A last-ditch effort by President Trump and his allies to overturn the election thrust Washington into chaos Saturday as a growing coalition of Republican senators announced plans to rebel against Senate leaders by seeking to block formal certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
The push to subvert the vote is all but certain to fail when Congress gathers in joint session Wednesday to count electoral college votes already certified by each state. Still, Trump is continuing to press Republican lawmakers to support his baseless claims of election fraud while calling on thousands of supporters to fill the streets of the nation’s capital on Wednesday in mass protest of his defeat.
A group of 11 Republican senators and senators-elect, led by Ted Cruz of Texas, vowed to join Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) in challenging votes from some contested states, calling for an “emergency 10-day audit” to investigate Trump’s unfounded claims. Hours later, Trump wrote on Twitter that there would be “plenty more to come.”
The move amounts to an open rebellion against Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who last month pleaded with GOP senators to avoid a public debate over the legitimacy of November’s election results. McConnell has personally congratulated Biden on his victory.
The high drama at the Capitol is set to punctuate a momentous week in politics that will delineate power at the dawn of the Biden presidency. The new Congress to be sworn in Sunday will reduce the size of the Democratic House majority. Trump and Biden will both campaign Monday in Georgia ahead of twin runoff elections for the U.S. Senate on Tuesday that will determine which party controls the upper chamber. Later in the week, members of the Republican National Committee will gather at a Florida beach resort to chart the party’s future beyond Trump’s presidency.
“What’s happening [Wednesday] foreshadows what’s going to be happening for the following 24 months,” said Peter Hart, a veteran Democratic pollster. “It’s a question of do we start to move to the future or get locked into the past. . . . This [could] continue to rip apart the fabric of this country that has already been torn through.” Read more at Washington Post
2020 may be over, but election season is not.
Control of the Senate — and with it, the fate of President-elect Joe Biden’s agenda — will be determined on Tuesday as voters in Georgia head to the polls in twin Senate runoff elections. Both the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff need to defeat the Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue for Democratic control of the chamber. Above, early voting in Marietta, Ga.
While polls suggest that the state’s crucial Senate seats are up for grabs, Republicans have grown worried about strong turnout in Democratic areas and mixed messages from President Trump, who baselessly called the Senate races “illegal and invalid.”
Congress meets on Wednesday to certify Mr. Biden’s victory. Twelve Republicans, including Senators Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and Marsha Blackburn, plan to back a futile attempt to overturn Mr. Biden’s win by voting “no,” defying the results of a fair and free election. Vice President Mike Pence, who also serves as the presiding officer of the Senate, signaled his support.
The last-ditch effort comes after another failed litigation attempt. A judge dismissed a lawsuit that aimed to pressure Mr. Pence to overturn the election results. Read at New York Times
Nearly a dozen Republican senators and senators-elect led by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas said Saturday they will reject electors from certain states won by President-elect Joe Biden, citing unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud and calling for an emergency 10-day audit of the results, an unprecedented attempt to thwart the democratic process.
The senators contend they are not trying to reverse the election results, but rather give voice to those who don’t believe it was conducted fairly, despite no investigation nor court finding any evidence of wrongdoing.
Still, President Trump and many of his Republican allies see next week’s joint session of Congress to certify Biden’s victory as their last stand to contest the election results, even if doing so is largely political theater to undermine and delay Biden’s inevitable win.
“To wit, Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states,” the senators wrote in a joint statement. “Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”
Sens. Ron Johnson (Wis.), James Lankford (Okla.), Steve Daines (Mont.), John Neely Kennedy (La.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Mike Braun (Ind.) — along with Sens.-elect Cynthia M. Lummis (Wyo.), Roger Marshall (Kan.), Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) and Tommy Tuberville (Ala.) — joined Cruz. Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) has already said he will contest the electoral college vote certification. Read more at Washington Post
Romney, other GOP senators blast fellow Republicans election 'ploy'
Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, denounced the decision by 11 of his Republican colleagues in the Senate to oppose the certification of President-elect Joe Biden's victory, calling it an "egregious ploy" that "dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic."
"More Americans participated in this election than ever before, and they made their choice. President Trump’s lawyers made their case before scores of courts; in every instance, they failed," Romney said in his statement released Saturday evening. "The Justice Department found no evidence of irregularity sufficient to overturn the election. The Presidential Voter Fraud Commission disbanded without finding such evidence."
The Utah senator called out Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and the other 11 members who back the move, saying that their argument for objecting “ignores the widely perceived reality that Congress is an overwhelmingly partisan body.”
Sens. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska also responded to their colleagues’ joint statement, announcing their intent to vote to certify the results.
In a series of scathing tweets, Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., declared his intention to vote to affirm the 2020 presidential election results and criticized Sens. Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz for their decision not to.
"A fundamental, defining feature of a democratic republic is the right of the people to elect their own leaders. The effort by Sens. Hawley, Cruz, and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in swing states like Pennsylvania directly undermines this right," Toomey said.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska also declared she will vote to certify the 2020 presidential election results during a joint session of Congress Wednesday, hours after her Republican colleagues announced their plan to join the objection.
"I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and that is what I will do January 6 – just as I strive to do every day as I serve the people of Alaska," Murkowski said in a statement. “I will vote to affirm the 2020 presidential election. The courts and state legislatures have all honored their duty to hear legal allegations and have found nothing to warrant overturning the results.” Read at USA Today
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — The homes of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were vandalized over the weekend after Congress adjourned Friday without securing $2,000 stimulus checks.
Messages like "where's my money" and other expletives were written with spray paint across the front door and bricks of the Kentucky Republican's house in Louisville. Police spokesman Dwight Mitchell said the incident happened around 5 a.m. Saturday and there was "minor damage of graffiti on a window and door." The department has no suspects.
Meanwhile, at the San Francisco home of Pelosi, a Democrat, vandals painted graffiti on the garage door and left a pig's head on the sidewalk around 2 a.m. Friday morning, police said. Vandals also wrote messages like "$2k cancel rent" and left fake blood on Pelosi's driveway, according to local news reports. San Francisco Police said its Special Investigations Division was investigating. Read at USA Today
As U.S. officials learn more about the recent hacking by Russian agents, alarm is growing over just how spectacularly America’s defenses failed.
While officials are still trying to understand whether what the Russians pulled off was simply an espionage operation or something more sinister, it’s clear the breach of upward of 250 federal agencies and businesses was far broader than first believed.
Intentions behind the attack remain unknown. Some analysts say the Russians may be trying to demonstrate their cyberarsenal to gain leverage against President-elect Joe Biden before nuclear arms talks. Above, President Vladimir Putin of Russia last month. Read at New York Times
LOS ANGELES – Former CNN talk show host Larry King has been hospitalized with COVID-19 for more than a week, the news channel reported Saturday.
Citing an unidentified person close to the family, CNN said the 87-year-old King is undergoing treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Read more at USA Today
Researchers are scrambling to learn why some coronavirus patients lose their sense of smell and taste. Some experts fear huge numbers of people may lose them permanently.
Once a rare diagnosis, a loss of smell and taste is often the first — and sometimes only — symptom of the coronavirus. Most patients regain their senses, usually within weeks. But for a minority of people like Michele Miller, above, the loss persists, putting them at risk for nutritional deficits and unintended weight loss.
And in California, Los Angeles County, already in the throes of a devastating surge in coronavirus cases after Thanksgiving travel and gatherings, is being hit with a spike from Christmas festivities. Read at New York Times
Erika P. Rodriguez for The New York Times
Desperate to control a new variant of the coronavirus, Britain quietly changed vaccination procedures to allow for a mix-and-match regimen.
If a second dose of the vaccine a patient originally received isn’t available, or if the manufacturer of the first shot isn’t known, another coronavirus vaccine may be substituted, health officials said. The new guidance contradicts guidelines in the U.S., where regulators noted that the authorized coronavirus vaccines “are not interchangeable.”
Meanwhile, the U.S. is falling behind in its vaccination campaign because federal officials left much of the planning to overstretched local health officials and hospitals, like the one in Puerto Rico, above. “We’ve taken the people with the least amount of resources and capacity,” one expert said, “and asked them to do the hardest part of the vaccination.” Read at New York Times
Parwiz/Reuters
Assassins in Afghanistan are killing civil servants, media figures, rights workers and security force members. But no one has taken responsibility.
The Afghan government would not provide the exact number of assassinations recorded in the country last year, but The Times has documented the deaths of at least 136 civilians and 168 security force members in such killings, worse than any other year of the war in the past two decades. Above, the coffin of the journalist Malalai Maiwand in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, last month.
Most officials believe that the Taliban are behind the attacks, but others fear that factions are using chaos as a cover to settle scores, in an echo of Afghanistan’s past civil war. The killings are a worrying sign of how much remains uncertain as the U.S. prepares to withdraw troops from the country. Read at New York Times
PARIS — An illegal New Year’s Eve party that drew around 2,500 people to a small French village came to an end Saturday morning, more than 24 hours after authorities had to abort an initial attempt to shut the rave down.
“Sound equipment and generators were seized,” France’s Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said Saturday morning, adding that the organizers would be “severely punished.”
Around 1,200 penalty notices have been issued, local officials said, with most of them being linked to violations of coronavirus restrictions. Read more at Washington Post
NEW DELHI — India on Sunday granted emergency approval to its first vaccines — Oxford-AstraZeneca and homegrown Covaxin, as it gears up to undertake an unprecedented immunization program for the country of more than 1.3 billion.
The announcement of India's approval of the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine came days after the regulators in Britain gave their nod to the vaccine and marks a big step forward for the world's second worst-affected country by the coronavirus pandemic. India aims to administer the vaccine to 300 million people in the first phase and the rollout could begin in the coming days. Read by Washington Post
Texas said Saturday that it had fired Tom Herman as its football coach and, hours later, announced that it had hired the wizard at the helm of top-ranked Alabama’s offense in a bid to restore the Longhorns to championship contention.
But the dismissal of Herman and the hiring of Steve Sarkisian, a former head coach at Southern California and Washington, immediately renewed tough questions about the merits of paying out millions of dollars in buyouts when college athletic departments are under extraordinary financial strain.
Herman was 32-18 during his four seasons in Austin, with a 4-0 record in bowls and, to the frustration of Texas fans, no Big 12 championships. Although Texas had signed Herman to an extension in May 2019, the university on Saturday cited the “measured progress” for the football program and said that a coaching change was warranted “to get us on track to achieving our ambitious goals.”
Texas could ultimately pay about $15 million in private funds to settle Herman’s contract. And although Texas is one of the richest athletic departments in college sports, it has acknowledged financial troubles during the coronavirus pandemic. Read more at New York Times