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It’s that time of the week! Our YouTube show airs every Tuesday, 1:30 PM PT/4:30 PM ET, so join us live to talk about the Georgia runoff elections as we pass the time before the polls close. 

I did some tea-leaves reading yesterday, you can read that here. (Bottom line: I’m cautiously optimistic, but it’ll be close.) 

Co-host Kerry Eleveld wrote about how this runoff’s results will give us deep insight into the next several cycles. We’ll talk about those stories, and reports of today’s turnout on the show. 

If all goes well, this show will also be a podcast starting next week (still working through some logistics). I’m definitely excited to see what was an experiment turn into something more concrete and long-lasting. Feel free to drop any questions for us here, we’ll try to answer as many as we can on the air. Cheers, and Happy New Years! It’s not 2020 anymore. 

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The spending bill finally signed into law by impeached president Donald Trump late last month contained nearly $1.4 billion for border fencing—a stupid, wasteful, and frankly insulting move, considering how many families are still suffering after receiving a pittance of $600 in survival checks (that is, if they were even eligible). Border Report says that House Democrats initially included zero dollars for the wall, but were forced to compromise with Republicans who threatened to torpedo the whole package.

But with Joe Biden set to take office in just over two weeks, a Texas Democrat from the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee said that because the bill’s text doesn’t include the word “wall” (it’s unclear if that was intentional), the president-elect doesn’t have to use the funds for Trump’s pet project. “There is no definition of ‘barrier systems’ and, therefore, the Biden administration can use that for so many options,” Rep. Henry Cuellar told Border Report.

That’s all good, but we also know that Trump is a vindictive, cartoon villain asshole who is purposefully blowing up pristine mountains in the borderlands even though he doesn’t have enough time left in office to put up new wall there. So what if he rushes to, say, enter new contracts with that money in the two weeks and change he has left as president? That can be undone, House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee chair Lucille Roybal-Allard noted. She also said that she and fellow Democrats had “pushed back hard against this funding,” according to Border Report.

“Biden will be able to cancel those contracts with little loss of funding since the contracts will have been signed so recently,” she wrote in a memo according to Border Report, “and the federal government has wide discretion to cancel contracts for convenience.” Border Report said that Biden has several options for the money, including returning to Congress and asking legislators to “rescind and re-appropriate the remaining funds for another purpose at U.S. Customs and Border Protection or other agencies within the Department of Homeland Security.”

However, we also know that CBP is an abusive agency that believes it’s accountable to no one, and because of its own actions, should be getting less money, not more: “Since 2003, the budget of CBP, which includes both the Border Patrol and operations at ports of entry, has also nearly tripled, rising from $5.9 billion in FY 2003 to a high of $17.1 billion in FY 2019,” American Immigration Council reported last year. So there’s gotta be better ways to spend this money, folks, because the border is already militarized as is.

Biden also has wide latitude to cancel existing contracts already building Trump’s wall, despite fretting from some media about stopping construction dead in its tracks. The Washington Post reported last month that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers estimates that Biden could in fact save the U.S. roughly $2.6 billion if he stops construction immediately after taking office. The initial savings is an estimated $3.3 billion, but officials said they believe the incoming administration will have to pay roughly $700 million to terminate agreements with private contractors building the monstrosity.

Trump’s wall has been a disastrous, corrupt, and expensive monument to hatred—and a monument that we, not Mexico, have had to pay for. In the process, it’s cut through the lands of indigenous peoples, disrupted natural ecosystems, and taken human lives. Terminating those federal contracts, ending construction, and tearing down Trump’s wall won’t just save the nation billions that could possibly be used for real emergencies; it’s is an important step in beginning to mend at least some of the damage created in the name of racism. 

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On Tuesday morning, Republicans in Pennsylvania refused to seat a Democratic state senator because his Republican opponent would not concede. The vote has been counted. It’s been recounted. It’s been certified. It’s stood up to numerous court challenges. Still, Republicans decided to leave the citizens of the 45th district without a senator rather than swear in the certified winner, simply on the basis that his Republican opponent still claims to have won.

Sound familiar? Donald Trump has demonstrated for Republicans that all traditions, regulations, and even laws are only meaningful if someone enforces them. And that when you have the power … there are no laws. On Wednesday, Republicans will execute what is, hopefully, the final move in their series of attempts to illegally hold onto power following Trump’s election loss in 2020. 

There seems little doubt that they will lose. But there has to be zero doubt that there will be punishment.

Imagine a bank. Now imagine a bank robber. One night, that robber tries to pick the lock on the bank and is caught, but … he’s let go. The next night he throws a rock through the bank’s window and is caught, but he’s let go. The next day he’s back with an attempt to bribe the security guard. The day after that it’s a threatening note to the teller. The next day he has some hired muscle. The next day, something else. So long as the bank robber is certain that he can attempt to get at the contents of the bank day after day with no consequence, he will. And because there is no consequence to the attempts, the outcome is certain: One day, the robber will walk away with the money.

That’s where we are now, not just with Donald Trump, but with the whole of the Republican Party. It’s been almost exactly a year since Republicans in the Senate made it clear to Trump they would use their power to back his power, assuring him there would be no consequences for his actions in Ukraine. The perfectly predictable Susan Collins followed this event by going on national TV to announce that she believed Trump had learned his lesson. She was absolutely right.

And it wasn’t only Trump. This has been a mutual learning experience, one that reinforced everything they had learned before.

After all, when William Barr was attorney general under George H. W. Bush, he showed how that position would be used to absolve White House staffers of serious crimes. When Newt Gingrich took control of the House, he showed how tradition and procedure in that chamber could be used to turn it into an engine for hate and disinformation. When Mitch McConnell laid hold of the Senate, he demonstrated how the most slender majority could simultaneously ruin the legislative branch while stacking the judiciary. Finally, Trump has built on the real legacy of Ronald Reagan—running roughshod over the law; dividing the nation for both power and profit.

In the 2020 elections, Trump used false claims of election fraud to arrange a $500 million personal windfall of funds from his supporters, while spending a trivial amount on recounts he knew wouldn’t work, and court cases he knew would fail. The real action was behind the scenes. That’s where Trump was making calls like the one he made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and which Pennsylvania Lt. Gov. John Fetterman confirms have also been made to Republican officials in that state. 

Fetterman also serves as a good example of what happens when officials refuse to go along with a coup in progress. On Tuesday, Republicans simply voted to remove Fetterman from his constitutional role presiding over the Senate. When Fetterman refused to accept this or surrender the podium, they simply stood someone else up beside him. The Republicans then proceeded to swear in every Republican state senator, and refused to swear in the Democratic senators until the—again, duly elected and certified winner—for the 45th district was removed from the room. Fetterman was left a bystander to events, with his attempts to uphold both tradition and the law waved away by men who realize that power trumps both.

It’s possible, even likely, that on Wednesday the Republicans pushing Trump’s conspiracy theories and disinformation will burn their allotted time, sit down, and then Mike Pence will reluctantly read the results of the Electoral College and declare Joe Biden the winner. It’s also possible, considering Pence’s spine of purest clay, that he will refuse to read the results, or play some other game suggested by the likes of Louie Gohmert, forcing the Supreme Court to make an ugly end to what should have been a simple, ceremonial event.

But one thing is certain: If there are no consequences to this attempt at daylight robbery, they will be back again. With dynamite. There has to be punishment, punishment both swift and sure, or the outcome of this fight is a foregone conclusion.

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Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins is still in office and is still allowed to speak to people in the public. Higgins, known for losing his law enforcement job for using excessive force and then lying to investigators about it, continues the journey to unseat other GOP officials in the clown car of a garbage fire they have created. Higgins one claim to fame is that he dresses very sharply and flashily for an elected official. Other than that, he has equated the need to use force against the immigration “caravan” (remember that?) with World War II allies battles on the beaches of Normandy. He really did.

CNN’s Jim Sciutto had Mr. Higgins on Tuesday to discuss the non-existent case he and at least 139 other Republicans are pretending to have in order to overthrow our democratically elected 46th president, Joe Biden. It’s important to remember that Clay Higgins’ last walk in the glow of media publicity was having a social media post pulled down because of how racist and violent it was. Anyways, Higgins took to CNN to explain himself, and like everything Higgins does, he did so poorly. Sciutto asked Higgins why he was trying to stop the certification of the democratically elected Joe Biden, Higgins replied that there was a “preponderance of evidence” that “crimes” had been committed. Like all things Republican these days, a simple request to provide even the faintest shred of evidence very quickly turned this gun-toting manly man into a snowflake being persecuted by a combative press.

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Sciutto asked for a single example of evidence of election fraud, and Higgins dragged out the tired charges that Republican Georgia elections official Gabriel Sterling debunked, point by point, on Monday. Sciutto did his best to point out that unless Higgins had something new, his claims had already been investigated by a Republican official and found to be worthless. “That’s not true. The Georgia election official rejected that very—he rejected it point by point yesterday. I’m asking what evidence you have to contradict the state Republican election official there as you’re claiming right now? What evidence do you have?”

Higgins replied “Good sir”—yes, he said that—“I say again, we have a preponderance of evidence that crimes may have been committed, election crimes.” To be clear, when asked for an example from his “preponderance” of evidence, Higgins is only able to provide more evidence that the only word he knows with more than three syllables is “preponderance.”

Sciutto bluntly asked Higgins to “cite one example,” to which Higgins went on a rant, claiming that he did cite the example of “problems verifying signatures,” a charge that Sciutto notes was both investigated and yielded only two questionable votes out of 15,000 (2, dos, two, dois, deux, due). Higgins then claimed that Sciutto is using “talking points”—a rhetorical trick that would get you kicked out of a junior high school debate club, but gets you lauded by the Grand Old Party of racists and fascists.

Higgins then pivoted, explaining that investigations take time. He then noted that D.C. officials cited new complaints against someone possibly connected with the Lockerbie, Scotland, plane bombing over 32 years ago. I guess Higgins thinks Donald Trump should stay in office for a few more years or decades, for the duration of a thorough investigation of evidence-free claims made by people who have also wrongly claimed that COVID-19 wasn’t a dangerous pandemic and that climate change isn’t real.

Higgins insisted that he knows about investigations while Sciutto doesn’t. That’s true: Higgins was investigated and found to have used excessive force as a Louisiana police officer, and then was investigated and found to have lied to investigators. So he does know a thing or two about investigations. In fact, he seems to be paying off a guy that lied for him.

Maybe that should actually be investigated.

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It’s very unusual to see a non-November election that is for all the marbles, but that’s what’s on tap on Tuesday in the two Senate runoff elections in Georgia. If Democratic candidates Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock both manage to defeat their Republican opponents, the Democratic Party will have a Senate majority (thanks to Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote), and along with Joe Biden and a Democratic-controlled House, a governing trifecta. If either or both lose, Mitch McConnell will retain control of the Senate and will be able to block not just Biden’s legislative agenda but his judicial nominations and even his cabinet appointments. No pressure, then, right?

The two Senate contests in November were very close, as was, of course, the presidential race in Georgia, which Biden narrowly won. Georgia has a unique law requiring a runoff in races where no candidate tops 50% (excluding presidential elections), and in neither Senate race, no one did, so here we are.

To help you follow along with Tuesday’s results, we’ve put together a fresh set of benchmarks in key counties that will show you whether the Democratic candidates are on track to hit 50%. This time, however, we’re featuring two alternate models—one based on the November presidential results, and the other based on the results from the first round of the Ossoff-Perdue race—that offer slightly different paths to victory.

These benchmarks can help you identify which of Georgia’s 159 counties—most of which are very small—are the ones you need to watch. We’ve included only those that accounted for 2% or more of the statewide vote in November—nine in total. Their share of the vote can be found in the first column, after the list of county names.

Just to the right, you’ll see what numbers Ossoff and Warnock need to hit in each of these counties to notch the narrowest of wins, assuming that each county’s vote share remains stable (a big “if”—more on that in a bit). Those targets are based on Biden’s November performance, which is listed in the next column.

As you can see, the Senate targets are almost identical to Biden’s numbers, since he of course just won exactly the type of squeaker that these benchmarks are designed around. The only adjustment we’ve made is on account of the fact there are only two candidates in each Senate runoff. (Libertarian presidential candidate Jo Jorgenson’s 1.2% in November allowed Biden to win with a 49.5% plurality, something that isn’t possible in a two-person race, so we’ve nudged the Democrats’ benchmarks just a tick higher across the board.)

Normally we compile these benchmarks based on recent presidential results, but because this is a runoff, we actually have another election we can model off of: the first round of the Ossoff-Perdue race. (We did the same thing for Louisiana’s gubernatorial runoff in 2019.) We’ve chosen that matchup simply because it closely resembles the two runoffs, with the only difference being the presence of Libertarian Shane Hazel, whose 2.3% share forced a second round. The special election, meanwhile, involved a whopping 20 candidates in November, which creates the possibility of quirkier data, even if you consolidate the vote by party.

But why offer a second model at all? Even if the toplines look similar, every race has its unique characteristics: Different candidates might appeal more or less to different coalitions of voters, or might have different pockets of regional strength within a state, so it’s good to experiment when possible with a variety of perspectives. Ultimately, the differences don’t look dramatic, as you can see by comparing the fourth column of numbers with the second. That’s not surprising, since Biden and Ossoff largely drew from the same pools of voters in their two races and there just wasn’t much ticket-splitting.

There were enough crossover votes, however, such that Ossoff underperformed Biden by around 1.5 points; Perdue ran ahead of Ossoff by a 49.7-48.0 margin, which contrasts with Biden’s 49.5-49.3 win. This small underperformance was largely uniform across the full variety of counties. Where it was most notable, though, was in the state’s most affluent suburban counties, like Cobb and Forsyth to the north of Atlanta.

While many explanations are possible, these historically red areas may be home to disproportionate numbers of never-Trump Republicans who may have been the most likely to vote for Biden as a rebuke to Donald Trump while also casting ballots for the less obviously objectionable Perdue. Interestingly, a similar dropoff also took place in Fulton County, where most of the Black-majority city of Atlanta is found. However, Fulton also has some of the state’s wealthiest suburbs at its northern end, so the same pattern may apply there as well.

One path forward for Ossoff and Warnock, therefore, involves doing a bit better with these ostensible ticket-splitters, and hoping that some of them might be less enthused about a Republican Senate majority than they were in November. But there are other routes as well. They can, of course, add more Democratic voters who didn’t show up in November. It might be hard to believe that’s possible, given how high turnout was in November, but records indicate that “tens of thousands” of Democrats have done just that.

Alternately, they can win by subtraction, if there’s a dropoff of Republican voters put off by Trump’s attacks on Georgia’s elections, or simply if there are more irregular voters on the GOP side who won’t turn out without Trump on the ballot than there are on the Democratic side who will skip voting without Biden at the top of the ticket.

These benchmarks often prompt a very good question: “Wait, does this stuff actually work?” Well, here’s a good opportunity to look back at our pre-November benchmarks for Georgia (which were based on the 2016 presidential race) and see how they panned out. A quick glance shows that yes, they do! Case in point: We projected that Biden would need to win Fulton County 73-26 in order to barely win Georgia. Biden, it turned out, won Fulton County 73-26 en route to barely winning Georgia.

The most interesting variance between those earlier projections and the actual results comes, again, in the state’s most affluent counties (like Cobb, which is now light blue after decades as a Republican stronghold, and Forsyth, which, while still dark red, is a much less radioactive shade). Biden considerably over-performed his benchmarks in those counties, as well as in Gwinnett—another suburban county that’s more diverse and not quite as affluent as Cobb and Forsyth, but has rapidly shed its Republican leanings in the Trump era.

That leads to the reasonable question of why, since he crushed his benchmarks in the suburbs, Biden didn’t win statewide by more. That question points to one drawback of limiting this table to only the state’s largest counties, which we do to avoid information overload. However, Trump significantly overperformed his 2016 numbers—not only in vote share but especially in turnout—in many of the state’s exurban and rural counties, which individually are small but taken together add up to a big portion of the state.

And that leads us to the other potential pitfall of these benchmarks: A candidate can fall short of their targets in terms of vote share but nevertheless win if turnout surges in the right places. That’s precisely what happened in Kentucky’s 2019 race for governor, when Democrat Andy Beshear ran behind our benchmarks in key urban strongholds but simultaneously saw those counties make up a a far greater than expected proportion of the overall statewide vote.

Something like that is probably less likely to happen Tuesday, but the possibility is still worth bearing in mind as you follow the returns. The most important thing to remember is that results won’t come in uniformly. As we saw in November, Georgia’s big cities were the last to finish reporting their votes, and we’re almost certain to see that again. The earlier-tallied votes are, therefore, once again likely to favor Republicans, and we may well not know the final outcome for several days.

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Congressional Republicans plan to strain the law to the breaking point—and maybe a little beyond—on Wednesday and possibly into Thursday with their efforts to challenge the Electoral College vote count. That process is supposed to be mostly a ritual, with the power to decide on their electoral votes going to the states. Every state has certified its vote. Nonetheless, a group of House Republicans and at least 13 senators plan to object to counting the electors from some state or other, mostly without much evident strategy beyond appeasing Donald Trump and boosting their own future presidential chances.

What is supposed to happen is that Congress counts the electoral votes as certified by the states. The vice president presides, reading aloud votes handed to him by clerks, and Congress votes on accepting those results. That’s it. Instead, Mike Pence will be desperately trying to balance between being seen as a serious man of principle and his dedication to always sucking up to Donald Trump. Trump apparently doesn’t know that Pence is just supposed to read numbers off of pieces of paper and doesn’t have the power to change the outcome—so awkward.

Objections to accepting a state’s electors can be raised, in writing, by a House member and a senator together. That triggers two hours of debate. House Republicans want to object to six states: Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada. Sen. Josh Hawley has said he will object to Pennsylvania, claiming that the legislature violated the state constitution with a law expanding mail-in voting. Sen. Ted Cruz plans to object to Arizona. But that may not be the end of it, which is why Sen. Amy Klobuchar has said the process may take more than 24 hours.

Politico reports that a source “noted that the senators wanted to wait and see how the debate and votes go after Pennsylvania, and then Arizona and Georgia before deciding if they will take up other states.” If Republicans do get around to objecting to counting Georgia’s electors, Democrats should just play Georgia Republican elections official Gabriel Sterling’s Monday press conference debunking Team Trump’s conspiracy theories about that state’s election and vote-counting. 

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will preside over House debate, with Reps. Adam Schiff, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Raskin—still mourning the recent loss of his son—and Joe Neguse leading the Democratic floor response. Democrats from the House delegations of states under challenge will also have a role.

Pelosi reportedly asked members of her caucus to be “dignified,” which … is probably required of them, but nothing else about this is dignified. Then again, as Rep. Cedric Richmond told House Democrats, “You don’t argue with fools, because at a distance you can’t tell who the fool is.” Let’s not let that be an excuse to get rolled, though.

In addition to Hawley and Cruz, Sen. Kelly Loeffler announced her intention to join the objections at Trump’s rally in Georgia Monday night. Talk about an obvious pander. They’ll be joined by Sens. Marsha Blackburn, Mike Braun, Steve Daines, Bill Hagerty, Ron Johnson, John Kennedy, James Lankford, Cynthia Lummis, Roger Marshall, and Tommy Tuberville. David Perdue would just love to join them, but he is not currently a senator, his term having expired on Sunday. 

Twenty-two Senate Republicans have said they will back counting the electors as certified by the states, and 16 aren’t saying. So let’s be clear to the “this all amounts to a lot of bluster, the threat of a coup has been overstated” crowd: one in four Republican senators is on board with the effort to overturn the election in full or in part. Those senators know this isn’t going to succeed. Now. But they’re laying the groundwork for what could happen in 2024 or 2028 with a Republican Congress, they’re currying favor with Trump and his base, and they’re doing their best to delegitimize Joe Biden’s presidency. And on Wednesday, it’s going to get ugly in Congress at the same time as Trump’s Proud Boy base makes it ugly—and potentially violent—on the streets of Washington, D.C.

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Sen. Josh Hawley showed TV viewers just how much he’s in denial about President-elect Joe Biden’s election win ahead of a GOP effort to contest Biden’s Electoral College victory Wednesday. Fox News host Bret Baier asked Hawley on Monday whether he thinks President Donald Trump will be president after inauguration day on January 20, and the Missouri Republican’s answer was almost humorous. “Well Bret, that depends on what happens on Wednesday,” Hawley said. “I mean, this is why we have the debate. This is why we have the votes…”

“No it doesn’t,” Baier interjected. He then attempted to explain that states certify the election. “By the constitution, Congress doesn’t have the right to overturn the certification at least as most experts read it,” he said. Hawley responded that Congress is directed to count the electoral votes. “There is a statute that dates back to the 19, 1800s rather, 19th Century that says that there is a right to object. There’s a right to be heard, and there’s also a certification process,” Hawley said. Letting the mistaken senator first get out how he came to his flawed conclusion, Baier quickly and succinctly educated him with nothing but facts. 

Hawley’s argument was based on what happened in the 1876 election between Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden and former Republican President Rutherford Hayes. In that race, three states didn’t certify their electors, Baier explained. “So Congress was left to come up with this system, this commission that eventually got to a negotiated grand bargain, but now all of the states have certified their elections as of December 14th,” Baier said. “So it doesn’t by constitutional ways open a door to Congress to overturn that, does it?”

Hawley attempted to clarify his point by referring to a statute that he claims gives Congress an opportunity to debate the results, count them, and certify them. “And my point is this is my only opportunity during this process to raise an objection and to be heard,” he said. “I don’t have standing to file lawsuits.”

Protesters with the organization ShutDownDC demonstrated in front of the senator’s suburban Virginia home Monday and made a point of leaving a copy of the Constitution on Hawley’s doorstep, The Washington Post reported, calling the demonstration a “peaceful vigil.” Hawley tweeted Monday his unique version of what happened. “Tonight while I was in Missouri, Antifa scumbags came to our place in DC and threatened my wife and newborn daughter, who can’t travel,” he said. “They screamed threats, vandalized, and tried to pound open our door. Let me be clear: My family & I will not be intimidated by leftwing violence”

While I tend to be of the opinion that right-wing delusions of a presidential victory aren’t pressing enough to motivate protests at legislators’ homes, it’s pretty clear that Hawley could benefit from reading the Constitution. The 12th Amendment of the Constitution isn’t aimed at giving legislators an additional right to debate election results. It states:

“The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted;–The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed(…)” 

Vice President-elect Harris said it even more succinctly in a recent interview. “Let me just tell you something,” she said. “We are going to be inaugurated. Period.”

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More than 3 million Georgians have already voted ahead of Tuesday’s Senate runoffs. That number includes Latino voters, who have already turned out in record-breaking numbers for the demographic in a runoff race, NBC News reports. “65% of Georgia Latinos who voted early in November voted early in Tuesday’s runoffs—compared to 10% who voted in a 2018 runoff, political scientist says.”

AL DÍA reports that organizers who have been on the ground to elect Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff to the U.S. Senate have been working to mobilize the state’s estimated 300,000 eligible Latino voters for a repeat of Arizona in 2020, when the voters helped flip for the first time in over two decades. Grassroots activists have been working their asses off in Georgia: advocacy group Mijente has contacted every Latino voter in the state. Yes, every single Latino voter.

“The historic work to mobilize Latinx voters in Georgia is rooted in decades of community organizing around the state,” Mijente said in a video shared by founding member and former Bernie Sanders organizer Rafael Návar. In the clip, an organizer with Georgia Latino Alliance for Human Rights (GLAHR) explained that early work began by visiting rural areas of the state, visiting pool halls and laundromats, sometimes “sleeping wherever you could.”

“The work has been happening for more than 20 years, and it hasn’t been easy at all, and it means opening up a space for those communities that don’t have a voice,” the organizer continued. “Through the creation and formation of Mijente, we opened up an electoral space that hadn’t yet been created in our communities. This electoral work is fundamentally based in the work of community organizing.” 

“Organizations like Mijente and Mi Familia Vota, to name a few, that are run by Latinx leaders who know the issues most at stake,” AL DÍA reported. “Until the last moment, they make connections with communities by making phone calls, recruiting volunteers and going door-to-door. Many take inspiration from Stacey Abrams and the voter registration movement she led in Georgia ahead of the presidential election.”

“This is our home, and it’s our right to participate and to define our future,” Latino Community Fund executive director Gigi Pedraza told NBC News.

This week will reveal whether the efforts have been enough to have Georgia follow in the path of Arizona, where advocates and groups including LUCHA Arizona and Mi Familia Vota knocked on nearly 1.5 million doors, made nearly 20 million phone calls, and registered nearly 185,000 people to get out and vote. Native voters were also critical in helping turn the state blue and elect Democrat Mark Kelly to the U.S. Senate. Following Kelly’s swearing in, Arizona is now represented in the U.S. Senate by two Democrats for the first time in nearly 70 years. 

NBC News reports that in Georgia, leaders like former 2020 presidential candidate Julián Castro have been campaigning for Warnock and Ossoff, with actors and activists like America Ferrera, Eva Longoria, and Mexican actress Kate del Castillo also working to mobilize Latino voters. “¡Sal y vota, tienes el poder!” she said in a tweet shared by Mijente. “Get out and vote, you have the power!”

Organizers with Mijente said in a series of tweets that they’re also on the ground today to help Latino voters get to the polls. Of course, we can probably expect some shenanigans from anti-democracy Republicans. My colleague Laura Clawson wrote that they’ve “long worked to make it harder to vote in the state, especially for Black voters. Voting is happening in Georgia, which has historically meant long lines in areas with a lot of Black voters—that’s something to watch for once again.”

With that in mind, if you’re trying to vote in Georgia and are having trouble, here’s two numbers you should know: The Georgia voter hotline at 1-888-730-5816, and the text hotline at 833-566-1212.

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New York Rep. Hakeem Jeffries delivered a message Monday about the posture of House Democrats’ leadership team regarding Donald Trump’s relentless attempts to engineer a fascist takeover of the American republic. 

“We’re not looking backward,” Jeffries told reporters during a press conference. “We’re looking forward to the inauguration of Joe Biden on January 20th.” 

That forward-looking vision came less than 24 hours after the Washington Post posted smoking-gun audio of an hour-long phone call in which Trump (aka Mafia Don) attempted to threaten and cajole Georgia’s top election officials to “find” enough votes to overturn the state’s election results. 

Nonetheless, Kate Bedingfield, an adviser to President-elect Joe Biden offered a similar take to Jeffries, saying, “The country is ready to move forward.”

But the problem with simply rushing past Mafia Don’s political grave is that ignoring his seditious acts is as much a threat to the future of American democracy as Trump’s failed efforts were in the first place. In short—seditious, traitorous acts left unchecked beget seditious, traitorous acts. In fact, Senate Republicans with the twinkle of 2024 presidential bids in their eyes are already lining up in support of Trump’s effort to tear down democracy in order to maintain his grip on power. Trump’s final gambit is all but certain to fail on Wednesday during a joint session of Congress to certify the election results, but the major takeaway is that plenty of future GOP Trumps are waiting in the wings to trash representative democracy on the way to meeting their own political ends unless a price is exacted for doing so. And the lesson those Republicans have learned so far—just as Trump learned from his acquittal—is that there’s no serious price to pay, political or otherwise, for betraying the country.

Both the incoming Biden administration and Congress have a role to play in safeguarding our democracy for generations to come. One is criminal and the other is a matter of governance. Biden must appoint smart, resolute leaders to the Justice Department and then simply get out of the way and let them do their jobs. Hamstringing justice in any way with regard to Trump’s endless assault on the law and the Constitution would be disastrous for the country’s future. But Biden can easily make those appointments to the Department of Justice and then rightfully send the message that his administration is focused on the task of righting the ship in regard to the pandemic and the faltering economy. 

House Democrats, however, cannot afford to simply move along, as if the threat to our democracy ends once Trump is summarily booted from the White House residence. That is a patently false contention given the upheaval we are already witnessing in the Republican party. Trump must be held to account. That can be done in several ways, a couple of which are already in process.

One way is by making a criminal referral to the FBI over Trump’s attempted election crimes, an investigation that Reps. Ted Lieu of California and Kathleen Rice of New York are already urging FBI Director Chris Wray to undertake.

Another possibility is censuring Trump over his call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger. Georgia Rep. Hank Johnson introduced a censure motion on Monday with the support of 90 of his colleagues. That number will likely grow in the coming days and weeks as Congress gets back to work—or at least, it should grow, since there are presently 222 Democratic members of the House.

Impeachment is another potential option, but to what end at this point? Trump is just over two weeks away from removal and, as we have already seen, the effort would surely be blocked by the GOP-controlled Senate. Heck, more than a quarter of the Senate Republican caucus has jumped aboard Team coup at this point. 

What does seem a worthy effort, however, is continued investigations of Trump and his minions. Not only do the facts need to come out, but if Democrats are to draft legislation to safeguard our democracy against future Trumps, they will need to know exactly what actions he and his enablers took in their extensive efforts to kneecap America’s institutions and systems of governance. 

But none of those three options—a criminal referral, censure, and ongoing investigations—amount to simply “looking forward.” What is past will haunt the nation and Democrats, in particular, if it is buried before an autopsy can be conducted and people held to account for their roles in assaulting and undermining America’s democracy.