervene to curb such measures

No matter how and when the Trump presidency ends, the specter of illiberalism will continue to haunt American politics. A highly politicized judiciary will remain, in which close Supreme Court decisions will be viewed by many as of dubious legitimacy, and future judicial appointments will be fiercely contested. The racial division, cultural conflict, and political polarization Trump has encouraged and intensified will be difficult to heal. Gerrymandering, voter suppression, and uncontrolled campaign spending will continue to result in elections skewed in an unrepresentative and undemocratic direction. Growing income disparity will be extremely difficult to halt, much less reverse.

Finally, within several decades after Trump’s presidency has ended, the looming effects of ecological disaster due to human-caused climate change—which Trump not only denies but is doing so much to accelerate—will be inescapable. Desertification of continental interiors, flooding of populous coastal areas, and increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, with concomitant shortages of fresh water and food, will set in motion both population flight and conflicts over scarce resources that dwarf the current fate of Central Africa and Syria. No wall will be high enough to shelter the US from these events. Trump is not Hitler and Trumpism is not Nazism, but regardless of how the Trump presidency concludes, this is a story unlikely to have a happy ending.

He said the Democrats still want something tangible on DACA but said it was problematic because it could run into the February 8 funding deadline.

Earlier Sunday, Trump called for Senate Republicans to change the chamber's rules to resolve the funding impasse as the government shutdown continued into its second day. He tweeted a call for McConnell to invoke the so-called "nuclear option" and thereby remove leverage for Senate Democrats.

Political scientists have observed that American politics has deteriorated into an unstable combination of weak parties and strong partisanship — dry brush for the likes of Trump and Blankenship to ignite.

The 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform restricted party fundraising, and the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling in 2010 essentially destroyed parties by giving everybody else freedom to spend unlimited sums to buy politicians. The moderating influence of parties was replaced by the radicalizing influence of dark money.

Related to this, partisanship in Washington escalated, aggravated by partisan redistricting that puts almost all House members in safe seats where the only threat comes from primaries. Primary voters tend to favor extreme candidates — who, once in Congress, turn politics into warfare.

the problem is most severe among Republicans, and it’s no small irony that the man who arguably did the most to create the current system is now under attack by it. McConnell, who championed unlimited dark money, cheered Citizens United and dramatically accelerated the partisan revenge cycle on the Senate floor, is now the victim of extremists his own actions created.

this much we already know: McConnell unleashed the forces now shredding his party. Blankenship, like Trump, exploited those forces. And nobody controls them.

Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, who aspire to lead the Trump army whenever Mr. Trump isn’t there to do so himself, have engineered a scenario in which each of their colleagues will have to go on record either favoring or opposing the president’s effort to reverse the election.

They have done so in defiance of Mr. McConnell, creating in the process a no-win scenario for a series of their colleagues up for re-election in 2022— Roy Blunt of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rob Portman of Ohio, Marco Rubio of Florida, John Thune of South Dakota—in which they have to take a stand that either infuriates Trump loyalists back home or energizes Democrats and many independents against them.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan released over the weekend a blunt statement urging his former colleagues not to attempt what many are about to try: overturn the election results. “Under our system, voters determine the president, and this self-governance cannot sustain itself if the whims of Congress replace the will of the people,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “I urge members to consider the precedent that it would set.”

As that tweet shows, there is an important ideological struggle lying beneath the skirmishing. Mr. Trump essentially ran for president in 2016 as an independent populist, with no use for a Republican establishment that largely opposed him. Upon prevailing, he turned the party away from traditional conservative principles of free trade, lower government spending and limited executive authority and toward more of a working-class agenda.

The unanswerable question is whether Mr. Trump can maintain his hold on the party once he is out of office. Scott Reed, a longtime GOP strategist, argues that “Trump wannabes need a new paradigm, for there will never be another Trump.” He predicts Mr. McConnell, a traditional conservative, will emerge as the party’s clear leader.

“The election showed us that GOP policies and ideas worked up and down the ticket, but it was the personality that cost us the White House.”

He was chosen by President Barack Obama in 2016 to join the Supreme Court only to see his nomination held up for eight months in an audacious political maneuver by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader at the time. The move ultimately allowed Mr. Trump to choose his own nominee to fill the seat.

But Mr. McConnell, who said last year that he would support Judge Garland to serve as attorney general, was among the Republicans who voted for his confirmation and a day earlier to end debate over his nomination, paving the way for the full Senate to vote.

The Capitol riot investigation has grown closer to Roger J. Stone Jr., one of Mr. Trump’s allies, and the F.B.I. has found evidence of communications between right-wing extremists and White House associates, underscoring how closely Mr. Trump had aligned himself with such groups during his presidency.

“I supervised the prosecution of the perpetrators of the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, who sought to spark a revolution that would topple the federal government,” he said. “I will supervise the prosecution of white supremacists and others who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, a heinous attack that sought to disrupt a cornerstone of our democracy, the peaceful transfer of power to a newly elected government.”

But Mr. McConnell refused to consider his nomination, and Mr. Trump selected Neil M. Gorsuch to fill the vacant seat in 2017. Judge Garland stayed on at the appeals court.

McConnell embraced the tortured position that money, and only money, is speech—and that actual speech is not speech.  

The Kentuckian argued that money was speech, and limitations on donations—even requirements to disclose—infringed on free speech.

life—the peaceful transfer of power comes to mind—it is a casualty of the Trump era. In the early half of his presidency, Donald Trump pursued some projects that solidified the traditional bond between the GOP and business, such as slashing taxes, but also others that divided the old allies, including protectionist policies on trade and personally intervening to bully companies.

Last year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, usually a stalwart supporter of Republicans, endorsed some Democrats, and it forcefully condemned Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

Meanwhile, a decades-long consensus that publicly held that companies should, above all, do whatever they could to maximize short-term shareholder value began to soften. In 2019, the Business Roundtable, a leading trade association, released new guidance that said corporations should “push for an economy that serves all Americans,” in Chairman Jamie Dimon’s words, by investing in communities and employees, dealing ethically with suppliers, and considering longer-term returns.

Now with voting laws at the center of national politics, corporations are speaking out. MLB moved the All-Star Game, Coca-Cola and Delta blasted the Georgia law, and other executives have objected to the law and other bills under consideration elsewhere. To critics, this is riskily divisive. Echoing a famous Michael Jordan line, McConnell complained that Republicans drink Coke and fly too.

But these companies are responsive to many groups, and just because their stances don’t directly affect revenue and profits, that doesn’t mean these aren’t business decisions. Corporations are balancing the demands of shareholders, customers, and employees, as well as the positions of their own executives,

Companies may also calculate that the long-term costs of being on the wrong side of social-justice issues, or the wrong side of an ascendant liberal, diverse population, outweigh the short-term risks of Republican backlash and boycotts.

In short, what McConnell calls “blackmail” is just free enterprise at work. These companies may or may not be acting in their long-term best interests—corporations make mistaken bets about the future all the time—but they are acting rationally.

The minority leader is realizing that the deal Republicans had with big corporations wasn’t personal; it was just business. A tax break can buy you a lot of things, but it doesn’t buy love.

In taking these stances on big social issues, these corporations are acting in a majoritarian manner. But no one should conclude that they are progressive. Even as big business enters into a temporary alliance with Democrats on voting rights, many of its captains are fighting back against the plan President Joe Biden announced Wednesday to raise corporate tax rates.

American government would probably be healthier if more politicians asked—for whatever reason—why they are so willing to accept corporations’ arguments on taxes, regulation, and antitrust. Corporations may be people, my friends. But corporations are not friends, people.

One establishment Republican insider with fears about Mr. Trump’s continued influence on the party told me today that the fund-raising totals were far more worrisome to moderate Republicans than his outlandish statements on Saturday — which felt like old hat.

“What surprised people and took them aback was the $85 million he raised,” the person said in a phone interview. “That is a bigger problem, frankly, than what he says.

It bears noting that the first quarter of the year, running from January through March, included the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol and the fallout from Mr. Trump’s refusal to fully denounce the perpetrators.

Robert Cahaly, a Republican pollster and strategist, said that this trend was only the latest example of how Mr. Trump has shifted the power in Republican politics away from major corporations and establishment figures, and toward the grass roots — a demographic he firmly controls.

Even as two-thirds of Americans said in a CNN poll last month that they disapproved of how Mr. Trump had responded to the Jan. 6 attack, 63 percent of Republicans said he had responded to it well.

Mr. Trump’s command over small-dollar donors in the Republican base is enormous — as is his popularity. Which means that the very National Republican Senatorial Committee that gave Mr. Trump an award on Monday is holding its breath ahead of 2022.

Last week, the Senate Leadership Fund — a super PAC that funds Senate Republican campaigns — announced that it would back Ms. Murkowski in her bid for re-election.

Senate Democrats are working through how it might unfold and President Joe Biden is acknowledging that his opening days in office may be divided between his agenda to bring the country together and a Senate impeachment trial that will continue to keep the country divided.

at 11 a.m. ET, the committee is going to begin debate on Rep. Jamie Raskin's bill urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Trump from office.

The House Committee is the hottest ticket in town Tuesday.

For context, the last impeachment Rules debate lasted about eight hours.

The House will pass the rule to govern the debate on the impeachment article Tuesday night at some point. When that occurs is not clear. But, Wednesday at 9 a.m. ET, the House will meet to begin consideration of the article of impeachment on the House floor. Exact timing for final vote Wednesday TBD.

Democrats are confident there will be at least a handful of Republicans voting with them on impeachment Wednesday. All eyes are on No. 3 Republican Liz Cheney who has made no secret of her frustrations with President Donald Trump over the years, but comes from conservative Wyoming.

she told colleagues on a conference call Monday evening that Wednesday's impeachment vote is a "vote of conscience," a source told CNN.

Also watch Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican from Illinois. And, Rep. Peter Meijer, a Republican who told CNN on Monday night "I had a break on Wednesday around 4:17 p.m. ... The one person who could tamp down the rhetoric , the one person who could have put an end to that violence, the President, he put out that video that said ..'we love you, you're special. Come home."

don't expect dozens of Republicans to vote for impeachment, but these alternatives aren't coming to the floor in a Pelosi-controlled House of Representatives.

Yes, moderate Republicans are calling for censuring the President. Pelosi made it clear on the Democratic caucus call Monday that censure wasn't on the table. The majority of her caucus is backing impeachment.

At this point there are two votes coming to the House floor where Republicans can register their anger with Trump's actions. They can vote for Raskin's bill on the 25th Amendment or they can vote for impeachment. That's it. Democrats don't want to give them an out card or another option.

Right now, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer is trying to use a rarely used procedural move to get McConnell to bring back the Senate with him and force a trial. The move only requires McConnell and Schumer to be on the same page, but the expectation as of now is McConnell isn't going to agree with it.

As the House charges ahead, there is a growing realization in the Senate, that an impeachment trial of Trump cannot be put off for 100 days. Instead, the plan that is beginning to make the most sense is one in which the new Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer would divide each day in half. In the morning, the Senate would move ahead with confirming Biden's Cabinet and begin work on his stimulus package. In the afternoon, the Senate would reconvene as a court room where former President Donald Trump is on trial. Biden alluded to this Monday noting that it was his "hope and expectation."

Alan Frumin, the former Senate parliamentarian, Monday night who told CNN that he didn't believe there was anything precluding Schumer from dividing the day like that, essentially allowing the Senate to double track. In essence, only having a few hours in the morning could delay Biden's agenda.

Senate rules simply say that once the trial starts at 12 p.m. ET every day the Senate should be in trial, but "the adjournment of the Senate sitting in said trial shall not operate as an adjournment of the Senate, but on such adjournment, the Senate shall resume the consideration of its legislative and executive business."

At first, members thought they could potentially dispose of the articles quickly if they came to the Senate, but while there are no rules governing how long a trial has to be, members also don't want to make a sham out of the process. Essentially, if the Senate Democrats have to have a trial, if Pelosi is going to send them over, many members are arguing they need to do it right. That means expect this trial to last days, not hours.

But that hasn't stopped a dozen Republican senators -- including Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri -- and more than 100 House Republicans from planning to join with Trump to reject the Electoral College votes in states that Biden won when Congress convenes a joint session on Wednesday.

The effort will only delay the inevitable, as the objections are sure to fail in both the House and the Senate,

For weeks, McConnell privately warned his party against making an unforced error by forcing votes on the Electoral College objections, fully aware that questioning the results of the election when Congress meets Wednesday would expose rifts in his ranks and force members up for reelection in 2022 into an unenviable political position.

"I'm concerned about the division in America, that's the biggest issue, but obviously this is not healthy for the Republican Party either," said Sasse

A group of nearly a dozen Republican senators announced Saturday that they would vote for Hawley's objection when it was brought forward, unless a commission was created to study voter fraud, something that is unlikely.

Trump's close ally, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, tweeted on Sunday that proposing an election commission was "not effectively fighting for President Trump" and added "It appears to be more of a political dodge than an effective remedy."

But the long-term effects could stretch for years -- and into the 2022 Senate races, with Trump and his allies threatening primary challenges to those Republicans who cross him and vote against the objections. Aides to GOP members still trying to decide what to do next describe an anxious time for the party as members grapple with what choice to make.

Throughout Trump's four years in office, Republicans have often expressed frustration or looked the other way at some of Trump's efforts and rhetoric, though they rarely crossed him. But in the past month, many Republicans voted to override Trump's veto of a popular defense policy bill, the first override of Trump's presidency, and McConnell blocked his attempts to give people $2,000 stimulus checks instead of the $600 in the spending and Covid-19 bill that Trump reluctantly signed.

"There is substantial reason for concern about the precedent Congressional objections will set here. By objecting to electoral slates, members are unavoidably asserting that Congress has the authority to overturn elections and overrule state and federal courts," Cheney wrote. "Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states' explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress. This is directly at odds with the Constitution's clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans," she added.

Former House Speaker Paul Ryan discouraged his former colleagues from objecting to the election results in a statement Sunday, saying it was "difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans."

"I think that if you have a plan, it should [be] a plan that has some chance of working. And neither of the two proposals that have been advanced will produce a result," said Sen. Roy Blunt, a Republican from Missouri, who added: "I don't believe it has much long-term impact on our conference."

On Thursday morning, McConnell repeatedly called on Hawley to make his case to members on why he was objecting to the results from at least one state. Hawley wasn't on the call, however, and later responded by email to the conference on his rationale. Then over the weekend, multiple senators including Romney, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania skewered any questions that the election had been compromised.

Romney specifically said the effort to overturn the election was an "egregious ploy" that "may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic."

"I read Sen. Toomey's statement," Hawley said. "I recognize that our caucus will have varied opinions about this subject. That's not surprising. But I also believe we should avoid putting words into each other's mouths," Hawley wrote.

"The 2020 election is over. All challenges through recounts and appeals have been exhausted. At this point, further attempts to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential election are contrary to the clearly expressed will of the American people and only serve to undermine Americans' confidence in the already determined election results," the senators said.

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, a former longtime senator and Senate Judiciary Committee chair, called on Republicans in the Senate "who know deep down what is right for the country — not just for their party" to vote against a Trump nominee.

Let the people speak. Cool the flames that have been engulfing our country."

"If an opening comes in the last year of President Trump's term, and the primary process has started, we'll wait to the next election," Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham said in 2018 at a panel hosted by The Atlantic.

There has certainly been very little consistency among Republicans on this.

It's called delay, delay, delay."

It's not OK for Obama to do it, because it's bad for my side. But it's OK for me to do it, because it is good for my side. This is all about political power.

"character" and "temperament."

"When we weigh the equities, defending our democracy requires us to use every arrow in our quiver."

passing statehood for Washington, D.C., to likely give Democrats two more senators;

If blowing up the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees was "going nuclear," we might be about to enter a phase of "post-apocalyptic" governance in Washington.

In appearance on ABC’s “This Week,” Mr. Cassidy said of the former president, “I think his force wanes,” and contended that more Republicans would come around in time to sharing his view of Mr. Trump’s guilt for the attack on the Capitol.

Many Republican voters still see Mr. Trump as the leader of the party; some senators see Mr. McConnell as the de facto leader, given his standing in the Senate and his ties to party donors.

Mr. Graham, for his part, suggested that it was Mr. McConnell, not Mr. Trump, who could face an uncertain future if Republican candidates suffer in 2022, noting Mr. McConnell’s speech criticizing the former president.

in 2009, during the steepest economic downturn since the Great Depression, that all but three Republican senators (two of whom are now gone) refused to support a desperately needed stimulus package. And to get their support to reach the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, Obama had to cut spending well below what the economy needed. In the House, all the yes votes came from Democrats.

Both McConnell and then-House Republican leader John Boehner, he writes, realized that if “they fought a rearguard action, if they generated controversy and threw sand in the gears, they at least had a chance to energize their base and slow me and the Democrats down at a time when the country was sure to be impatient.”

they can assure moderate voters that radicalism won’t be on the table since progressives would have to negotiate with middle-of-the-roaders such as Manchin, Warner and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to get anything passed. But unlike McConnell, all three members of this moderate trio want to get things done — and want the new president to succeed.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell on Monday said the country should wait to decide on the election winner for Trump to pursue his challenges, comparing them to the 2000 election dispute decided by the Supreme Court giving George W. Bush the victory over Al Gore.

“This assumes that the problem is evidentiary,” Levitt said. “If the problem is that there really hasn’t been widespread voter fraud, there’s no evidence to present.”