Another 'perfect call' for Trump

Last year began with an impeachment hearing over a call Donald Trump made to a foreign leader to pressure him for help in his re-election campaign. This year, Trump is up to the same old tricks. During a phone call with Georgia's Republican Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on Saturday, the president pressured the secretary to "find" enough votes to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the state and chalk it up to a "miscalculation." In particular, Trump asked that officials determine that ballots were shredded in Fulton County and that Dominion election machinery was removed or tampered with. He also suggested Raffensperger could be guilty of a "criminal offense." In fact, it is the president who may have opened himself up to legal liability in the phone call, potentially violating federal and state statutes intended to guard against the solicitation of election fraud. "All I know is that we’re going to follow the law, follow the process," Raffensperger said. "Truth matters." —Politico

• — The GOP's plans for Wednesday. The infamous call didn't faze many congressional Republicans, with more expressing outrage over the leaking of the recording than its content. Further, several senators, led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, have indicated that they will reject the Electoral College results when they come before Congress this week. "We intend to vote on Jan. 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not 'regularly given' and 'lawfully certified' (the statutory requisite), unless and until [an] emergency 10-day audit is completed," the group said in a statement on Saturday. —CBS News
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• — The outliers. There have been a fair share of Republican stalwarts, including Sens. Richard Burr, Shelly Moore Capito, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, Ben Sasse, John Thune, Pat Toomey, and Roger Wicker who have publicly expressed varying levels of indignation about their colleagues' doomed efforts. Additionally, two of each chamber's most conservative members, Rep. Chip Roy and Sen. Tom Cotton, while expressing the requisite Trumpian concern about the election's legitimacy, both also argued on federalist grounds that Congress has no constitutional authority to try to overturn the results of a given state's certified votes. —The Washington Post
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• — In other congressional news... Nancy Pelosi was narrowly re-elected as Speaker of the House at the start of the new session of Congress yesterday. Pelosi had little wiggle room to lose votes from fellow Democratic members, as Covid-related absences complicated matters. She won with 216 votes, with just five Democrats breaking ranks to vote against her—an improvement over the challenge her speakership faced in 2019, when 15 members didn't back her bid. —Axios
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• — "It's a desperate time." The U.S. has crossed the 350,000 mark in the total death toll to date from COVID-19. And as a new, more contagious strain of the virus is being detected in several states, a surge of cases is crowding large metro hospitals with patients, pushing occupancy against the limits of space and overwhelming nurses and doctors. More than 40% to 60% of ICU patients in some metro areas are critically ill from COVID-19, according to the University of Minnesota Hospitalization Tracking Project, straining personnel and resources and forcing some medical facilities to consider rationing care. —The Wall Street Journal
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• — Operation Warped Speed? The discovery of the easier-to-spread mutant strain of the coronavirus in the U.S. comes as the drive to vaccinate most Americans has been hampered by ineffective coordination and a lack of federal support for states and healthcare systems. While more than 4.28 million Americans had been vaccinated as of Saturday evening, that's far fewer than the 20 million doses U.S. health officials predicted for the end of 2020—and has led some officials to consider delaying second doses of vaccine until more people, particularly healthcare workers, can receive an initial dose. —Bloomberg

Former Defense secretaries: Military must stay out of it

"As senior Defense Department leaders have noted, 'there's no role for the U.S. military in determining the outcome of a U.S. election.' Efforts to involve the U.S. armed forces in resolving election disputes would take us into dangerous, unlawful, and unconstitutional territory. Civilian and military officials who direct or carry out such measures would be accountable, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the grave consequences of their actions on our republic." —10 former Defense secretaries in The Washington Post

Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Mark Esper, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, Leon Panetta, William Perry, and Donald Rumsfeld are the 10 living former U.S. secretaries of Defense.

MORE: NATO angry at Trump refusal to transition military to Biden —Business Insider

Rubin: Phone call demands legal consequences

"There must be a response to a president who exploits his office for the purpose of overthrowing an election. The evidence is on tape. The next attorney general should move forward, if for no other reason, to deter further attempts at such reprehensible conduct. I would suggest impeachment as well, which could include a ban on holding office in the future, but we know already Republicans will defend anything Trump does." —Jennifer Rubin in The Washington Post

Jennifer Rubin is an attorney and political opinion columnist at The Washington Post.

MORE: How new Congress can shine light on Trump era and persisting abuses —Just Security

Frum: Crossing the bright-red line

"Nobody knows whether presidential self-pardons are valid. Scholars disagree; courts have never ruled on them, because no past president ever tried such a thing. But a president desperate enough to try to steal an election on a recorded line is desperate enough to try a self-pardon. If a president can pardon himself as well as his or her subordinates, a president can order any crime, or commit it himself, with absolute impunity. The very notion of a self-pardon is radically inconsistent with democratic accountability. If Trump tries to pardon himself, his successors must fight his attempt all the way to the Supreme Court. And given the Raffensperger recording, who doubts that Trump will try it?" —David Frum in The Atlantic

David Frum is a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush and is currently a senior editor at The Atlantic.

Feaver & Inboden: A way forward for the GOP?

"[W]e hope all Republicans will join us in serving the country as the loyal opposition to the Biden Administration. That means supporting Biden when he advances wise policies, compromising where necessary, and making substantive, fair critiques when Biden is erring—or when his own far-left flank is pressing him into unwise ventures. Above all, it means abandoning a destructively personalized and hyperpolarized style of politics. The past four years provided enough of that to last us the rest of our lives." —Peter Feaver and Will Inboden in Foreign Policy

Peter Feaver is a professor of political science and public policy at Duke University, where he directs the Program in American Grand Strategy. Will Inboden is the executive director of the William P. Clements, Jr. Center for History, Strategy, and Statecraft at the University of Texas-Austin. He also serves as an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and as a distinguished scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law.

MORE: Denver Riggleman has seen the future of the Republican Party —The Atlantic

Ackerman & Schoen: Why RCV's time has come

"Ranked-choice voting would encourage consensus-building and discourage divisive agendas. Its value for both parties is that, as a political strategy, it does not force national candidates to run base campaigns. On the other hand, our current 'winner take all' voting system allows two parties to dominate our government, which leads to extreme candidates with extreme policies. This hurts our democracy because it gives voters less choices, shuts out independents, and then leads to gridlock." —Peter Ackerman and Douglas Schoen in The Hill

Peter Ackerman is the founder of Americans Elect. Douglas Schoen is a consultant who served as adviser to former President Bill Clinton and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

WaPo Ed Board: Our democracy needs reform

"Trump and a disturbing number of Republican officials have made obsolete the old assumptions that each major party will play fair, that electoral results will reflect the will of the majority, and that each side will willingly turn over power when defeated at the polls. The nation needs a top-to-bottom review of how it conducts elections, counts votes, and assures the public of the democracy's health, so that it resists those who want to restrict voting, trash legitimate ballots, and leverage positions of trust to upend valid results. Among President-elect Joe Biden's first acts should be to convene a high-level commission to recommend a democracy overhaul." —The Washington Post

I ask my parents, my sisters, my brothers-in-law, my friends and neighbors why they support Trump, and it has nothing to do with demographic changes. These people in my circles are educated and financially secure. It is not fear of "them" in the sense of racial groups or a "changing country."

But yes, it is fear that motivates them. They fear the Left. For them, the Left are elites, imposing their values and agenda on America. They feel like they have lost the culture war in every way—abortion, gay marriage, secularized education, radical feminism, etc. This is what they care about. This is why even my educated family and friends find conspiracy theories attractive, even QAnon. For them it is entirely cultural and religious. Trumpism has successfully co-opted these cultural issues and created a culturally "conservative" populism not unlike what is in Brazil. The Left is an existential threat to their most deeply held values—and they identify the Democratic Party with the Left. They fear the Left more than they fear foreign influences or the erosion of our democracy and institutions.

We also need to appreciate that the echo chamber in which these people live has now become completely closed. They are convinced that the media are controlled by the Left and will lie outright, even about Joe Biden winning. They can only trust NewsMax now and what they read in Parler. My family and friends were not extremists before, but they are now. They have been radicalized in 2019-20. They see the flurry of right-wing stories of election irregularities as proof positive of a corrupt election. They are bombarded every day by these stories, creating an alternate universe. They even watched the same hearings that I watched in MI and in GA. I came away thinking, "What a bunch of crackpots and partisans." They came away thinking, "See, look at all that evidence! People, open your eyes."

Please, there is no hope for the Republican Party. It will not come to its senses. It will become more and more extreme and divorced from the truth. This will simmer all during Biden's four years, and then boil over again.

We need a third party. Why? We need to peel off the 25% of Republicans of good conscience and in touch with reality, and create a wedge. Form a coalition—you all have the connections to do this. There are so many who would join you. Even just focusing on starting in a particular state like Utah and picking up some House or a Senate seat could open a path. Maybe we could even just focus on state-level House and Senate races, Secretaries of State, etc. now that we have seen how important these lower-level offices are to maintaining our democratic institutions. Even if this third party candidate would win no office, it would succeed in drawing votes away from the current Republican Party, which would be a win. —Erin R., South Carolina

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