A substantial number of states and roughly half the Republicans in the House have now signed on to the Texas lawsuit again against Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. On its face Texas asserts the right to review the voting laws of states Joe Biden won, finds them lacking and asks the Supreme Court to throw out the results in those states.

Much of Trump’s 2020 infrastructure, established solely around the cause-célèbre of President Trump and his reelection, has not made the jump to the President’s post-election crusade to overturn his loss. Instead, that space is being filled by the President himself and a rag-tag band of allies.

At the suggestion of TPM Reader JC, I pulled up this article Jane Mayer published in The New Yorker just before the November election. It’s about why and how Trump feared losing – specifically legal vulnerability and crushing debt. But Mayer talked to Michael Cohen, who quite presciently described the aftermath of Trump’s defeat.

There are a few paragraphs about Mayer’s discussion with Trump. But this is the key one.

President Trump often enlists the vice president to fight his more serious battles for him.

Don’t give the cable news outlet too much credit. It’s done little besides the most basic function of a major news outlet during a presidential election — which is, declare a winner when there’s a winner. 

A growing number of opinioners and editorialists are now arguing that those who warned that the corrupt Supreme Court majority was ready to steal the election on behalf of Donald Trump were simply wrong. As evidence they point to the federal judiciary’s general refusal to entertain basically any of the Trump legal team’s increasingly outlandish court challenges and examples like yesterday when the Supreme Court rejected without dissent or comment a challenge to the results of the election in Pennsylvania. But this opinion is wrong.

This series of “King Over the Water” posts (the reference is to the Stuart Pretenders, James II, his son and grandson) circles around basic questions: what do Joe Biden, or Democrats or just people who value our civic democracy do if Trumpists or Republicans or some fraction of them refuse to accept that Joe Biden is the legitimate President and continue to believe lies about voter fraud?

It seems the GOP’s strategy in Georgia is to say “radical liberal” enough times that it sticks.

From TPM Reader GS …

Unlike MA, I don’t have expertise in the mechanics of power in DC. S/he lays out a compelling case for why Biden will be able to take effective control of the executive branch.

But the reason MM’s analysis has stuck with me is not what it means for the corridors of the Pentagon, but rather what it means for the public sphere of politics, namely the GOP’s internal dynamics when the only salient topic for the base is reversing the “steal” of 2020.