We covered news yesterday that Fulton County prosecutors in Georgia are considering bringing “false statement” charges against Rudy Giuliani and some of Trump’s other close allies over their efforts to spread bogus claims about the 2020 election results in Georgia.

On this week’s pod, we talked about Democrats’ big pro-democracy bill, which faces long odds in the Senate without filibuster reform. Matt Shuham also joined us to go into his recent reporting on a GOP-led effort in Tennessee to preserve a bust of notorious KKK leader Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Forty years ago today my mother died in a car wreck. I was twelve. And the trauma and repercussions of that night have echoed down through the subsequent forty years of my life. It is mystifying to me that it was so long ago. Yet in another way it might be centuries, it seems so distant and alien. From the perspective of today I see that it was just a brief prelude before my life, as I now understand it, really began.

Here are some fascinating takeaways from a series of focus groups Democracy Corps conducted with Trump supporters and various varieties of conservatives. One notable thing is the difficulty they had recruiting volunteers. “It took a long time to recruit these groups because Trump voters seemed particularly distrustful of outsiders right now, wary of being victimized, and avoided revealing their true position until in a Zoom room with all Trump voters — then, they let it all out.”

After back-to-back mass shootings in Atlanta and Boulder in the past week, gun reform advocates are once again hoping to see an expansion of red flag laws, which allow authorities to confiscate guns from individuals deemed to be particularly dangerous. They’re one of the few gun control measures that some members of the pro-gun lobby will get behind due to their case-by-case enforcement.

The final results of the fourth successive Israeli election are now in and the verdict is clear: Netanyahu lost. Or to put the matter more precisely, the results make it almost impossible for him to form a government. His bloc, which includes his Likud party and a group of far-right and religious parties, gained 52 seats. You need a minimum of 61 to form a government. Another natural ideological ally, the Yamina party led by an erstwhile Netanyahu lieutenant named Naftali Bennett, has resisted sitting in yet another Netanyahu government. But at the end of the day they probably would. But even that’s only 59 seats, two short of the bare minimum to form a government.

After more than a year of crisis we can all taste the end of the COVID pandemic. The rapidly accelerating rate of vaccinations secures that hope firmly in reality. For the moment though we remain in a standoff with the virus. In key parts of the country we’re actually losing ground.

There’s no question that COVID cases are now on the rise in the Greater New York region and have at least plateaued in much of the Northeast. Michigan, particularly metro-Detroit, is in the midst of surge. Cases there have more than doubled in the last two weeks. New York and Michigan are among 22 states where the number of COVID infections have gone up at least 10% over the last week.

Now that the COVID relief bill has passed the nation’s politics are stuck in an uncanny pause or floating space. I can’t think of any analog to it in my living memory or any obvious one in the decades of previous history. Democrats have a big and fairly dramatic legislative agenda. They appear to have buy-in for much though not all of it from all fifty senators in their caucus. The question is whether they’ll make some basic change to the rules of the senate to make it possible to pass legislation with majority votes.

It’s a Monday in the new Trump-free world and most days it’s best to keep it that way. But we thought this particularly sad weekend news was worth flagging.

As we’ve discussed in various contexts over recent months, a big, big question is whether mRNA vaccines prevent COVID infection itself or the just illness that the virus causes. If the vaccine keeps you from getting a severe case of the disease or dying that is obviously a huge benefit. But the initial efficacy studies could not rule out one possibility: that vaccinated individuals were still getting infected and that the vaccine was pushing their cases into the asymptomatic category. That may not be a huge difference for individuals. But it’s all the difference in the world in terms of stopping the on-going spread of the disease through the population.

Now we have a study that seems to address this question directly.