ICYMI: Special "TRUMP SEDITION"

-- Trump Claims Constitution Invalid Because It Was Signed by Dead People

-- The Devil Goes Back to Georgia

-- 'Fight like hell': grievance and denialism rule at Trump Georgia rally

-- How the Republican Party Went Feral

-- Why Congress Should Impeach Trump Again

-- Trump Threatens Pence On Electoral College Certification At Last Georgia Rally

-- MAGA activists plot revenge on Republican ‘traitors’

-- Why Georgia matters

Trump Claims Constitution Invalid Because It Was Signed by Dead People

DALTON, GEORGIA ( The Borowitz Report )—Advancing a new conspiracy theory during a rally on Monday, Donald J. Trump claimed that the United States Constitution is invalid because it was signed by dead people.

“All we’re hearing is, the Constitution this and the Constitution that,” Trump said. “I’m telling you, as sure as you’re sitting there, that every person who signed that piece of paper is dead.”

Trump said that he had his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani investigate the signatories to the Constitution, “and he found a scandal bigger than Hunter Biden’s laptop.”

“Their signatures do not match the signatures of any living person,” he said. “Not only are these people dead, but they have been dead for a long, long time. This should never have been allowed to happen.”

In addition to questioning the legitimacy of the dead people’s signatures, Trump claimed that Alexander Hamilton’s “should be thrown out twice.”

“First of all, he’s dead, and second, he wasn’t born here,” he claimed.

The Devil Goes Back to Georgia
The low-T coup attempt marches on

Last night the president of the United States held a rally during which he called on the vice president to refuse to certify the election results in order to keep himself in power against the will of the people.

President Trump held this reckless event against his own government’s health   guidelines   and without acknowledging the contagion that on his watch has ravaged the country. You would never know from listening to him that the pandemic just had its   deadliest week so far . He long ago gave up even the pretense of attempting to ameliorate the loss of life.

But other than that Mrs. Lincoln. . .

It is important to state clearly what it is happening during this extraordinary interregnum, given that our senses have been dulled by the president’s bat-guano avalanche and the legacy media’s inability to properly contextualize this comically inept yet historically unprecedented antidemocratic project.

It’s honestly hard to blame them. This is not what a coup is supposed to look like.

And the ringleader is a man who at times tonight seemed barely capable of comprehending the illicit words that were on the teleprompter a few feet from his face, which does not not exactly inspire confidence in his ability to successfully execute a coup.

Trump’s   rambling , incoherent performance was marked by what seemed to be a case of TDS—Testosterone Deficiency Syndrome—so bad that it caused even the maskless cult members who packed into the Dalton, Georgia event site to become   bored   by the show.

But Trump’s unintelligibility and TDS do not take away from the gravity of the undertaking. The rally was ostensibly in support of Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue’s Senate run-off campaigns, but in reality it was an opportunity for the president to ensure that said senators—and any others who dare cross him, like Mike Lee, whom he name-checked more than once—see that their only path forward is by participating in his effort to overturn the election.

Luckily for Loeffler, this fact was not lost on her. She recognizes that   her entire political program is in service to the whims of this man and the crowd that gathered before   them, thus she opened her own remarks with a paean to his attempt to seize power.

“I have an announcement, Georgia. On January 6, I will object to the Electoral College vote,” she said to raucous cheers. “That’s right. We’re gonna get this done!”

(“This” in that sentence is, again, to be clear, the coup. “We’re gonna get [the coup] done” is what she was saying there, in case there is any question for those heading to the ballot box on Tuesday about where she stands on maintaining American democracy.)

The crowd rewarded Loeffler with a chant—it apparently was “Stop the Steal,” but it sounded like “Plot the Steal,” which makes much more sense in context.

Trump went on to lavish praise upon Marjorie Taylor Greene, the newly minted QAnon It Girl in Congress.

The Republicans who are like Brian Kemp—that is, those who do not have Loeffler’s chameleon-like ability to morph into whatever the MAGA masses want—did not fare as well during the speech. Trump used the opportunity to bully them and send a message to anyone else who might cross him.

“I’m going to be here in a year and a half and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state,” Trump said.

Because that’s what this was all about. Despite the timing and despite the lip service to Loeffler and Perdue, it wasn’t an effort to campaign for Senate races that Trump couldn’t care less about.

It was a president taking one last opportunity to get on a   hickory stump   and to bully all of those who have submitted to him. To ensure that they go with him the last, hopeless mile. To guarantee that their obituaries will start with their willingness to attempt to end the American democratic experiment in service to this devilish buffoon who knows that he’s been beat but wants to bring the rest of us down with him.

'Fight like hell': grievance and denialism rule at Trump Georgia rally
Unrepentant president urges voters to support Republicans in the Senate
runoffs on Tuesday and veers off script with bogus claims of a stolen election

An unrepentant  Donald Trump   has urged voters in Georgia to back Republicans in Tuesday’s Senate runoffs and vowed revenge against Republican state officials who refuse to overturn his own defeat.

On a chilly night at a remote airport in Dalton, the US president mercilessly aggravated divisions within his own party, embracing loyalists and castigating perceived traitors. While it was ostensibly a campaign rally on behalf of Senate candidates Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, he could not resist veering off script to push bogus claims of a stolen election.

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“We won the presidential election, we won it big,” Trump falsely told a sympathetic crowd, “and we’re going to win tomorrow”. Loeffler duly joined him on stage and promised to join a dozen other Republican senators objecting to Joe Biden’s electoral college win on Wednesday.

Trump noted that the press “didn’t like” a   Saturday phone call   in which he can be heard badgering   Brad Raffensperger , Georgia’s secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to thwart Biden’s victory there. He promised to punish Raffensperger and state governor Brian Kemp, also a Republican.

“Your governor, your secretary of state are petrified of Stacey Abrams,” he said, referring to a Democratic voting rights activist who lost to Kemp in 2018. “What’s all that about? They’re say they’re   Republicans . I really don’t think they can be.”

The president added ominously: “I’m going to be back here in a year-and-a-half and I’m going to be campaigning against your governor and your crazy secretary of state.”

Control of the Senate depends on Tuesday’s elections in   Georgia   and it remains unclear whether Trump’s scattergun interventions will help or hurt the Republicans’ cause against Democrats Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.

His relentless war on the integrity of the election has triggered party infighting and fears that some disillusioned voters may stay away from what they regard as a broken system. His potentially illegal phone call to Raffensperger, revealed on Sunday, could cause further damage and fire up Democrats.

Trump sought to resolve the contradictions by arguing: “You must deliver a Republican victory so big the Democrats can’t steal it or cheat it away.”

But he went on to spend less time on Loeffler and Perdue’s merits than his own sense of grievance and denialism, reeling off a long list of numbers that he claimed showed he was robbed of victory in Georgia. The state counted its votes three times before certifying Biden’s win by a 11,779 margin. Officials found no significant irregularities.

More than once, Trump read from a script that implied Senate wins are vital to keep a president Biden in check, only to break off and deny Biden’s legitimacy. “They’re not taking this White House. We’re going to fight like hell.”

He also repeatedly claimed that he had won Georgia in 2016 and did so again by an   even bigger margin in 2020 . “There’s no way we lost Georgia. This was a rigged election. We’re still fighting it.”

Previewing Wednesday’s meeting of Congress to ratify the electoral college vote, he said of Mike Pence, the vice president who will oversee proceedings: “I hope Mike Pence comes through for us.”

Dozens of Trump campaign lawsuits have been tossed by courts including the supreme court. Trump complained: “I’m not happy with the supreme court. They are not stepping up to the plate.”

Trump flew to the venue on his Marine One helicopter, greeted by cheers for what was possibly his last rally as president. Tents outside sold “Stop the steal” flags and shirts. At the small regional airport, two giant US flags hung from cranes, with numerous more flags dotted around the makeshift arena. Two big video screens displayed the message: “Save the Senate & Save America.”

The crowd was warmed up with familiar Trump rally music, some of which gained new poignancy. Queen’s lyrics, “We are the champions, no times for losers” was immediately followed by Frank Sinatra’s “And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain ...”

Perdue could not attend because he is in quarantine after coming into contact with someone who has Covid-19 but he sent a video message. Trump and other speakers warned that victories for Ossoff and Warnock would send America down a path of far-left socialism.

The president’s eldest son, Don Jr, urged: “Don’t let Georgia be the starting point for the radical left in the United States Senate because that’s who they’re running. There is no such thing as a moderate Democrat. That party is long gone. It’s now a Marxist socialist party, a communist party.”

Don Jr warned against Republican apathy because of the current election disputes, suggesting that taking their ball home and not voting “would be the dumbest statement in the history of politics”. He pleaded: “Guys, when you’re at a disadvantage, you don’t take your ball home. You fight harder!” His voice cracked with fury on the final word.

The crowd chanted: “Fight! Fight!”

There were also speeches by Trump’s daughter Ivanka and new congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has expressed support for the QAnon conspiracy theory. She said: “We’re not going to let Georgia go to two radical socialists.”

Some attendees wore masks but many did not and there was little physical distancing and little concern about Trump’s explosive call with Raffensperger.

Clayton Bentley, 60, a retired fraud investigator from Rome, Georgia, was wearing a blue “Trump: Keep America great” cap and tucking into a big bag of popcorn. “I know Trump was only asking about the things going on here,” he said. “He said all I need is 11,000 votes. I don’t feel like it’s a bad thing.

“He was saying let’s get to the truth and let’s do what’s right to get to the bottom of it. I feel that phone call was fine. He’s the president; he should be able to call anybody.”

Janie Lopez, 42, a counsellor from San Benito, Texas, agreed: “He wants to make sure they cross the i’s and dot the t’s and this is the final count. He wants to make sure this is a fair election.”

Lopez, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, added: “I believe he won the election. How many past presidents have run for a second term and lost? It doesn’t happen often.”

Susan Huff, 77, also felt that a Trump defeat did not make sense. “I do believe Trump was cheated out of the win. You can’t have 73m votes and not win. You can’t have rallies like this and not win. Something went wrong somewhere. I’ll always believe that.”

Huff, a retired school teacher wearing a red “Make America great again” cap, acknowledged that Trump’s attempts to discredit the process could deter Republicans from voting in the Senate runoffs.

“Some people have said because of the election in November they won’t come out to vote. But I hope they understand that if they don’t vote to get these people in, we’re in big trouble. I don’t want socialism in our country: the only people who make money are the ones at the top.”

How the Republican Party Went Feral
Democracy is now threatened by malevolent tribalism

There have always been people like Donald Trump : self-centered, self-aggrandizing, believing that the rules apply only to the little people and that what happens to the little people doesn’t matter.

The modern G.O.P., however, isn’t like anything we’ve seen before, at least in American history. If there’s anyone who wasn’t already persuaded that one of our two major political parties has become an enemy, not just of democracy, but of truth, events since the election should have ended their doubts.

It’s not just that a majority of House Republicans and many Republican senators are backing Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss, even though there is no evidence of fraud or widespread irregularities. Look at the way David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are campaigning in the Senate runoffs in Georgia.

They   aren’t running on issues , or even on real aspects of their opponents’ personal history. Instead they’re claiming, with no basis in fact, that their opponents are   Marxists   or   “involved in child abuse.”   That is, the campaigns to retain Republican control of the Senate are based on lies.

On Sunday Mitt Romney   excoriated   Ted Cruz and other congressional Republicans’ attempts to undo the presidential election, asking, “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?” But what principle does Romney think the G.O.P. has stood for in recent years? It’s hard to see anything underlying recent Republican behavior beyond the pursuit of power by any means available.

So how did we get here? What happened to the Republican Party?

It didn’t start with Trump. On the contrary, the party’s degradation has been obvious, for those willing to see it, for many years.

Way back in 2003 I   wrote   that Republicans had become a radical force hostile to America as it is, potentially aiming for a one-party state in which “elections are only a formality.” In 2012 Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein   warned   that the G.O.P. was “unmoved by conventional understanding of facts” and “dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.”

If you’re surprised by the eagerness of many in the party to overturn an election based on specious claims of fraud, you weren’t paying attention.

But what is driving the Republican descent into darkness?

Is it a populist backlash against elites? It’s true that there’s resentment over a changing economy that has boosted highly educated metropolitan areas at the expense of rural and small-town America; Trump received 46 percent of the vote, but the counties he won represented only   29 percent   of America’s economic output. There’s also a lot of white backlash over the nation’s growing racial diversity.

The past two months have, however, been an object lesson in the extent to which “grass roots” anger is actually being orchestrated from the top. If a large part of the Republican base believes, groundlessly, that the election was stolen, it’s because that’s what leading figures in the party have been saying. Now politicians are citing widespread skepticism about the election results as a reason to reject the outcome — but they themselves conjured that skepticism out of thin air.

And what’s striking if you look into the background of the politicians stoking resentment against elites is how privileged many of them are. Josh Hawley, the first senator to declare that he would   object   to certification of the election results,   rails   against elites but is himself a graduate of Stanford and Yale Law School. Cruz, now leading the effort, has degrees from Princeton and Harvard.

The point isn’t that they’re hypocrites; it is that these aren’t people who have been mistreated by the system. So why are they so eager to bring the system down?

I don’t think it’s just cynical calculation, a matter of playing to the base. As I said, the base is in large part taking its cues from the party elite. And the craziness of that elite doesn’t seem to be purely an act.

My best guess is that we’re looking at a party that has gone feral — that has been cut off from the rest of society.

People have compared the modern G.O.P. to organized crime or a cult, but to me, Republicans look more like the lost boys in “Lord of the Flies.” They don’t get news from the outside world, because they get their information from partisan sources that simply don’t report inconvenient facts. They don’t face adult supervision, because in a polarized political environment there are few competitive races.

So they’re increasingly inward-looking, engaged in ever more outlandish efforts to demonstrate their loyalty to the tribe. Their partisanship isn’t about issues, although the party remains committed to cutting taxes on the rich and punishing the poor; it’s about asserting the dominance of the in-group and punishing outsiders.

The big question is how long America as we know it can survive in the face of this malevolent tribalism.

The current attempt to undo the presidential election won’t succeed, but it has gone on far longer and attracted much more support than almost anyone predicted. And unless something happens to break the grip of anti-democratic, anti-truth forces on the G.O.P., one day they will succeed in killing the American experiment.

Why Congress Should Impeach Trump Again
And this time, he should be convicted. The country cannot risk his becoming president again.

The emergence of an  audio recording  of President Trump pressuring the Georgia secretary of state to overturn the results of the election is a harrowing moment in the history of our democracy. And though the number of his days in office is dwindling, the only appropriate response is to impeach Mr. Trump. Again.

Whether he acknowledges it or not, President Trump is leaving the White House on Jan. 20 — but right now, there is nothing stopping him from running in 2024. That is a terrifying prospect, because the way he has conducted himself over the past two months, wielding the power of the presidency to try to steal another term in office, has threatened one of our republic’s most essential traditions: the peaceful transfer of power.

Fortunately, our founders anticipated we would face a moment like this, which is one reason   Article I, Section 3   of the Constitution entrusts Congress with the power not only to remove a president but also to prevent him or her from ever holding elected office again. Mr. Trump’s conduct over the past two months has left our legislators with no choice but to use it. That impeachment inquiry would take time, far more than Mr. Trump has left in office. But it would be well worth it.

Since the election was called in favor of President-elect Joe Biden, Mr. Trump has been relentlessly fomenting doubts about its legitimacy — even as many federal and state courts, including ones whose judges were appointed by Mr. Trump himself, have ruled against his claims. He has   reportedly inquired   about the idea of enlisting the help of the military to keep him in power.

Most recently, on the phone with Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, he said, “I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” He added: “We won this state,” even though he didn’t. In a democracy, you don’t find votes. You count them. Most strikingly, Mr. Trump threatened the Georgia officials with criminal prosecution if they didn’t comply, saying leaving the vote counts intact would be a “big risk.”

This kind of threat may sound familiar, because an eerily similar abuse of power led to Mr. Trump’s impeachment just over a year ago. Senator Susan Collins of Maine explained her vote to acquit him by saying she thought he had learned “a pretty big lesson.” Clearly, Mr. Trump learned a different lesson — that he was above the law. It’s just as William Davie from North Carolina, discussing the position of the presidency at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, predicted: A president who viewed himself to be unimpeachable, he said in 1787, would “spare no efforts or means whatever to get himself re-elected.”

It’s time for Congress, once and for all, to put an end to this.

No one wants to put the country through the turmoil of another impeachment. But we also can’t afford to look the other way — for several reasons.

For one, we must establish a precedent that a president who tries to cheat his way to re-election will be held accountable. Sure, this attempt may not have succeeded, but a failed coup should itself be alarming enough. And who is to say there won’t be a closer election in the future, with a more competent authoritarian candidate — whose party also has control of the House of Representatives? We need to make sure that Congress has ensured that candidates cannot strong-arm their way into re-election.

We also need to set a precedent that a lame duck president can still be held accountable. If an incumbent, say, threatened to nuke Iran unless the Electoral College sided with him, we would want to have a mechanism by which we could remove him from office. In our Constitution, impeachment is that mechanism, but it is worthless if we never use it.

And last, we cannot risk Mr. Trump’s becoming president again — or for that matter, even running again with a chance of winning. This isn’t a point about ideology; it’s a reflection of the fact that our system may not be able to withstand this lawless man returning to the highest office in the land. Emboldened by our failure to hold him accountable for abusing his power in his first term, who knows what he would do in a nonconsecutive second term? The damage to our institutions from his first four years in office will take generations to undo. Our democracy might not be able to handle another four.

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, was able to protect Mr. Trump the last time — no doubt because he was afraid of what a truly rigorous trial might show. But he may no longer be able to do so. For one thing, Mr. Trump will soon lack the power of the presidency to dole out favors and punish his enemies. For another, the Senate composition will be different. Already, Democrats have flipped seats in Arizona and Colorado. Republicans who voted to acquit him, like Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, have shown signs they are finally   willing   to stand up to him.

And Georgians will go to the polls to decide who will represent them in the Senate. Mr. Trump’s preferred senators, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, would no doubt try to block an inquiry into his misdeeds. But if these senators lose their seats, a full and robust inquiry in the Senate could be the result, with Chuck Schumer as majority leader.

In 2008, a young member of the Judiciary Committee said, “The business of high crimes and misdemeanors goes to the question of whether or not the person serving as president of the United States put their own interests, their personal interests, ahead of public service.” That congressman’s name was Mike Pence — and he was exactly right.

We need to convict President Trump and make sure he can never call the White House home again.

Trump Threatens Pence On Electoral College Certification At Last Georgia Rally

President Donald Trump stayed about as on-message as he’s shown himself capable of being at his last rally in Dalton, Georgia, on Monday night, hours before Election Day polls open for the double-barrel senatorial runoffs. That meant  lots  of tangents.

In the opening minutes of the speech, Trump made an ominous “joke” about Vice President Mike Pence, who will be presiding over Congress’ joint session on Wednesday when the chambers vote on the Electoral College vote certification.

“If he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him quite as much,” Trump chuckled about Pence.

Multiple Republicans — including Sen. Kelly Loeffler (R-GA), as she gleefully reminded the crowd during Monday’s rally — have pledged to object to the certification of President-Elect Joe Biden as winner. The gambit has virtually no chance of succeeding; it would take a majority in both chambers to have any effect more than a symbolic one.

Rep. Marjorie Greene (R-GA), the QAnon-friendly congresswoman who represents Dalton, cheered Loeffler’s announcement when she took the stage directly afterwards. Greene too will vote against the certification.

Trump meandered through his speech, taking some time for one of his favorite new segments: the Kemp roast. The President has fully turned on Gov. Brian Kemp (R), a loyal ally, livid that the governor won’t help overturn his state’s election results.

“I’ll be here in about a year and a half campaigning against your governor,” he promised. “I guarantee that.” At other points in the speech, he candidly stated that he doesn’t like holding rallies for other people, so one has to presume that these hypothetical future rallies would be purely anti-Kemp.

But his speech didn’t just go after the officials overseeing Georgia’s election. He also targeted the judicial branch, saying that the Supreme Court — to which he has appointed a third of the members — isn’t “stepping up” in regards to deeming him the winner of the election.

Occasionally, he returned to the task at hand: encouraging Republicans to vote for Loeffler and Sen. David Perdue (R-GA) — who is quarantining after coming into contact with someone infected with COVID-19 — on Tuesday.

On that topic, he likely turned in the performance that members of his party wanted: he urged people to turn out and vote, warning them of the threat of a Democratic Senate and using the “last line of defense” argument frequently made by Perdue and Loeffler.

Some Republicans had worried that he’d let his own rigged election grievances fully bleed into the senatorial runoff, convincing his followers that voting would be pointless. But the only remedy to the “rigged election,” he said, is to “flood polling places with a historic tidal wave of Republican voters tomorrow.”

Aside from the few minutes of message discipline, Trump spent the vast majority of the speech rehashing his election conspiracy theories. He read aloud from letters and tossed around numbers and phrases hard to follow for those without an intimate knowledge of the fabricated schemes. In some places, he regurgitated almost word-for-word the   arguments   he made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in a call over the weekend during which he urged him to “find” nearly 12,000 Trump votes to reverse the result.

But Trump found his way back in the end.

“We will make America great again!” he finished, to cheers and the opening swell of “YMCA,” urging Perdue and Loeffler to “go get ’em.”

MAGA activists plot revenge on Republican ‘traitors’
The swift move to vengeance offers a preview of how Trump and his MAGA community plan to reshape the GOP in the coming months

MAGA figureheads and pro-Trump activists are vowing to excommunicate Republicans who vigorously oppose the doomed effort to keep President Donald Trump in power.

The threats have played out in recent days with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was once seen as a possible ally in Trump’s efforts to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the swing state. But Raffensperger has consistently refused to validate Trump’s baseless voter fraud claims, and on Saturday, he bluntly told the president the rigged-election theories were simply wrong. After a recording of the Saturday call leaked to the press, the MAGA world erupted with incandescent range.

“A national security threat,” proclaimed Charlie Kirk, MAGA youth leader and Turning Point USA co-founder. “Brad Raffensperger should immediately be investigated.”

In the coming days, that MAGA revenge complex could target everyone from low-level members of Congress to Vice President Mike Pence, as Congress meets on Jan. 6 to formally certify Biden’s victory. “Republicans,” Trump warned on Twitter, “NEVER FORGET!” speaking to lawmakers who have said they will not oppose Biden’s certification. And Trump allies are plotting to fund potential pro-MAGA primary challengers to oust those disloyal Republicans.

“We’ll put some money behind” trying to oust these Republicans, said Alex Bruesewitz, one of the organizers of Stop the Steal, an organization linked to high-profile MAGA personalities that is helping organize a major Jan. 6 pro-Trump rally in Washington.

The swift move to vengeance offers a preview of how Trump and his MAGA community plan to reshape the GOP in the coming months — creating Trump loyalty tests for Republicans, then working to evict anyone who doesn’t fall in line. The goal is to identify those who are most worthy of inheriting the MAGA base with Trump out of office. But the result may be that no one except Trump can rally the MAGA coalition.

“I think that Trump and his supporters in the base, or his supporters in the Republican Party, are going to continue to be a big part of the party for the foreseeable future, including in 2022,” said Alex Conant, a GOP political consultant and the former communications director for Sen. Marco Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Most congressmen don't wake up in the morning worried about their general election. They worry about their primary.”

At the moment, Trump is focused on eviscerating Raffensperger, who has rebuffed Trump’s attempts to subvert the Georgia election results — and so, too, is his base.

While Trump’s allies launched a normal fusillade of personal attacks against Raffensperger — former House Speaker and Trump ally Newt Gingrich   called him “anti-Republican”   — they also called for criminal charges. Some suggested it had been illegal for the call to be recorded, even though   Georgia law only requires one party   in a conversation to consent to an audio recording. Others went further.

“Traitors in our midst,” tweeted Chanel Rion , White House correspondent at the pro-Trump outlet OAN, along with the hashtag “#InvestigateRaffensperger.”

Next, MAGA attention will focus on Capitol Hill, where Congress will meet on Jan. 6 in a joint session to formally certify November’s presidential election. Pence will oversee the proceedings as vice president. Historically, the gathering is an afterthought, a noncontroversial rubber stamp on an already settled outcome.

But in the Trump era, the president, scores of Republicans and throngs of his supporters are insisting that lawmakers should refuse to sign off on the results, incorrectly arguing that the election was rigged.

Trump-supporting entities are trying to concoct novel constitutional powers that Pence could wield at the last minute from his largely ministerial perch, which mostly involves opening the envelopes with each state’s Electoral College votes, and then handing them to a secretary for recording. Alexander Macris, a video game writer who became known for his role in Gamergate, the online harassment campaign targeting women,   suggested in a viral essay   that Pence could re-interpret the 1877 Electoral Count Act in a way that would allow him to simply not count the votes.

Edward Foley, the director of the Election Law Project at Ohio State University, flatly rejected the interpretation.

“I mean, it was raised in the 19th century, but it’s never been accepted in the sense that the Supreme Court's never adopted it. It's never even prevailed at Congress,” he said.

That hasn’t stopped pro-Trump outlets like The Gateway Pundit from making tantalizing offers directed at Pence.“Pence can place himself in the history books alongside Thomas Jefferson or he can sign off on the destruction of the United States as we know it,”   read an op-ed on the site .

Others have traded carrots for sticks: Prominent conspiratorial-minded figures, such as pro-Trump Georgia lawyer Lin Wood, claimed that Pence could be arrested, tried for treason and executed by firing squad if he did not act on Trump’s behalf. And out in the wilds of the QAnon conspiracy community, the process might not even matter: Pence, some argued, might be a body double, put in place by a Satanic cabal to further its plots.

Lawmakers in Congress, meanwhile, have different concerns on their hands: Many will soon seek reelection. And for a certain brand of politician, going MAGA is the safest bet.

“Most of these people that won during the [2020] primaries, they said, ‘I'm the most like Trump.’ And that's why most of them won their primaries,” said Breusewitz, the Stop the Steal organizer. “And so if they go back, the voters will hold them accountable.”

Perhaps conscious of this, several newly-minted representatives have vowed to keep resisting even after Biden is sworn in. Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) pledged to push for a commission to investigate the election. Others are planning to be among those protesting in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 6. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, who both gained notoriety for promoting QAnon conspiracies earlier in their political careers, are scheduled to speak at the rally.

As for those who don’t sufficiently fight against Biden’s inauguration, Bruesewitz has promised they will be punished.

“When we say every Republican that does not stand strong with the president will get a primary challenger, that does not mean we believe that we can beat every single one of them,” he said. “But what it means is we will make them spend their money. And we will urge their donors to not support them.”

Even with at least 140 House Republicans and 12 Senate Republicans vowing to oppose certification on Wednesday, Congress will still sign off on Biden’s win. Only a simple congressional majority is needed to formalize the results, which is all but guaranteed given the current makeup of Congress. And Pence himself has remained chilly on the topic, with a spokesperson saying that while the vice president backed the lawmaker’s right to object, it was up to them to actually prove fraud.

For the majority of Republicans, Conant argued, “This effort to undermine the integrity of the election will only help Joe Biden. And I say that because it'll leave Biden's opposition in Congress divided and many Republicans defending a very unpopular position.”

Still, for the right type of Republican, a vast MAGA empire is within reach: Trump’s fundraising numbers skyrocketed after the election, as his campaign solicited donations to fight nebulous voter-fraud allegations. Tapping into that energy could give the most fervent MAGA Republicans a boost in the coming years.

But, as Conant noted, that only works if Trump stays involved in Republican races around the country — far from a certainty once he leaves the White House.

“I suppose if Trump made his life mission to defeat everyone that wasn't loyal with him until the very end, maybe it could have an impact,” Conant said. “Just count me skeptical that he's going to spend the next two years playing in Republican primary politics, when he never showed that much of an interest in doing that when he was president.”

Still, Breusewitz, the Stop the Steal organizer, argued Republican voters are now solidly aligned with Trump.

“Republican voters want to see the party grow in a direction towards the president’s, and continue with the ‘America First’ and the MAGA movement,” he said.

Why Georgia matters

Two Senate seats in Georgia are on the line today , and with them control of the Senate. I have no idea what, if any, effect The Phone Call will have on the outcome. But what’s really on the line?

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell
arrives at the U.S. Capitol in Washington
on Jan. 3.
Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times

Clearly, this election isn’t about what the two Republicans are trying to make it about. No, their opponents Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock aren’t Marxists or socialists of any kind. And the truth is that even if Democrats win both races, they won’t have the votes for an expansive progressive agenda: The deciding senator will be West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, and I don’t think even Republicans could portray him as a Marxist (although on second thought I could be wrong about that.)

But if Democrats do take those seats, they will control the Senate’s agenda — and perhaps even more important, Mitch McConnell won’t. This will have major economic implications.

I’m not very worried about the next year or two. As I wrote last week, this isn’t like the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, when an overstretched private sector needed extended support from deficit spending, and Republican-enforced austerity took a serious toll on recovery. I expect a rapid short-term economic rebound once we have widespread vaccination, even without new fiscal stimulus.

There is, however, a longer-term need for a big increase in public investment, for multiple reasons. It would help sustain the economy beyond the vaccination bounce; it would help repair our decaying infrastructure; and it could be an important part of a climate strategy.

How should we pay for this surge in public investment? We actually don’t need to pay for it at all. Even before the pandemic we were an economy awash with more savings than the private sector wanted to invest, so that the government could borrow money very cheaply. In effect, markets have been begging Washington to borrow even more, and it would be good for everyone if Congress obliged and used the money to invest in the future.

And the politics look good, too. Polls suggest strong support for a major infrastructure bill, and this support extends to red as well as blue states. Infrastructure spending would surely pass the House, and would probably pass the Senate with bipartisan support if it ever reached the floor.

But in that case, why didn’t Donald Trump ever deliver the infrastructure legislation he promised on the campaign trail? Why did “It’s infrastructure week” become a running gag line?

Part of the answer is sheer incompetence on the part of the outgoing administration. Trump surrounded himself with people who had absolutely no policy chops; they didn’t know enough to legislate themselves out of a wet paper bag. (The one exception was trade policy, where Robert Lighthizer, the protectionist U.S. trade representative, actually knew his way around.) So Trump basically relied on Republicans in Congress to fill in all the details of his policies.

But those Congressional Republicans, Mitch McConnell in particular, didn’t want a big infrastructure bill, even though it would have helped Trump politically. McConnell’s objections probably flowed not from concerns that such a bill wouldn’t work, but from fear that it would — and in working, would help to legitimize an expanded role for government.

And if McConnell wouldn’t let infrastructure come to the floor with a Republican in the White House, he certainly won’t let it get a vote if he’s still majority leader under Joe Biden.

So a few thousand votes one way or the other in those Georgia Senate races could either unlock trillions of dollars in investment in our future, or keep that potential locked up for years to come.