Bold Prediction: "Sensible Gun Safety Laws" Will Go Nowhere For Now

Maestro of Bad Faith and wrecker of American democracy Sen. "Moscow Mitch" McConnell (R-Hell), feeling the enormous heat and anger stemming from the Uvalde massacre, has another bad faith offer to take the heat off Senate Republicans:

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told CNN on Thursday he met earlier in the day with Texas Sen. John Cornyn and encouraged the senior Republican senator to begin discussions with Democrats, including Sens. Chris Murphy of Connecticut and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, to see if they can find a middle ground on legislation to respond to the tragic Texas elementary school shooting.

Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are facing enormous pressure to take action in the wake of the horrific shooting, but members on both sides acknowledge the uphill battle to find common ground given the highly polarized political climate around gun legislation and widespread GOP opposition to stricter gun control.

 

A "middle ground" on, for example, background checks and red flag laws, the very de minimus the vast majority of Americans are demanding??  What kind of poison pill might Republicans have in mind?  Well, in 2012, after the Sandy Hook massacre, Democrats tried to pass the Safe Communities Act, with a provision for expanding background checks.  It died in the Senate thanks to a Republican filibuster, but not after Republicans Ted Cruz (that loathsome weasel again) and Chuck Grassley proposed an amendment killing the background check expansion.

 

So, what is Sen. Cornyn's first thought out of the box?

Cornyn has also said that he does not want to see the shooting used as a way to infringe on gun rights.

 

"There's a whole list of things that we can consider, but I think particularly mental health, access to mental health treatment is high on that list," he said, adding, "I think we need to be open to whatever, wherever the evidence leads us. I would say that this is not an excuse to infringe the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens doing that will do nothing to fix tragedies like this."

 

Ah, the mental health, "guns don't kill people, deranged 18-year-olds kill people" script ripped from the National Rifle Rampage Association handbook!  The NRA, like white Christofascists, has long been an integral part of the Republican party/cult, and Republican "leaders" heading into an election cycle would sooner adopt "The Internationale" as their official anthem than decouple from those crackpots.  

 

(Of course, the better way to get "sensible gun safety laws" is to throw Republicans out of office -- at the local, State and Federal level.  Well, it's an aspiration to fight for.)

 

It seems at least some Democrats are finally wise to the bad faith rope- a- dope tactics of McConnell and his merry band of sociopaths, though. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) says the clock is ticking:

"I've been through this before," he said. "I know sometimes Republicans are more interested in talking than doing, so if we can't get some progress by the end of next week, then I'll say to Sen. Schumer it's time to take votes. And Sen. Schumer has committed that we're gonna have votes one way or the other on the floor of the Senate on issues like background checks."

 

In the meantime, we won't be cashing any checks written by Moscow Mitch.

 

BONUS:  These checks have already been cashed, though --

 

 

Senators bankrolled by the NRA:

Mitt Romney: $13,648,000

Richard Burr: $6,987,000

Roy Blunt: $4,556,000

Thom Tillis: $4,421,000

Marco Rubio: $3,303,000

Joni Ernst: $3,125,000

Josh Hawley: $1,392,000

Mitch McConnell: $1,267,000

Ted Cruz: $176,000

An absolute disgrace.

— Public Citizen (@Public_Citizen) May 25, 2022

 

(Image:  Moscow Mitch at the 2014 CPAC nutfest)

There Are No "Hero" Republicans

 

More proof, if any were needed, that the "heroes" of the Georgia elections are, in the end, just your garden variety Republican cheats:

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who was pressured by President Trump to change the election results in his state in the 2020 presidential election, is now defending the state's new, stricter voting law against a lawsuit by the U.S. Justice Department. 

Raffensperger told CBSN's Tanya Rivero on Tuesday that he sees "absolutely no merit" in the lawsuit and insisted there is "record voter turnout" in the state.

Attorney General Merrick Garland alleged in a lawsuit filed last week that Georgia's election law was enacted "with the purpose of denying or abridging the right of Black Georgians to vote on account of their race or color, in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act."

After having concluded, along with multiple recounts and court findings, that the elections in Georgia were fair, and fraud free, Republican Raffensperger now defends "fixing" a system that wasn't broken in order to tilt the table toward Repubicans.  Notably, he's running for reelection against former guy- annointed Rep. Jody "Rhymes With Lice" Hice, who was one of the 139 Republican Representatives who voted to overturn the 2020 election.  So, either way, a vote for a Georgia Republican Secretary of State is a vote to undermine democracy.

 

Monday Reading

 

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

James Downie offers more evidence that Senate Republicans are dealing in bad faith on a January 6 commission, and that Sens. Manchin and Sinema should smell the coffee.  Here's a lengthy excerpt:

On “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) was full of flimsy excuses. “Commissions often don’t work at all,” he said. “And when they do work, like the Simpson-Bowles Commission produced a good result, nothing happened as a — as part of that result.” By that standard, we might as well not have laws, because some don’t work. He also argued that “it’s too early to create a commission” because the widely lauded 9/11 Commission didn’t begin its work until late 2002. That’s true, but why couldn’t this new commission start its work earlier?  [snip]

[Maine Sen. Susan] Collins’s answer on ABC’s “This Week” got off to an encouraging start for Manchin and company. “I strongly support the creation of an independent commission,” she said. But then came the conditions: “One has to do with staffing, and I think that both sides should either jointly appoint the staff or there should be equal numbers of staff appointed by the chairman and the vice chairman,” she told host George Stephanopoulos. “The second issue is, I see no reason why the report cannot be completed by the end of this year.” Both of Collins’s conditions have also been suggested by Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) — another senator who would be on any 10-vote list Manchin might draw up.

The staffing objection is silly: As Philip D. Zelikow, the 9/11 Commission’s executive director, told The Post, the staffing language in the bill is essentially identical to the language establishing the Jan. 6 commission. The only difference is that President George W. Bush selected the 9/11 Commission’s chair, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) would select the Jan. 6 commission’s chair. Yet Collins, who was a senator when the 9/11 Commission was established, did not have a problem with that commission. What could possibly have changed?

More damning was Collins’s insistence, echoing McConnell, that the commission needs to keep its work out of an election year. At least Blunt’s main objection has historical precedent, and leaves open the possibility of a commission down the line if congressional and Justice Department investigations don’t succeed.  [snip]

Inquiries maintain influence and credibility in the public’s eyes only when they produce damning, incontrovertible findings — think Watergate. Senate Republicans know this, so the only explanation for their opposition to the commission is: 1) They know a full accounting of that terrible day will shame the GOP; and 2) They’d rather once again put their party over the country.

Sens. Manchin and Sinema, this isn’t McConnell telling you there aren’t 10 reasonable Republicans. This is Collins (and Romney) all but screaming it. Ideally, the two Democrats would accept where this road is obviously heading and back filibuster reform now, before the unnecessary theater of trying to sway the unswayable. But at the very least, they should get ready to support changes as soon as the negotiations break down — which they will.

These aren't people committed to a functioning democracy.  They're careerists who place a far higher value on their turkey necks than on the fate of the country.  We can only hope that the public reluctance of some Democrats to come to grips with this reality is only performative, and that they understand the danger and will act with fellow Democrats to do what's right and protect our democracy.

Speaking of negotiations that will likely break down, this re- bid on infrastructure might also be performative on the Administration's part, but it's making some of us nervous:

As the Biden administration’s infrastructure negotiations with Senate Republicans picked up with a $1.7 trillion counteroffer on Friday, some congressional Democrats are getting antsy.

“We move as quickly as we can on going big, we move as quickly as we can on negotiations,” Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) told Vox on Wednesday. “At some point, if they won’t go where we believe the country needs to go and where the country seems to want to go, then we take off.”

President Biden issued his opening bid last month — the $2.25 trillion American Jobs Plan — and the GOP responded with a $568 billion infrastructure counteroffer a few weeks ago. (Separately, the White House also introduced a $1.8 trillion American Families Plan, focusing on child care and education.)

The new $1.7 trillion White House counteroffer settles for the $65 billion Republicans floated for broadband funding, and pares back the amount of funding for roads and bridges from Biden’s initial proposal of $159 billion to $120 billion in new investment. It also cuts research and development from a proposed package, vowing to put it in other congressional bills going forward. But the president’s counter keeps funding for clean energy, removing lead pipes from America’s drinking water systems, and boosting long-term care workers.

The Administration's infrastructure plan polls in the stratosphere.  We're with Sen. Brown (as usual):  we give them a shot, and when they come back in bad faith, we take off.

Looks like Belarus President Alexander "Mini Putin" Lukashenko's forcing a commercial airliner to land in order to arrest a critic is going to have consequences:

European leaders on Monday were considering a plan to sever Belarus from the rest of the continent's airspace, a day after Belarusian authorities forced a commercial airliner to land and arrested a dissident journalist who had been flying from Athens to Lithuania.

Latvian Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkevics said that AirBaltic, a major airline in the region, would no longer fly through Belarusian airspace after a Ryanair flight was forced to land Sunday by a Belarusian MiG-29 fighter jet. The plane was nearing Vilnius, Lithuania, on Sunday before Belarusian authorities turned it around, made it land in their capital, Minsk, and arrested journalist Roman Protasevich, the founder of an opposition media outlet. He faces at least 12 years in prison.

Rinkevics said he would push for a European ban on flights from Belavia, the Belarusian national airline, as well as a tough package of sanctions against Belarusian authorities. European Union leaders plan to meet Monday evening at a previously scheduled summit in Brussels, where the reaction to Belarus will now be the top priority. A ban on Belavia would be a blow to Belarus’s already shaky economy.

The EU needs to step up and show Mini Putin he crossed a big red line.

On the coronavirus front, this is the kind of babbling, venomous talk that gets people killed:

Pastor Greg Locke urged his followers not to get vaccinated, claiming that "political elites" pretend to get vaccinated by getting injected with "sugar water" instead.

Locke, head of the Baptist Global Vision Bible Church in Tennessee, previously predicted on multiple occasions that former President Donald Trump would remain in office—even after it was clear that President Joe Biden had won the election. Earlier this month, Locke claimed that Biden is a "fake president" and that he "stole" the election. During a Sunday sermon this week, the pastor took aim at COVID-19 vaccines.

"I have not changed my stance. I haven't softened my stance. I have strengthened, strictly my stance against the [COVID-19] vaccine," Locke asserted. Right Wing Watch first reported the pastor's remarks.

"I don't care what Pfizer—I don't care what any of the four groups do out there. Look, if you think... for one minute that those political elites actually got that vaccination, you are smoking meth in your mama's basement," the pastor argued, drawing loud applause from those attending the religious service. "Bunch of fake liars is what they are. They didn't shoot nothing in their arm but a bunch of sugar water," Locke insisted.

We're admittedly torn here, given the people involved:  reason won't work, so do we let Darwin do his thing?

We close by again strongly recommending a visit to Infidel 753's link round-up to interesting posts from around the Internet.  Make his blog a regular stop on your web surfing adventures.

Ahead Of WH Meeting, Republicans Lie About Infrastructure Plan

 

 

Ahead of a meeting today at the White House with House and Senate Republicans to discuss the Biden Administration's infrastructure plan, a show of continuing, malicious Republican bad faith:

Senate Republicans have reportedly sent around a memo calling President Biden’s ambitious infrastructure package a “slush fund,” ahead of a bipartisan meeting with the president at the White House on Monday.

Politico reports that the memo sent by the Senate Republican Conference to all GOP communications staffs blasts the White House for referring to the infrastructure proposal as a “jobs plan” and instead called it a “partisan plan to kill jobs and create slush funds on the taxpayer dime.”

“Biden’s Partisan, Job-Crushing Slush Fund spends just 5% of the total $2.7 trillion on roads and bridges,” the lawmakers said in their memo, according to Politico.

“The rest is: a wish list of non-infrastructure spending on failed Obama policies; a dog’s breakfast of slush funds for Democrats’ pet projects without any accountability or transparency; expensive green energy mandates on Americans; a ban on the right to work; and a flurry of tax hikes that will to drive companies out of the U.S. and give China and Russia a say in the United States’ tax laws. As a result, the plan will eliminate at least 1 million jobs," they added.

(Spoiler alert) Bullshit!  Not (shockingly!) the wished- for Golden Muffin of bipartisanship! sought after by certain posturing Dems and cynical Republicans.

The phony narrative that only roads and bridges are "infrastructure," plus the absurd notion that a $2 trillion plan is a job- killer, plus addressing climate change for the first time in 4 years is an "expensive green energy mandate," plus the notion that raising the top corporate tax rate to less than where it was before the incompetent former guy came in and tanked the economy -- it's all just more of the same lying, gaslighting Republican talking points, endlessly recycled.  If it weren't for bad faith, Republicans would have no faith at all.

On the last point, for some perspective, here's what happened when President Clinton pegged the top corporate rate to 35%  -- not the 28% Biden's proposing (our emphasis):

On Aug. 10, 1993, President Bill Clinton signed into law the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which created four new corporate tax brackets with increased rates for businesses with incomes over $335,000. [28] Vice President Al Gore, in a statement hailing the bill’s passage, said “[This bill] means jobs, growth, tax fairness… It’s a message of hope to the small business owner and 96% of all small businesses who will get a tax cut under this plan.” [39] The bill was attacked by United States Chamber of Commerce President Richard Lesher, who said that the corporate tax increases would “slow economic growth and fuel inflation…” and that “foreign competitors would gain an economic advantage over American goods here and abroad.” [40] A group of 300 major corporations and trade associations known as the Tax Reform Action Coalition said it “strongly opposed Mr. Clinton’s move to increase the top rates for… corporate taxes.” [40] From the passage of the bill until the end of Clinton’s term, the US economy gained more than 21.4 million jobs, the unemployment rate fell from 6.8% to 3.9%, industrial production rose by 5.6% per year, and the Dow Jones Industrial average rose 26.7% per year.

So, raising the top corporate tax rate to a much higher level in 1993 led to... eight years of job growth, rising industrial production and a booming Dow Jones.  Sounds awful!

(Image: Jeff Stahler, gocomics.com)

 

Tweets Of The Day -- An Offer You CAN Refuse

 

 

The Senate Republican counteroffer to Biden’s $1.9 trillion relief plan is $160 billion on vaccines, testing and PPE + some undetermined amount on direct aid and unemployment insurance. https://t.co/66ri6xIq5n

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) January 31, 2021

 

Echoes of 2009 when the group of Republicans pretending to be negotiating a health-care bill in good faith included Mike Enzi, and somehow a lot of people convinced themselves it wasn’t just a trap. https://t.co/fxe0aBWyvi

— Brian Beutler (@brianbeutler) January 31, 2021

 

The funny thing about this is it's basically them saying look you absolutely positively need to go the reconciliation route because even our Lucy deal means you get jack, humiliation and destruction at the polls in two years. https://t.co/SQF2MpVxYj

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) January 31, 2021

 

Let us get this straight. Just five Senate Republicans think you can impeach and convict a president who orchestrated a terrorist attack against the United States. But ten Senate Republicans want us to give less relief to suffering Americans? And they think we should care?

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) January 31, 2021

 

How can we possibly pass a Covid rescue without bipartisanship? pic.twitter.com/rNSeChy8o5

— Schooley (@Rschooley) January 31, 2021

 

That's not a compromise, it would be abject surrender. Not even worth discussing. https://t.co/xQPPbEoGWE

— Paul Krugman (@paulkrugman) January 31, 2021

 

As a political party, they’d be better off spending their time trying to suppress voting in the next election cycle. That’s the better way to pursue policies unpopular with Americans.

Oh wait, they’re doing both. https://t.co/UVit2o92er

— David Simon (@AoDespair) January 31, 2021

 

You want a bipartisan COVID Recuse Plan? It turns out, @POTUS delivered one -- the American Rescue Plan. https://t.co/OcxzAg8vX9

— Ronald Klain (@WHCOS) January 28, 2021

 

 

Sedition Then, Sedition Now, Sedition Forever

E.J. Dionne, Jr., recalls the temperamental and radical ancestors of the current crop of anti- democracy Republican seditionists by way of explaining why they're even worse than their forbears:

At least the Confederate secessionists acknowledged that Abraham Lincoln won the 1860 election.

The 18 Republican state attorneys general and 126 Republican House members who asked the Supreme Court to throw out the results of the 2020 election had more impudence even than the Civil War seditionists in whose steps they followed.

Here is a translation of what they were telling a majority of the nation’s electorate and voters in states representing 62 of President-elect Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes:

“We don’t like the president and vice president you chose so we simply won’t accept the result of a free election. We’ll deploy lies and phony statistics to get the United States Supreme Court to impose our will on the rest of the country. The heck with democracy. But we’ll continue to enjoy the Social Security checks, the farm subsidies and all the other money that states that voted for Biden send our way.” [snip]

Those who promote this nonsense should put up or shut up. If those House Republicans think our nation’s democratic process is illegitimate, they can demonstrate their sincerity by resigning — especially the 19 from Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia who joined a lawsuit that would have annulled the votes of their states.

Yeah, he knows that won't happen.  Rep. Bill Pascrell's proposal to punish the 126 Republican Congressrats should, but most likely won't, happen either.  So, these cosplaying seditionists know they can get away with degrading our democracy just so they can prove their Trumpian bona fides to the Dear Leader and his dimwitted, frothing cult.  Good tradeoff!

But anti- democratic impulses combined with overwhelming bad faith isn't just a recent element of Republican DNA.  Right- wingers also tried to deny John F. Kennedy his electoral victory in 1960. Here's a snippet from Ronald Shafer's article about that attempted hijacking:

It was a bitter, close election, and there were furious allegations of fraud.

After Democrat John F. Kennedy barely beat Republican Richard M. Nixon in the 1960 election, a coalition of opponents plotted to deny him the presidency in the electoral college. Most were White, conservative electors from the south who opposed the young Massachusetts senator’s liberal policies, especially his support for civil rights for Black Americans.

If these electors had succeeded, segregationist Democratic Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia would have been elected president. His vice president would have been Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Both men had nothing to do with the idea.

Of course, the difference in 1960 was that neither Richard Nixon nor Sens. Byrd or Goldwater would go along with the hijacking.  That Nixon -- Nixon! --would be something of a democracy defender in his day compared to Mango Mussolini and his rat infested party of 2020 is a stark illustration as to how far this collection of charlatans has stooped in the intervening years.

It won't be over for these anti- democracy rats after Monday's electoral college vote cementing Joe Biden's victory.  It won't be over for them after he and Kamala Harris are sworn in on January 20, 2021.  It won't be over for them as long as there's a Democrat in a position to assume and wield power.  It's sedition then, sedition now, sedition forever.

Bottomless Bad Faith

What are the craven, bootlicking, anti- democracy Republican poltroons in Pennsylvania's legislature up to now that they've heard from gassy consigliere Rudy "Hands in Pants" Giuliani's parade of crackpots and racists?  More mischief:

Just hours after GOP leadership in the state House indicated they would not move to upend Pennsylvania’s election results in Harrisburg, Speaker Bryan Cutler and Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff joined more than 60 Republican colleagues Friday in calling on members of Congress to do it instead.

In a letter Democrats dismissed as a stunt, the GOP lawmakers disavowed the election’s outcome — an 81,000-vote victory for President-elect Joe Biden — and accused Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, of “undermining the many protections” they had written into a law passed a year ago to expand widespread voting by mail. [snip]

Just a day earlier, Cutler (R., Lancaster) and Benninghoff (R., Centre) had unequivocally stated — in a memo cosigned by Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) and President Pro Tempore Jake Corman (R., Centre) — that state legislators had no authority to ignore certified election results and appoint Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Electoral College themselves, despite repeated calls from the president and some within their own party to do so.

“It would … set a precedent that a simple majority of the General Assembly can override the will of the people as evidenced by the popular vote,” the GOP leaders said.

That statement drew a swift rebuke from top Trump advisers on Friday. Lawyer Rudy Giuliani accused them in a tweet of “covering up for Dem[ocrat] crimes” and misleading the president. He said he was ashamed of them for “let[ting] America down.”

Legal adviser Jenna Ellis went further, retweeting a stinging rebuke from another Giuliani ally who called the GOP leadership team in Harrisburg “liars,” “cowards,” and “traitors.”

Yes, indeed, they're liars, cowards, and traitors -- that much we can heartily agree on.  On top of that, cynically pointing a finger at Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf for overseeing a fair and secure election leads into a point made by Greg Sargent, who explains in a column about the Georgia runoff election, it's much more than cowardice:

It is often claimed that Republicans who refuse to concede Trump’s loss are suffering from “cowardice” or that he has held them “hostage.” In this telling, Republicans secretly know the truth but won’t say so, simply because the political price of weathering his fearsome rage-tweets is too great.

This won’t do. It badly undersells the bottomless bad faith and dishonorable instrumentalism that Republicans are employing here. Yes, Republicans know Trump lost and that contradicting him on this point might cost them some of his supporters.

But they are fully embracing the opportunity to use this situation to their advantage, not doing so because they see no other option. They are trying to harness and channel all this depraved Trumpian rage to their instrumental advantage, not work around it, despite its extraordinarily destructive potential.

It's hard to expand on this, except to say that the incoming Biden Administration, which is already seeing this bad faith playing out every day, needn't waste any time expecting anything but more bad faith from this party of nihilistic misfits and sociopaths.  You have a mandate -  use it.

But first, let's win those two Senate seats in Georgia!

 

Monday Reading

As always, please go to the links for the full articles/ op eds.

The Biden Administration starts to take shape with foreign policy selections:

President-elect Joe Biden has selected Antony Blinken, one of his closest and longest-serving foreign policy advisers, as secretary of state as he prepares to unveil a slate of new nominees this week that will emphasize a deep well of experience in the foreign policy and national security establishment. [snip]

Biden also is planning to announce Linda Thomas-Greenfield as his nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, giving a former career Foreign Service officer and African American woman one of the most high-profile diplomatic posts in government, according to three people familiar with the decision.

The adults will be back in charge come January 20.

Naming names:

 

The 21 GOP Senators who have privately expressed their disdain for Trump are: Portman, Alexander, Sasse, Blunt, Collins, Murkowski, Cornyn, Thune, Romney, Braun, Young, Tim Scott, Rick Scott, Rubio, Grassley, Burr, Toomey, McSally, Moran, Roberts, Shelby. (2/3)

— Carl Bernstein (@carlbernstein) November 23, 2020

 

With few exceptions, their craven public silence has helped enable Trump’s most grievous conduct—including undermining and discrediting the US the electoral system.

More from my appearance earlier on @cnn: https://t.co/c1jZXMR0Pv (3/3)

— Carl Bernstein (@carlbernstein) November 23, 2020

As we noted yesterday, Michigan is one of the states due to certify President- elect Biden's victory there (by 150,000- plus votes).  The Washington Post editorial board notes:

[Trump's] target Monday is the Michigan Board of State Canvassers, which is scheduled to meet to certify the results in their state, which Democrat Joe Biden won by the healthy margin of 154,000 votes. Ronna McDaniel, the servile chair of the Republican Party, and her Michigan counterpart, Laura Cox, on Saturday called on the board to delay certification. Their ostensible justification: “numerical anomalies and credible reports of procedural irregularities.”

As usual, there was no substantial evidence. Officials found only minor anomalies in Detroit affecting a small number of votes, and affidavits alleging irregularities were so weak that Trump campaign lawyers dropped the lawsuit based on them. Mr. Trump lobs sweeping allegations of a “rigged” and “stolen” election; his enablers such as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) nod solemnly about letting him make his case — and judges across the country point out, again and again, that there is no case. [snip]

...We hope that Michigan’s board on Monday performs its work honorably. And we hope that when this is all over, Americans remember who defended democracy, and who joined in the campaign to upend it.

Meanwhile, this Trump toady continues to stall on getting the transition underway:

Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) attacked President Donald Trump's General Services Administration chief, Emily Murphy, for refusing to sign off on President-elect Joe Biden's transition team.

Each of Trump's lawsuits alleging any kind of election fraud has proved to be a failure and some have downright infuriated judges. Still, Ms. Murphy maintains that Biden hasn't been declared the winner. Instead, she did an interview with CNN and whined that she's in a "no-win situation." If she authorizes the election, she could be fired from a job she'd have for one month. If she doesn't sign the letter she's putting the country at risk for a series of national security and public health problems by forcing Biden staff to scramble to get background checks and clearance approved on the first day of the new administration.

E.J. Dionne, Jr., has an observation and a warning:

President-elect Joe Biden’s victory offered the cheerful prospect that we might begin to detoxify our politics. Maybe we could forget Donald Trump for a while and argue with at least a touch of civility about the actual problems our country faces.

Heck, some of us dared to imagine that we might treat each other with respect. After all, Biden said over and over that he wanted to be the president of all Americans and honored the dignity of voters who had supported Trump in the past by expressing an understanding of their discontents.

Moreover, bypassing more polarizing alternatives, Biden’s own party chose the candidate most likely to be acceptable to the other side, itself a form of outreach.

And the GOP’s response to the outreach? With just a handful of exceptions, abject refusal to stand up against the anti-democratic lunacy of Trump’s efforts to nullify the results of a fair election.

It is also a warning: Anyone advising Biden and members of his party to turn the other cheek and reach out to Republican congressional leaders as though none of this has happened is urging them down the path of political suicide.

Ronald Reagan’s expression of hopeful skepticism, “trust but verify,” is far too optimistic for what Biden faces. Republicans aren’t simply denying him a honeymoon; they’re either acquiescing to or advancing Trump’s bid to cast Biden’s presidency as illegitimate from the start.

We close with our strong recommendation that you pay a visit to Infidel 753's link round-up, and while you're over there, be sure to read his post on the Trumpanzee monster turning on Republican leaders. It may help us snag those two Georgia Senate seats.

Bad Faith And Loons

In the aftermath of the convincing Biden-Harris victory, the rotted out Republican Party sees its role as enabling COVID Donnie's delusions in order to protect his bloated but fragile ego -- not, of course, to shoring up faith in our democratic system (surprise surprise!):

It is not over.

The presidential election is certainly over, and the result was not particularly close. President-elect Joe Biden won a decisive majority of the popular vote and likely a considerable electoral college victory. Claims of widespread electoral fraud would be spurious even if they weren’t made by a prating fool in front of a Philadelphia landscaping firm. The 2020 election is done. Concluded. Finished.

What has not ended — what seems endless — is Republican bad faith and poltroonery.

I am not referring here to those voters for President Trump who have been misled into false hope. It is not hard to convince people who distrust elites and are prone to conspiracy theories that elites are plotting to deny “real” Americans their influence. It does not even matter if the vote-counters are Republicans, because that is exactly what a conspiracy would do to hide its nefarious work.

No, it is Republican leaders who are responsible for poisoning whatever wells of goodwill still exist in our republic. Having aided Trump’s autocratic delusions, they are now abetting his assault on the orderly transfer of power. Through their active support or guilty silence, most elected Republicans are encouraging their fellow citizens to believe that America’s democratic system is fundamentally corrupt. No agent of China or Russia could do a better job of sabotage. Republicans are fostering cynicism about the constitutional order on a massive scale. They are stumbling toward sedition.

Meanwhile, these are some of the "fellow citizens" we're supposed to cosset and defer to, in order to promote domestic tranquillity:

President Trump’s election loss and the week-long silence of “Q,” the movement’s mysterious prophet, have wrenched some QAnon believers into a crisis of faith, with factions voicing unease about their future or rallying others to stay calm and “trust the plan.”

The uncertainty has been compounded by the abrupt public resignation, also last Tuesday, of Ron Watkins, the administrator of Q’s online sanctuary on the message board 8kun.

Q has gone quiet before. But the abrupt lack of posts since last Tuesday — Election Day, which the anonymous figure had touted for months as a key moment of reckoning — has sparked speculation and alarm among the movement’s most ardent followers.

Some QAnon proponents have begun to publicly grapple with reality and question whether the conspiracy theory is a hoax. “Have we all been conned?” one user wrote Saturday on 8kun.

Wrote another: “HOW CAN I SPEAK TO Q???? MY FAITH IS SHAKEN. I FOLLOWED THE PLAN. TRUMP LOST!!!!!!!!!!! WHAT NOW?????? WHERE IS THE PLAN???”

Trump’s defeat threatens to undermine the tale that Q, a supposed top-secret government operative, has woven over years: that Trump and his allies would soon vanquish a cabal of “deep state” child abusers and Satan-worshiping Democrats, exiling some to the U.S. detention facility in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

(Yale psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee has previously discussed the mental pathologies that are affecting members of the Trump cult, of which QAnon rubes are the most deluded, conspiratorial and likely dangerous.)

Going forward, this is what the poltroons leading the Republican Party will own, through their refusal to pop COVID Donnie's alternate universe election bubble:

Rita Katz, the executive director of SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors online extremism, said she expects the QAnon following will continue to grow online, regardless of who created or operated its presence online.

“It’s a dangerous network. It’s a dangerous movement that truly believes that Biden and other Democrats are killing kids,” Katz said. “And now, with Biden’s projected victory, the QAnon movement believes with the same zealous certainty that the whole thing is a sham. And that’s a major problem, because … these aren’t a bunch of harmless keyboard warriors — they’re adherents of a movement that has resulted in real-life violence.”

The FBI said last year that QAnon and other “conspiracy theory-driven domestic extremists” represented a major terrorism threat. Its supporters have been linked to kidnapping plots and violent threats, including in 2018, when an armed man in Arizona barricaded a bridge at the Hoover Dam with an armored truck.

Conspiracy theories have always been a part of the American political landscape, largely but not exclusively from the right -- from the Illuminati hoaxes to the John Birch Society's communist conspiracies to more recent birtherism, Sandy Hook and "deep state" slanders.  But, after four years of enabling a budding fascist fool, to now encourage the belief that a democratically- elected Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are somehow beneficiaries of a "stolen election," characterized by massive voter fraud, is perhaps the most brazen, un- American demonstration of cowardice and bad faith so far.  

But the year isn't over yet.

(Photo:  a perfectly normal QAnon "patriot" at an Arizona vote counting center last Thursday/ Dario Lopez-Mills, AP)