One more point about the President and the decision to call in the National Guard. I’ve mentioned several times below that the chain of command simply went around the President. Mike Pence gave the order even though there’s really no legal basis for him doing so. Most of these reports suggest the President was just checked out, maybe not interested in talking to them.

CBS and only CBS is reporting that cabinet members are discussing invoking the 25th amendment to remove President Trump from office. I will believe it when I see it. But there have been a few hints over the last hours that the national security structure and some critical functions of government are operating separate from President Trump. The Secretary of Defense and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs conferred with Mike Pence and the Democratic and Republican congressional leaders about bringing in the National Guard. Apparently there were no discussions with the President and Mike Pence eventually gave the order, even though there’s no basis I can think of on which Pence could give such an order.
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I probably don’t have to tell you to be excited about the results out of Georgia tonight where it seems highly likely that the the Democrats picked up both Senate seats and thus took control of the Senate. You don’t need me to tell you about the historic nature of Raphael Warnock’s victory. But the consequences of these victories is likely even greater than many realize.

We know from past experience that Republicans will try to repurpose their election fraud charade as the rationale for new voting restrictions. Many non-Republicans are looking at this ghastly carnival and simply being thankful that it will almost certainly fail in its goal of giving President Trump a second term in office. But this is a dangerous and misguided complacency. It’s one that will further endanger the country down the road, not only in additional voter suppression laws but in the danger of repeats and possibly successful repeats of what is happening now.

To put it simply, this will create a new reality in which this episode lives on not as a shameful, discrediting episode but as a grievance and rallying cry on the right with no counterforce opposing it. We absolutely have to avoid this.

How do you do that?

Yesterday, TPM broke the news that the Atlanta-area U.S. attorney was leaving his post early. Byung Jin “BJay” Pak, of the Northern District of Georgia, had planned to leave on Inauguration Day, but instead was leaving immediately due to “unforeseen circumstances,” he told his staff yesterday.

Today, we learned who will replace him: Bobby Christine, the Trump-appointed U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia. TPM broke that story too.

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The Georgia elections are upon us and I confess I simply have no idea what the outcomes are going to be. Early voting included encouraging hints for Democrats, particularly in levels of African-American voting. But trying to disentangle the meaning of early voting before you see same day voting is generally a fool’s game. The polls have been almost literally tied throughout. Though the averages of the final polls show one or two point leads for both Democrats, as we’ve learned, in our current politics, Republicans routinely outperform polls by very small but real margins. Especially when Trump is on the ballot. Is Trump on the ballot? Literally, no, but he’s certainly trying to pretend like he is.

It was pretty transparently clear that the source of the Trump-Raffensperger recording was Raffensperger and staff lawyer Ryan Germany. But it’s notable that in the follow-on reporting they aren’t being coy about it. They are basically saying, we’d been asked to commit illegal acts in earlier calls. It seemed prudent to record this call. Probably the best way to see this is that the two men decided to wear what amounts to a DIY wire.