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Tuesday brings the 2020 election cycle to a close with twin U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia that will decide which party controls the chamber. In addition, there’s a runoff for a seat on Georgia’s five-member Public Service Commission. Note that due to the high volume of mail-in votes, we may not know the final outcome of these races tonight.

Resources: Results • County Benchmarks

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Tuesday brings the 2020 election cycle to a close with twin U.S. Senate runoff elections in Georgia that will decide which party controls the chamber. In addition, there’s a runoff for a seat on Georgia’s five-member Public Service Commission. Note that due to the high volume of mail-in votes, we may not know the final outcome of these races tonight.

Resources: Results • County Benchmarks

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Daily Kos Communications Director Carolyn Fiddler joined Sonali Kolhatkar on Monday to talk all things Georgia ahead of the Georgia runoff elections. With a president who continues—in the face of the actual numbers, public opinion, and repeated failed legal challenges—to refuse to accept his loss, what’s next? Will Georgians rebuke the Republican Party and elect Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock?

Kolhatkar opened the show by talking about President Trump’s alarming and quite illegal behavior in pressuring Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to declare him the winner in his state. While this is a last-ditch effort, Trump appears unwilling to back down, Fiddler said: “There’s no length to which Trump won’t go … to do what he wants, to get what he wants—in this case, staying in office.”

Elaborating on Election Day turnout, Kolhatkar noted Georgia’s long history of voter suppression and why the runoffs have historically been a way to suppress voter turnout (they have also been used to prevent Black candidates from winning). This is no mistake and is happening by design, having been baked into the state’s legislative processes—almost always to the benefit of the Republicans. As Fiddler explains,

The entire Republican party in the state of Georgia has spent many years working very hard at the state legislative level, and at the regulatory level in the the secretary of state’s office, to make it more difficult for Georgians to get to the polls, to cast their ballots either by mail or in person. They make it more difficult to register; they purge voter rolls, things like that. While, yes, the secretary of state is refusing to commit a criminal act by refusing to certify election results, he has also fought very hard, along with the rest of his party, to suppress voter turnout in Georgia.

Describing the “internecine battle” in the Republican Party right now, Kolhatkar mentioned that polls are currently showing Democrats with a slim lead. While Fiddler believes party infighting and confusing messages about voting security—thus calling into question the point of casting a vote if one cannot rely on it to be counted securely—have reduced turnout of Senator Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue’s much-needed base, as she notes, polls have been inaccurate in the past and warned not to rely on them at this time:

These particular races are won and lost on the margins. Thinking that a couple-point lead … is something that should make everyone feel warm and fuzzy — that’s just smoke in the wind. There is no third-party voting in the runoff, there’s no blank line to write in Mickey Mouse if you don’t like either one, so it changes the nature of the election. And it means that whichever candidate wins in both of these races, it’s going to be just by chipping a little bit away at the other person’s electorate here and there, and adding a little bit more here and there to yours. It’s going to be very close, one way or another.

The pair also touched on how Ossoff and Warnock have successfully teamed up together in this runoff effort, and utilized messaging about the coronavirus to set a contrast between their leadership styles and that of Loeffler and Perdue’s.

You can watch the full video below.

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Glory be, after years and years and years and years of House Republicans poisoning legislation with procedural motions, which a handful of Democrats would never fail to participate in, the House of Representatives in the 117th Congress has new rules. Those new rules make that procedure, the Motion to Recommit, far less dangerous.

Now, the MTR could have been toothless all along, if Democratic leadership had been willing to be enforcers and do what Republicans do when they’re in the majority—not allow members to stray and abet Republican dirty tricks. The MTR is the minority’s last chance to amend legislation before final passage, and what Republicans always do in the minority is offer an amendment that they think will split Democrats and force them to take tough votes. Soon into the new 116th Congress, on key gun safety legislation, they did just that. They sullied a background checks bill by successfully amending it to require ICE be notified when undocumented immigrants try to buy guns. A thing that doesn’t happen, but that 26 Democrats voted for because that’s what they do all too frequently—eight times in the last two years. Well, they con’t have to worry about that now. The new rules the House has adopted don’t allow MTRs to amend legislation from the floor, they can only send the bill back to committee. That can theoretically kill bills, but it will be much easier to keep a majority together on clean legislation and it puts the MTR back into perspective, a simple procedural bill that no one really cares about.

So that’s a very good thing. But it isn’t the only very good thing the House did. It made sure that major initiatives from President-elect Joe Biden to save the nation’s economy and environment can’t be curtailed by deficit hawks. They’ve provided exemptions to the long-standing PAYGO provisions, the pay-as-you-go limitations on budget bills that requires any legislation that would increase the deficit to be offset by spending cuts elsewhere. The new rules don’t do away with PAYGO, but give the Budget Committee chair the authority to exempt any legislation categorized as health and economic response to the pandemic as well as legislation responding to climate change from the PAYGO restrictions. The door for further healthcare reform and for the Green New Deal is open a little wider now.

The majority did give Republicans one thing, which they’ll probably live to regret. They dropped a rule “barring members, officers and employees of the House from electronically disseminating, which includes sharing on social media, distorted or manipulated images, videos or audio files through official accounts.” They intended to make disseminating “deepfakes” an ethics violation. Republicans were actually opposed to that, which tells you as much about Republicans as you need to know. So instead of banning it, they asked the House Ethics Committee to study the issue and come up with recommendations. Which means we’re going to be seeing two years’ of deepfaked crap from Republicans.

There are a few more key reforms in the package passed Monday, including a prohibition of members or staff from outing or retaliating against whistleblowers, and they made sure that oversight committees will have subpoena authority over current and former presidents and vice presidents. And current and former White House personnel, too. The committees in charge of two ongoing investigations, the Oversight Committee’s investigation into the 2020 census count and the Coronavirus Crisis Subcommittee’s investigation into potential political interference in the pandemic response, can continue their work seamlessly, not having to hold organizational meetings before issuing subpoenas.

In a nod toward normalizing procedure, the House strengthened a rule from last Congress that requires most legislation to go through at least one committee process of hearings and markup—the editing process of legislation, adding amendments and altering provisions—before being allowed on the floor. It allows any member to make a point of order on the floor to send bills not meeting that requirement back to committee. It doesn’t apply to continuing resolutions to keep government operating after the fiscal year runs out, or to emergency appropriations, and it doesn’t take effect until April 1, to give committees more time and flexibility during the pandemic.

Speaking of which, it allows proxy voting in the House for the next couple of months. There are also new rules to expand diversity among hearing witnesses, to implement gender neutral language in all official language. It requires committees to address “inequities on the basis of race, color, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, age, or national origin” in their work.

It’s a smart, thoughtful package that’s been in the works for months. It by no means Senate-proofs the upcoming Biden administration, but will help on the big parts—the spending necessary to get the nation running again. Since all spending bills have to originate in the House, Democrats will have  more leverage to get adequate spending bills through.

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For the first time in more than three years, the Trump administration has approved brand-new applicants into the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. The Associated Press reports that of the more than 2,700 first-time applications submitted since mid-November, over 170 have been approved since the administration was forced to reopen the program under court order last year.

That judge’s ruling, which found that unlawfully appointed acting Department of Homeland Security Sec. Chad Wolf lacked legal authority to further slash the program, also said that officials had to extend work permits that had been shortened by the coiffed mini-fascist. Karen Tumlin, an attorney in the case against the administration, said that more than 68,000 beneficiaries who had received the shortened one-year permits now had two-year permits.

The numbers come from data submitted by the federal government to the judge overseeing the case. DACA’s full reimplementation following Judge Nicholas Garaufis’ order came nearly six months after the Supreme Court ruled that the administration had unlawfully ended the policy. But officials not only defied that ruling, but then also issued a memo, signed by Unlawful Chad, further slashing existing protections from two years to just one.

Garaufis “ordered two-year renewals reinstated and required Homeland Security to report how many new applicants were rejected from June to Dec. 4,” the AP said. “The figure: 4,383.”

Tumlin said in her thread “[t]his shows how ready people were to apply” but couldn’t, because the administration was defying the Supreme Court on an order it didn’t like. Only following Garaufis’ November ruling did the administration reopen DACA (though also dragged that out for several weeks as well). But as Tumlin also notes, most of the applications submitted in the past weeks remain unprocessed by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the immigration agency the administration nearly shut down last year under supposed budget concerns. 

As CBS News’ Camilo Montoya-Galvez noted in his report following the reopening, the program’s survival in the face of never-ending attacks beginning with former Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions’ termination of the policy in September 2017 has been remarkable. “But DACA outlived Sessions,” Montoya-Galvez writes. But, Republicans are still attacking the program, with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, one of the most corrupt politicians in the nation, leading a charge to try to kill it in another court.

The judge in that case, the anti-immigrant Andrew Hanen, has not yet issued a decision following a hearing late last month. President-elect Joe Biden’s administration has confirmed that it will take steps to protect young undocumented immigrants immediately after his swearing in, with his incoming chief of staff Ronald Klain telling NBC’s Meet the Press that “[w]e’re going to protect the Dreamers on day one.”

If Hanen rules against DACA, immigration policy experts say that the executive has still wide latitude when it comes to protecting young immigrants and their families. “The Biden administration needs to be clever about this because there’s a sadly decent chance that Judge Hanen strikes down DACA the same day the announcement is made,” American Immigration Council’s Aaron Reichlin-Melnick tweeted in November. “They should be ready to use alternatives, like Parole in Place or Deferred Enforced Departure.” But DACA still stands right now, and advocates like Tumlin are continuing to urge young immigrants to keep applying.

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Hospitals nationwide are once again reaching capacity as cases of the novel coronavirus continue to increase. As healthcare facilities become overcrowded with patients and space is limited, patients are being moved to hallways, gift shops, and even cafeterias to be treated. While states across the U.S. are experiencing a surge in COVID-19 cases, California has set new and drastic records for both infections and deaths. Despite at one time being considered an example of how to control the virus, the state now leads with one of the highest coronavirus infection rates in the U.S.

With more than 15,000 cases reported in a single day this week, Los Angeles County surpassed the 800,000 case mark. Paramedics are facing a shortage as 911 calls increase and more residents require hospitalizations in the area. “The current surge of patients … it’s kind of a hidden disaster,” Cathy Chidester, director of the county Emergency Medical Services agency, said. “It’s not a fire. It’s not an earthquake. It’s not a train wreck that’s right in the public view and they can see what is happening and they can avoid that area. It’s all happening behind the doors of households and hospitals.”

According to Chidester, reports have indicated that ambulances are having to wait seven to eight hours before unloading patients because of hospitals being overwhelmed. As a result some patients must be treated in the ambulance. This also causes ambulances to be unable to respond to other medical calls. “We’re running out of ambulances, and our response to 911 calls is getting longer and longer,” Chidester said.

As a result of ambulances experiencing backups due to a surge in cases related to the pandemic, local fire departments are stepping in, proving that the COVID-19 crisis is impacting not only hospitals but other emergency needs.

 “This strain on hospitals affects patients with all types of needs: trauma care from accidents, heart attacks, strokes, and the many other reasons-including COVID-19-that any resident might on a moment’s notice need emergency transport and access to hospital-level care,” the Santa Clara Public Health Department told ABC News.

Cases of COVID-19 have more than doubled in the California county since last month. According to NBC News, a significant number of deaths and cases reported this weekend were due to a backlog of cases reported during the holiday season. About 21% of patients in the county’s hospital are reported to be in the ICU.

“The strategy for stopping the surge is fairly straightforward. When people stay away from other people, the virus cannot spread as it is doing now. The more we stay home and the more we avoid in-person activities with other people we don’t live with, the more we reduce the spread of the virus,” Director of Public Health Barbara Ferrer said. “While health officer orders create the framework for protecting each other, it is our actions that stop people from being hospitalized and dying. When we follow the public health safety directives with intention, we avoid getting and transmitting COVID-19; this is how we stop the surge,” Ferrer added.

As Los Angeles County works to battle this crisis, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers announced Friday that it would help with oxygen delivery systems at six of the county’s older hospitals, NBC News reported. “By working to upgrade challenged oxygen delivery systems at these older hospitals we can improve the ability to deliver life sustaining medical care to those who need it,” said Mark Ghilarducci, director of the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services.

Additionally, some hospitals are reported to not be able to maintain sufficient pressure and may even freeze as a result. Because of this, military experts are saying they will look into upgrades needed as affected hospitals experience surges across the county.

Experts noted that not all those hospitalized have had a prior history or underlying conditions. According to Ferrer, the number of young adults who have tested positive for the virus daily has more than doubled. While many of these individuals have not died from the virus, the rate of infection following their diagnosis is high, NBC News reported. “With no decline in the number of new cases, our hospitals continue to be overwhelmed,” Ferrer said. “As more and more people are rushed to hospitals, the tragic fact is that hundreds more people will die every week from COVID-19. These trends unfortunately will continue into January, and if we do nothing, definitely beyond.’’

With over 40 million residents in the state, Los Angeles County has seen at least 40% of California’s coronavirus-related death and a third of its 2.2 million cases. Black and brown communities have been hit by the virus the hardest and continue to face more obstacles in receiving health care. As of this report, the U.S. has reported more than 20.7 million cases of coronavirus, according to The New York Times.

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Donald Trump’s inability to believe that he lost, and lost big, is a big problem for his fellow Republicans. But, as ever, it’s a bigger problem for the United States.

Trump’s refusal to engage with a reality he doesn’t like—the reality that he’s a loser—has pushed Republicans to discredit their party and seriously damage U.S. democracy. And he’s still lashing out at any Republican who doesn’t 100% back his assault on the election results, meaning that his die-hard supporters are tarnished for years to come while the people who half-heartedly refused to go along with him are dragged down now.

Trump is truly in denial, some people around him told The Washington Post. “He incontrovertibly thinks he won—and he thinks he won big—and the people around him don’t disabuse him of that because they don’t want to get crosswise, and because they told him he was going to win, so they can’t have it both ways,” someone identified as “one of Trump’s closest advisers” said. “It’s not about his inability to move on. It’s about his inability to even diagnose what happened. He won’t yet conduct the autopsy, if you will.”

“Honestly, I think that he cannot handle being the sitting Republican president that lost Georgia,” according to “a GOP official in frequent touch with the White House,” who also pointed out the total lack of strategy or consideration involved in Trump’s attacks on the Georgia election results, saying “Let’s say you get Raffensperger to commit fraud and get you the 11,000 votes—what does that even get you?” After all, “You still need three other states. I don’t understand what the ‘win’ is here. There’s no strategy.”

But Trump has the best and brightest minds of the Republican Party on board with this lack of strategy. Mostly. 

Former Supreme Court clerk Josh Hawley plans to object to counting the electors from Pennsylvania when Congress counts the electors on Wednesday. Fellow former Supreme Court clerk Ted Cruz isn’t saying what state or states he plans to object to. He’s just going to object. To something. Thereby cementing his loyalty to the guy who called his wife ugly and said his father was involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. And none of them are doing it because they join Trump in believing the election was stolen, as one Washington Post source who actually went on the record under his own name pointed out.

“I think it is revealing that there is not a single senator who is arguing that the election was stolen from President Trump,” Josh Holmes, “an outside adviser to McConnell,” said. “The divide in the party is whether it’s appropriate to pull the pin on an electoral college grenade, hoping that there are enough responsible people standing around who can shove it back in before they detonate American democracy.”

It’s performative, and the performance is for Trump and—crucially—for his base, who Trump has scammed into believing his lies about the stolen election, and who people like Hawley and Cruz want to vote for them in 2024. This assault on the will of the voters is basically the kickoff of the 2024 Republican presidential primary. Other Republicans are on board out of fear now, as Trump lashes out at anyone who doesn’t lick his boots enthusiastically enough. Sen. Tom Cotton, another 2024 hopeful, declined to go along with the effort to overturn the election in Congress on Wednesday, and Trump quickly threatened him by tweet, saying “Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!”

Trump is fomenting violence in the streets of Washington, D.C., for Wednesday while whipping up an assault on election results in Congress the same day. This is an unspeakably awful moment in the history of a nation that has had its full share of unspeakably awful moments. The only way to salvage anything positive out of it is to discredit not just Trump but the Republicans who have so cravenly supported him—many of them in the hope that not only will it be advantageous to them in the 2024 primary but that these maneuvers will be a practice run for successfully overturning an election in the future—and the violent white supremacists who are his literal foot soldiers.

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Well that didn’t take long. The last-ditch legal effort by the elite strike force team of Trump lawyers to decertify the vote in Georgia is over. District Court Judge Mark Cohen denied Trump’s motion asking the court to decertify the election. The suit was leveled against Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and, typical of the elite strike force, was submitted on the fly and a bit haphazard and scattershot.

The campaign had also asked, in a December 31 filing, that the court hear the case before Wednesday’s Electoral College vote certification in the Congress. They didn’t bother to also share the complaint with lawyers for Kemp and Raffensperger, which is kind of a necessary step for a lawsuit. That sloppiness was part of why Cohen denied the injunction. “Although Plaintiffs counsel could have requested through this Court’s ECF filing system an immediate hearing over this past holiday weekend, and obtained a hearing before the duty district Judge, counsel did not do so,” he wrote. “Consequently, this Court was not informed of these filings until this morning at 9:38 a.m. when the case was assigned.”

The Trump team objected to allowing a livestream or public phone line for the hearing, probably as a result of just having been burned in Trump’s attempt at intimidating Raffensperger into a criminal conspiracy to commit election fraud. The less the public knows, they have apparently learned, the better. But there was enough live coverage on Twitter to relish the arguments. Like the defense summation of the suit: “Throwing crap against the wall.”

Trump’s problem, Judge Cohen said at one point in the hearing, is that “he just can’t live with” the the fact that he lost.  “It’s hard to accept sometimes.” He chided the lawyers for their sloppiness and for their attitude that if the state courts didn’t provide them the outcome they wanted, they could just “bop on over to federal court” to get what they wanted. This judge didn’t appreciate that court shopping.

Perhaps sending a message to the the Republican lawmakers trying to make their own political hay by trying to toss out the election results, Cohen pointedly declared “I took and oath,” and said he cannot undo an election. Certification of this election is going to happen this week. It might take until January 7, because of those grandstanding Republican senators, but it is going to happen. It’s not going to be the end, because Trump is delusional and probably thinks he can keep the office by force.

The courts—one united branch of government, including the state courts—have spoken. The election is over. Trump lost. Now it’s just that handful of insurgent Republicans, and they are going to have to make a choice. They’ve already made it clear that they’ll put Trump and their own political aspirations ahead of country. They’ll have to decide if they’ll stick to that if it means bloodshed.

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There’s no room left in the Republican Party for people who believe that The People should pick their electors rather than the other way around. Without any supporting evidence whatsoever, Donald Trump’s MAGA cultists believe the election was stolen from him—particularly in Georgia—and any GOP official who claims otherwise must be dealt with.

That means any Republican who doesn’t lend their full-throated support to Trump’s fascist coup attempt could find themselves in the crosshairs. That list includes everyone from GOP members of Congress to Georgia’s Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to Vice President Mike Pence, who will be walking a tightrope on Wednesday as he presides over congressional certification of the Electoral College votes.

After audio leaked Sunday of the hour-long call in which Trump begged, threatened, and cajoled Raffensperger to “find” the votes to overturn the election, Trump’s delusional charges saw Raffensperger as the villain in the episode.  

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

Trump has also been applying maximal pressure to Pence, urging him to somehow steal the victory from the jaws of defeat during congressional certification. At his Monday night rally in Georgia, Trump said he hoped Pence “comes through for us.” On Tuesday, Trump followed up with the faulty claim that Pence “has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.”

But the more immediate threat to GOP lawmakers who fail to support Trump’s fascist coup effort will come in the form of potential primaries from the right in 2022.

Alex Bruesewitz, one of the organizers of the Stop the Steal organization, told Politico the group planned to “put some money behind” ousting those Republicans. And Trump has already been agitating to drum up challengers to congressional lawmakers who have been insufficiently loyal. After Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas declined to back Trump’s coup, Trump warned him on Twitter that Republicans “NEVER FORGET!”

Trump has also been on the war path against Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, who predicted Trump’s coup would “go down like a shot dog” in the Senate.

So far, at least 140 House Republicans and 13 Senate Republicans have vowed to oppose the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Some Republicans believe that could ultimately help Biden moving forward by dividing the GOP caucuses against themselves. 

“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,” Republican political consultant Alex Conant told Politico.

Conant also said he was skeptical that Trump would spend two years devoted to inserting himself into GOP primary politics after he wasn’t that active in them even while he was president. 

But that remains to be seen. No one is more petty than Donald Trump and few if any humans will be more bitter than him once he is ousted from office. Unless Trump’s time is consumed with fighting off criminal investigations, he will almost surely be a political player in Republican politics for the next couple—if for no other reason than to raise money to fund his legal defense.