Power Up: The great Republican Kraken up

THE GREAT GOP KRAKEN UP: Republicans are turning on each over how far to take their support of President Trump’s unending quest to overturn the election. More than half of the House Republican Conference signed on to an amicus brief supporting a Texas lawsuit seeking to overturn the 2020 contest in the Supreme Court, along with 17 Republican attorneys general. 

The 11th hour legal bid is the latest oath of fealty required by Trump — and is dividing his party at the state and federal level, turning governors against each other and their state’s attorneys general and splitting congressional delegations and members of Congress. 

So far, the Trump campaign has lost over 50 court cases seeking to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s victory and failed to provide any evidence of election fraud.  And the lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton (R) repeats unsubstantiated claims that have already failed to gain traction in lower courts, arguing that pandemic-related changes to election laws in four battleground states won by Biden — Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania — allowed for voter fraud.

While legal experts, prominent Republicans, and Democrats alike have called the suit a publicity stunt destined to fail, many Republicans are nonetheless rallying to overrule their own voters to placate a president who can’t accept his loss at the ballot box. 

There is perhaps no clearer picture of the iron clad grip Trump maintains on the GOP than the specter of a majority of House Republicans signing on to the Texas case. Trump enlisted Pence and conservative allies to “see what else can be done to help the president,” our colleagues Rachael Bade, Josh Dawsey and Tom Hamburger report. 

• “ … Trump’s conservative allies in the House have been privately buttonholing GOP senators, seeking to enlist one to join in objecting to slates of electors on Jan. 6, according to multiple people familiar with their effort who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss their plans.”
• The pressure campaign could set the stage for a dramatic showdown when Congress meets in joint session in January to count electoral votes and declare Biden as the 46th president: “ … if a member of the House and a member of the Senate challenge a state’s results, the whole Congress would vote — and the GOP plotting all but assures the routine process could take a dramatic turn, forcing Republicans to choose between accepting the election results or Trump’s bid to overturn the outcome.” 
• This still applies: “This really is our version of a polite coup d’etat,” Thomas Mann, senior resident scholar at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, told the Associated Press last month. “It could end quickly if the Republican Party acknowledged what was going on. But they cower in the face of Trump’s connection with the base.”

Separately, there’s a new push from Trump loyalists and over two dozen members of the House Freedom Caucus who “signed a letter to Trump requesting that he direct Attorney General William P. Barr to appoint a special counsel to investigate ‘irregularities’ in the election — though Barr himself said last week that the Justice Department had found no evidence to overturn the election results,” Rachael, Josh and Tom report. 

• Contradicting his boss, Barr told the At the start of December that the Justice Department has not uncovered “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

It’s unclear when the justices will decide whether to accept the new Texas case targeting four swing states. But Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia have asked the Supreme Court justices to dismiss the effort, arguing the filings have already been examined and dismissed by lower courts, our colleague Robert Barnes reports. 

• Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D): “The cascading series of compounding defects in Texas’s filings is only underscored by the surreal alternate reality that those filings attempt to construct … Texas’s effort to get this court to pick the next president has no basis in law or fact. The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”
• Georgia’s Attorney General Christopher M. Carr (R) points out his state has already conducted three recounts reaffirming the state results. “Texas nevertheless asks this court to transfer Georgia’s electoral powers to the federal judiciary,” Carr wrote. “Respect for federalism and the constitutional design prohibits that transfer of power, but this court should never even reach that issue.”

President Trump is fixated on personally corralling support for the unsubstantiated challenge — and trying to quiet those who oppose him.  

• Trump personally scolded Carr in a phone call for opposing Paxton’s lawsuit and warned him not to rally more Republican support against the litigation, scooped the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein.
• Meanwhile, the Republican attorneys general who joined Texas’s bid  were invited to a private lunch with the president in the Cabinet Room on Thursday. “By the close of business Thursday, 21 states — including four led by Republican governors — had filed objections, calling Texas’ request unconstitutional, unfair and outrageous,” the Dallas Morning News’s Todd Gillman reports. 
• “The controversy has the union nearly evenly divided. Siding with the four defendants, 20 states and the District of Columbia filed a motion opposing Texas’ lawsuit. They included three states with Republican governors: Maryland, Vermont and Massachusetts.”

There were some notable GOP House members who didn’t back the lawsuit, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and GOP Conference chair Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.). McCarthy declined to comment on the challenge but others publicly criticized the president’s legal pursuit. 

• Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), the former chief of staff to Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.)  tweeted the case “represents a dangerous violation of federalism” and “sets a precedent to have one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of other states.”
• Outgoing Rep. Paul Mitchell (R-Mich.) tweeted he has “fond memories … of a Republican Party that defended our Constitution, respected the voice of voters, committed to fairness and opportunity for all — you know a policy platform not a personal political tool.” 

In the Senate: Reaction to the lawsuit among senators was mixed. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah.) called the lawsuit “dangerous and destructive of the cause of democracy,” per CNN’s Manu Raju. And Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) called it “very unusual.” 

But others like Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) have continued to entertain the president’s attacks on the electoral system. Two GOP senators representing Kansas — Sen. Jerry Moran and Sen.-elect Roger Marshall —  were split on whether the president should concede. 

• Moran appeared ready to move on from the election: “Unless a court makes some other decision, the electoral college is the defining outcome of the presidential race,” Moran said. 
• Marshall, however, voiced his support for the Texas lawsuit: “I think we should exhaust every legal remedy possible and investigate it until we have confidence in future elections,” Marshall told reporters Wednesday.
• Bottom line: “Most Republicans see little reason to confront Trump and get crosswise with a President who has 89 million Twitter followers and legions of loyal supporters, even as many are privately aghast at his actions,” writes Raju. 

Keep your eye on the ball: Republicans legislatures have turned “to battles they might be able to win — attempts to limit or undermine the future use of the vote-by-mail ballots that so infuriated Mr. Trump,” per the New York Times’s Michael Wines. 

• In Georgia, for example, “state senators pledged on Tuesday to eliminate no-excuse absentee voting, require a photo ID to obtain a ballot, outlaw drop boxes and scrap a court agreement to quickly tell voters about signature problems on ballots so that they could be fixed.” 
• “In Pennsylvania, Republicans preparing for the legislative session that convenes on Jan. 11 are seeking co-sponsors for bills to stiffen identification requirements for mail ballots, tighten standards for signature matching and, in one case, to repeal the law that allows anyone to vote absentee without an excuse.”
• “Michigan Republicans have signaled that they want to review a 2018 ballot initiative approved by two-thirds of voters that authorized no-excuse absentee balloting as well as same-day registration and straight-ticket voting.”
• “Trump soured them on voting by mail,” Amber McReynolds, the chief executive of the National Vote at Home Institute, told Wines. “By attacking the method of voting that was most popular this year, he may have depressed his own turnout.”
• TL;DR: “ … whether to tighten mail ballot rules in the name of stopping fraud seems likely to be a core issue when states take up election matters next year.” 

FDA PANEL RECOMMENDS VACCINE: “Federal advisers endorsed the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine, making it all but certain the Food and Drug Administration will authorize the vaccine on an emergency basis within hours or days, kicking off an unprecedented effort to inoculate enough Americans to stop a rampaging pandemic,” Laurie McGinley, Carolyn Y. Johnson and Joel Achenbach report.

What happens next: “If as expected, the FDA follows quickly with an emergency authorization, the shots will start being moved to the states within 24 hours, according to officials at Operation Warp Speed,” our colleagues write. That means inoculations could begin as soon as next week.

• The CDC will also weigh in: “After the FDA authorization, an advisory committee to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention will vote on whether to recommend the vaccine and for which groups. First in line to be inoculated are health care personnel and residents and staff of long-term care facilities, according to its previous recommendations. But states will have the final say on who gets the first shots and where they are administered. Those considerations are complicated by extreme logistics challenges, including the sub-Antarctic storage temperatures the vaccine requires.”

The breakthrough comes at a harrowing moment: CDC director Robert Redfield said for the next 60 to 90 days more people will die per day “than we had at 9/11 or we had at Pearl Harbor.” (2,977 people were killed during the Sept. 11 attacks; 2,390 people were killed during Pearl Harbor.)

• Just yesterday: “107,000 people were hospitalized with covid-19, the disease caused by the virus, and a record 3,347 deaths were reported by state health departments, topping the milestone reached one day earlier. Within days, the country will likely surpass 300,000 deaths since the pandemic’s arrival.”

BIDEN’S TEAM OF FRIENDS: The president-elect added Denis McDonough as his Veterans Affairs secretary and named Susan E. Rice to head his Domestic Policy Council,” Matt Viser and Alex Horton report.

• What we’ve learned from his picks so far: “The choices provided a fuller picture of the type of government Biden is building, one that relies heavily on officials who have spent decades in public service — and has several historic firsts among the nominations — but has had less space for rising Democratic stars and representatives of the party’s liberal wing. That is prompting opposition not just from Republicans but also from some of the Democrats and liberals who Biden kept united during the general election campaign.”
• It’s the friends that count: “For all the talk that Mr. Biden is abiding by a complicated formula of ethnicity, gender and experience as he builds his administration — and he is — perhaps the most important criterion for landing a cabinet post or a top White House job appears to be having a longstanding relationship with the president-elect himself,” the New York Times’s Michael D. Shear and Shane Goldmacher report.

Just a taste of the opposition: Some veteran groups are upset that McDonough, former President Barack Obama’s final chief of staff, never served in uniform — if confirmed, he would be just the second nonveteran to lead the second largest federal agency since it was elevated to the Cabinet-level in 1989, Alex reports. “Is this just a crony pick, or an afterthought?” one longtime veterans advocate asked of the choice.

Some Black farmers and civil rights groups are upset about Biden bringing back Agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack: Part of the frustration is due to the extensive and very public push for Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio), who instead became Biden’s pick to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich, Ximena Bustillo and Liz Crampton report.

• NAACP president Derrick Johnson warned Biden that many Black voters in Georgia, especially Black rural voters, “have not forgotten that Shirley Sherrod, the former head of USDA rural development in Georgia and a well-respected civil rights leader, was wrongfully forced out of her job under Vilsack’s leadership after a deceptively edited video featured on Breitbart falsely suggested she was racist,” they write . Vilsack and the Obama White House later apologized for her ouster. 
• In the same conversation, Biden warned the “defund the police” slogan would hurt his party in the Georgia runoffs, the Intercept’s Ryan Grim reports based on audio of the call.

And Biden is facing immense pressure of his Interior secretary decision: “A group of more than 100 female leaders, including Native women, activists and celebrities, released a letter asking him to choose Rep. Deb. Haaland (D-NM.), who would be the first Native American cabinet secretary,” the Times’s Sydney Ember reports.

BIDEN, HARRIS ARE TIME’S PERSON OF THE YEAR: “The Democratic ticket was an unlikely partnership: forged in conflict and fused over Zoom, divided by generation, race and gender. They come from different coasts, different ideologies, different Americas. But they also have much in common, says Biden: working-class backgrounds, blended families, shared values,” Charlotte Alter writes in the cover story. 

• Biden said he’s been reading about FDR’s first 100 days: “We’re the only country in the world that has come out of every crisis stronger than we went into the crisis. I predict we will come out of this crisis stronger than when we went in.”

Why they were selected: “For changing the American story, for showing that the forces of empathy are greater than the furies of division, for sharing a vision of healing in a grieving world …,’ Time editor in chief  Edward Felsenthal writes. 

At issue is the massive annual defense bill, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA): “Paul is objecting to swift passage of the NDAA, forcing senators to remain in Washington for an extra day as he filibusters the $740 billion legislation. But the government needs to be funded past Friday — and the short one-week spending bill can’t be passed before then without agreement from all 100 senators to vote.”

• Paul said he would drop his objection if the GOP punted the NDAA vote to Monday. But that would require some procedural actions and leadership wanted to wrap up the defense legislation this week.
• Key quote: “It’s really just a function at this point of letting the clock run and seeing if we can get cooperation. Some of it’s our side, some of it’s their side,” said Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-S.D.).

STIMULUS TALKS REMAIN IN DISARRAY: “Congressional bickering over a new economic relief package escalated as lawmakers traded blame and put negotiations over critical legislation on the brink of collapse,” Mike DeBonis and Jeff Stein report.

Where we’re at it: “House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested that discussions over emergency legislation could stretch beyond Christmas, even though multiple critical programs expire at the end of this month and there are fresh signs the economy is weakening,” our colleagues write.

• McConnell doesn’t see the bipartisan deal happening: “Staffers for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also told leadership offices in both parties that McConnell sees no possible path for a bipartisan group of lawmakers to reach an agreement on two contentious provisions that would be broadly acceptable to Senate Republicans.”
• Just how bad things are: “Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) said he remembers campaigning for Biden in the late fall and confidently telling supporters that Congress would approve some form of stimulus. He now concedes that in hindsight, that sentiment was ‘stupid,’” per Politico’s Burgess Everett, Heather Caygle and Sarah Ferris.

Trump administration executes Brandon Bernard: “Bernard’s execution is one of five death sentences the federal government hopes to carry out before Biden takes office next month,” Mark Berman reports. It was the first the first lame-duck federal execution since 1889.

• This aggressive schedule has been criticized: “The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Bernard’s stay request, clearing the way for his execution to proceed. The court’s three liberal justices — Stephen G. Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — said they would have granted the stay. An hour later, officials said Bernard’s execution had been carried out and he was pronounced dead at 9:27 p.m. Bernard was the ninth federal death-row inmate executed this year.”

The Hunter Biden investigation is unlikely to go away soon: “Unless Trump’s Justice Department clears Hunter Biden of wrongdoing before leaving office, the new president will confront the prospect of his own newly installed administration deciding how or whether to proceed with an inquiry that could expose his son to criminal prosecution. Already some Republicans are demanding a special counsel be appointed to insulate the case from political influence,” the Times’s Peter Baker reports.

• William P. Barr worked to not let word of it leak: “The attorney general has known about a disparate set of investigations involving Hunter Biden’s business and financial dealings since at least this spring … and worked to avoid their public disclosure during the heated election campaign,” the Wall Street Journal’s Sadie Gurman and Rebecca Davis O’Brien report.

Lone senator blocks creation of Smithsonians for Latinos, women: “Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) blocked consideration for legislation to establish a National Museum of the American Latino and an American Women’s History Museum as part of the Smithsonian Institution, reasoning that the U.S. does not need ‘separate but equal museums,’” CNN’s Paul LeBlanc reports. The House previously passed legislation to establish the Latino museum in July.