Ron Brownstein/Atlantic:

The Decision That Will Define Democrats for a Decade

Will they get rid of the filibuster if it means passing their voting-rights and election-reform agenda?

That decision carries enormous consequences for the future balance of power between the parties: The number of younger and diverse voters participating in future elections will likely be much greater if these laws pass than if they don’t, especially with state-level Republicans already pushing a new round of laws making it tougher to vote based on Donald Trump’s discredited claims of election fraud in 2020. Given those stakes, the Democrats’ voting-rights agenda is quickly becoming a focal point of the pressure from left-leaning activists to end the filibuster. “Our grass roots will not accept the notion that we had good intentions, but we just failed” to pass these laws, Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat who is the lead sponsor of the Senate companion to H.R. 1, told me.

Melinda Fakuade/Vox:

The best face mask is one that fits

Cloth masks are fine for many people — as long as they cover your nose and mouth.

Tons of celebrities have been seen out with their masks underneath their noses. Notably, members of Congress who promote masking up have been seen pulling up their sliding masks in public.

Cloth masks sometimes lend themselves to poor etiquette: Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI) slipped his down to sneeze into his hand on C-SPAN, which is, to put it plainly, horrifying. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is known to have masks that match her outfits but was once photographed in a conversation with George Floyd’s brother, mask hanging down below her mouth. And soon after his inauguration, President Joe Biden’s mask slipped down his face in the midst of signing an executive action related to Covid-19. It happens to the best of us. Walk around anywhere in pandemic America, and you’ll surely encounter people fiddling with their masks.

Note which issue is +56 in GA.

John Harwood/CNN:

Why Biden has a rare opportunity for early success

Over five decades in Washington, President Joe Biden has watched seven newly-elected presidents get started. Improbably, he has the chance for a stronger opening act than any of them.

Just 12 days into Biden's presidency, the emerging alignment of forces holds the promise of two giant early legislative breakthroughs. The potential for rapid payoffs in public health and economic recovery exceeds anything recent predecessors managed to find.

That's not because Biden swept into office on a landslide. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all won larger electoral majorities with wider popular vote margins.

It's not because of superior numerical muscle in Congress. Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump, as well as Clinton and Obama, enjoyed bigger partisan majorities in the House and Senate.

And it's not because Biden's grandfatherly persona bests Reagan's charisma, Clinton's persuasiveness or Obama's star quality. At 78, the oldest president in American history has made understated calm his early signature.

Instead, the size of Biden's opportunity reflects the unique circumstances of early 2021: a deadly pandemic that could subside with an effective vaccination push, a battered economy poised to rebound when it does, the unfinished business of a disgraced predecessor, and the determination of fellow Democrats to overcome obstruction by increasingly-radicalized Republican adversaries.

Jamelle Bouie/NY Times:

I’m Not Actually Interested in Mitch McConnell’s Hypocrisy

To make his case for the filibuster, he has essentially rewritten the history of the Senate.

“When it comes to lawmaking, the framers’ vision and our history are clear. The Senate exists to require deliberation and cooperation,” McConnell declared. “James Madison said the Senate’s job was to provide a ‘complicated check’ against ‘improper acts of legislation.’ We ensure that laws earn enough buy-in to receive the lasting consent of the governed. We stop bad ideas, improve good ideas and keep laws from swinging wildly with every election.”

He went on: “More than any other feature, it is the Senate’s 60-vote threshold to end debate on legislation that achieves this.”

It’s hard to take any of this seriously. None of McConnell’s stated concern for the “lasting consent of the governed” was on display when Senate Republicans, under his leadership, tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act by majority vote. Nor was there any interest in “deliberation and cooperation” when Republicans wanted a new round of corporate and upper-income tax cuts.

Sarah Posner/Reveal:

How the Christian right helped foment insurrection

Christian-right activists inside and outside of government promoted the election fraud lie and claimed God told them to “let the church roar.”

White evangelicals have been Trump’s most dedicated, unwavering base, standing by him through the cavalcade of abuses, failures and scandals that engulfed his campaigns and his presidency – from the “Access Hollywood” tape to his first impeachment to his efforts to overturn the election and incite the Capitol insurrection. This fervent relationship, which has survived the events of Jan. 6, is based on far more than a transactional handshake over judicial appointments and a crackdown on abortion and LGBTQ rights. Trump’s White evangelical base has come to believe that God anointed him and that Trump’s placement of Christian-right ideologues in critical positions at federal agencies and in federal courts was the fulfillment of a long-sought goal of restoring the United States as a Christian nation. Throughout Trump’s presidency, his political appointees implemented policies that stripped away reproductive and LGBTQ rights and tore down the separation of church and state in the name of protecting unfettered religious freedom for conservative Christians. After Joe Biden won the presidency, Trump administration loyalists launched their own Christian organization to “stop the steal,” in the ultimate act of loyalty to their divine leader.

First Read:

On Covid relief, Democrats will go alone if Republicans won't come along

The Biden White House and Democratic congressional leaders appear to have made their tactical decision on Covid-19 relief talks — use budget reconciliation that requires just 51 votes for passage.

The question is whether that legislative tactic will work, and whether President Biden will get backlash if he doesn’t get bipartisan support for his $1.9 trillion package…

Translation: They want Republican votes, but they aren’t going to be beholden to it.

But the reconciliation tactic doesn’t come without risks and drawbacks.

Emma Green/Atlantic:

Betraying Your Church—And Your Party

How Representative Adam Kinzinger, an evangelical Republican, decided to vote for impeachment—and start calling out his church

Kinzinger is not a pastor or a theologian. He knows his job as a representative is not to preach the gospel but to represent his constituents and vote on legislation. When he’s dead, however, it won’t matter how many elections he won, or how low America’s tax rates are. The Lord has been speaking to him about his role as a Christian in politics, he said, and how he can reach people who are thinking about their eternal life. He has concluded that his faith and his party have been poisoned by the same conspiracy theories and lies, culminating in the falsehood that the election was stolen. When you look at “the reputation of Christianity today versus five years ago, I feel very comfortable saying it’s a lot worse,” he said. “Boy, I think we have lost a lot of moral authority.”

But people like Kinzinger have not been the ones shaping the reputation of Christianity in America over the past four years. Trump’s supporters have. Even after everything that’s happened—Trump’s attempt to overturn the election, his cheerleading for the attack on the Capitol—some influential evangelical leaders are still defending the president: “Shame, shame,” Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of the famous pastor Billy Graham, wrote about the 10 Republicans who voted for impeachment. “It makes you wonder what the 30 pieces of silver were that Speaker Pelosi promised for this betrayal.” In the metaphor, the Republican dissidents are cast as Judas, who is said to have betrayed Jesus in exchange for 30 coins. Trump plays the role of Christ.

Looking to political personalities rather than Jesus for salvation is the worst kind of mistake a Christian can make, Kinzinger said. “There are many people that have made America their god, that have made the economy their god, that have made Donald Trump their god, and that have made their political identity their god.” The problems that led to the January 6 insurrection are not just political. They’re cultural. Roughly half of Protestant pastors said they regularly hear people promote conspiracy theories in their churches, a recent survey by the Southern Baptist firm LifeWay Research found. “I believe there is a huge burden now on Christian leaders, especially those who entertained the conspiracies, to lead the flock back into the truth,” Kinzinger tweeted on January 12.

David Smith/Guardian:

The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy

Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

In other news, Marjorie Taylor Greene is the face of the GOP. She's a nutter, elected by her constituents. Until or unless the Congress chooses Liz Cheney over Greene it is what it is, and perfectly appropriate to see them (Greene and the GOP) as one and the same.

 Madeleine Aggeler/New York:

The Vileness of Marjorie Taylor Greene

The video — along with new CNN reports about Greene’s troubling social-media activity prior to her election — has prompted many Democrats and a few Republicans to call for Greene’s resignation, though GOP leadership has yet to act in any meaningful way. Greene, for her part, did not apologize or walk back her claims, saying that at the time of the video she was “going from office to office in the Senate to oppose the radical gun control agenda that David Hogg was pushing.”

The video is just the latest example of the loathsome conduct of a woman now tasked with helping shape education and labor policy in the U.S. Below, examples of some of Greene’s most troubling behavior.

Chris Stirewalt/LA Times:

I called Arizona for Biden on Fox News. Here’s what I learned

In my career as a political analyst and, until my firing last week, an election forecaster on the decision desk at Fox News, I have always been with [Erastus] Brooks. I wanted to steam downriver as fast as I could to be first with the news to beat the competition and serve my audience.

Having worked in cable news for more than a decade after a wonderfully misspent youth in newspapers, I can tell you the result: a nation of news consumers both overfed and malnourished. Americans gorge themselves daily on empty informational calories, indulging their sugar fixes of self-affirming half-truths and even outright lies.

Can anyone really be surprised that the problem has gotten worse in the last few years?

Vox:

Fox News’s post-Trump slump, explained

For the first time in nearly 20 years, Fox News isn’t the top-rated cable news network.

As Baragona explained in an interview with Vox, it’s not a coincidence that Fox News’s ratings decline coincided with the disappearance of Trump’s Twitter account, which the former president used relentlessly to promote his favorite Fox opinion hosts and denigrate their competition. And now, without the backing of one of its most influential fans, the network has been left to chart its way through an uncertain future.

“We don’t know how much right-wing grievances will work, how much basically stoking outrage will work,” Baragona said. “It worked during the Obama years, and that’s the formula they’re trying to replicate right now. But we just got through with a Trump era, and now the guy who helped trumpet [and] amplify them on Twitter, he’s gone now. His Twitter account’s gone. And many of his fans are not coming back, so it just remains to be seen.”

CNN:

Tokyo Olympics: Can vaccines save the Games?

"I think a lot of people had this vested belief that once the vaccine started to roll out, that would really spell the end of Covid and what we would see is that transmission rates would start to plummet, things would get more controlled and we would have some ability to go back to a more normal lifestyle," Jason Kindrachuk, an infectious disease expert at the University of Manitoba in Canada, tells CNN Sport.

"The fact is that even with good vaccine rollouts in a number of regions of the world, we're having trouble getting a hold on transmission."

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

The GOP’s whining about Biden is absurd. Good thing Democrats are ignoring it.

Until we know that 10 GOP senators are willing to support something remotely close to what Biden and Democrats want, there simply isn’t anything to talk about. What’s the Republican plan? There isn’t one. With whom are Democrats supposed to negotiate? Over what, exactly?

Let’s go out on a limb and suggest that Republicans would like to keep it this way for as long as possible. They want the public debate to unfold in a place where they get to refrain from saying what they’re for — that is, refrain from saying what they’re prepared to concede to Democrats — while simultaneously attacking Democrats for not being willing to concede enough to them.

NY Times:

An impasse ends in the Senate as Democrats win a filibuster battle.

But as in past fights over the filibuster, the outcome is likely to be only a temporary solution. As they press forward on Mr. Biden’s agenda, Democrats will come under mounting pressure from activists to jettison the rule, which effectively requires 60 votes to advance any measure, should Republicans use it regularly to stall or stop the administration’s priorities.

Merrick Garland could not be reached for comment.

Asawin Suebsaeng/Daily Beast:

Trump Fumes in His First Weekend Out of Office as Fauci Clowns on Him

In recent days, former President Donald Trump has watched from afar as one of his most popular rivals for public attention has been unleashed by the Biden administration to, in part, disparage Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. And the ex-president hasn’t even been able to tweet about it.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, once a prominent figure on Trump’s coronavirus task force who’s now a top COVID-19 adviser to President Joe Biden, began his multi-day blitz to different news outlets that included openly expressing his relief that the old crew was gone and that he could now serve in the Biden administration.

Drew Altman/Kaiser Family Foundation at Axios:

The U.S. needs to ramp up vaccinations to reach herd immunity

The U.S. would need to significantly ramp up coronavirus vaccinations if we’re going to reach herd immunity any time soon.

Why it matters: At minimum, herd immunity requires vaccinating 70% of the population. And reaching that benchmark is especially difficult — because children aren’t eligible for the vaccines yet, the U.S. would need to inoculate the vast majority of adults.

By the numbers: The U.S. would need to administer 2.4 million doses per day in order to vaccinate 70% of the population by July 4.

• To get there by Labor Day would require 1.9 million doses per day.
• To reach herd immunity by Jan. 1, 2022, we’d need 1.2 million doses per day.

Where it stands: The Centers for Disease Control reported 1.6 million vaccinations last Friday, and yesterday the Biden administration upped its goal — it's now aiming for 1.5 million shots per day, instead of 1 million.

Liz Szabo/CNN:

Anti-vaccine activists peddle theories that Covid-19 shots are deadly, undermining vaccination

Anti-vaccine groups have falsely claimed for decades that childhood vaccines cause autism, weaving fantastic conspiracy theories involving government, Big Business and the media.

Now, the same groups are blaming patients' coincidental medical problems on covid shots, even when it's clear that age or underlying health conditions are to blame, Hotez said. "They will sensationalize anything that happens after someone gets a vaccine and attribute it to the vaccine," [Dr Peter] Hotez said.

Alex Burns/NY Times:

How Democrats Planned for Doomsday

A huge coalition of activist groups had been working together since the spring to make sure that Joe Biden won and that the “election stayed won” amid Donald Trump’s subterfuge.

They convened to craft a plan for answering the onslaught on American democracy, and they soon reached a few key decisions. They would stay off the streets for the moment and hold back from mass demonstrations that could be exposed to an armed mob goaded on by President Donald J. Trump.

They would use careful language. In a presentation, Anat Shenker-Osorio, a liberal messaging guru, urged against calling the attack a “coup,” warning that the word could make Mr. Trump sound far stronger than he was — or even imply that a pro-Trump militia had seized power.

What is interesting about this moment is that we used to get mad at media (NY Times,especially, but all of it across the board) for refusing to call out Donald Trump, normalizing him, refusing to use the word “lies” etc.

But now, media and reporting are clear. It’s the conservative part of the public that won’t accept the truth. They’ll have to sooner or later (see COVID), but a lot of harm will occur along the way.

George Conway/WaPo:

Former president, private citizen and, perhaps, criminal defendant:

Donald Trump’s new reality

The question came out of the blue and has haunted me ever since. It was Jan. 17, 2017, three days before Donald Trump’s swearing-in, and my wife and I sat with him in the near-empty main cabin aboard the Trump Organization’s Boeing 757 en route to Washington for a pre-inaugural gala.

So, asked the president-elect: Should he retain or fire Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the powerful Southern District of New York? I gave what I thought was an obvious, anodyne answer: All other things being equal, it’s better to have your own people in place. Within two months, Bharara was gone.

To the charge of naivete that night, I plead guilty: I didn’t consider then that Trump might have had his personal legal interests in mind. But it is impossible to escape the self-interested intent behind his question. From the earliest days of his administration, it became painfully apparent that in all matters — including affairs of state — Trump’s personal well-being took top priority. Four years and two impeachments later, he has managed to avoid the full consequences of his conduct.

But now that run of legal good fortune may end. Trump departed the White House a possible — many would say probable, provable — criminal, one who has left a sordid trail of potential and actual misconduct that remains to be fully investigated.

David Rothkopf/USA Today:

Let's get real. Joe Biden, Democrats and America need results much more than unity.

It's time to give Biden's 81 million voters a chance to be heard and Biden a chance to carry out the plans he ran on, even if he has to play hardball.

When Biden spoke of unity, however, he was clear. He explicitly did not mean he expected we would all agree on every initiative. Rather, his intent as laid out in the speech, was to remind Americans that we are all in this together. He has said his goal is to de-toxify American politics, to end the zero sum, us vs. them mentality that dominated during the Trump years. He wants to make sure people understood that under his administration, no state or city or individual will be penalized for their legitimate political beliefs.

Colin P Clarke/NY Times:

A New Era of Far-Right Violence

The imagery of the Capitol siege will have enduring resonance.

Large segments of the mob that stormed the Capitol were unaffiliated — individuals and small groups, family members, neighbors. These could well be the new foot soldiers of the far right. Some, and perhaps many, of these new recruits will have military experience or law enforcement training. What’s more, the infusion of younger members into the ranks of the far right is likely to breathe new life into the movement, ensuring its longevity.

David Masciotra/Salon:

Longtime GOP insider Mike Lofgren on his former party: "Going easy on these people will not work"

Lofgren spent 28 years on Capitol Hill. Now he says Republican zealots should be crushed, banished and ostracized

I recently discussed the insurrection at the Capitol, how best to combat right-wing extremism and the future of the Republican Party with Lofgren in a phone conversation, lightly edited here for length and clarity.

We'll start with the obvious. What was your gut reaction as you watched the act of domestic terrorism — the siege of the Capitol — live on television? Now that you've had time to process it, what is your interpretation of the event both in terms of what happened and how the United States should proceed?

I worked for three decades in Congress. Regardless of how peeved I might have been over some policy or another, I was proud of my public service. To see the place trashed like that, and I mean really desecrated — there were people shitting on the floor, and smearing it on the walls. The insane violence of a mob beating a cop with a fire extinguisher and shoving him down the marble stairs was horrifying. At the same time, once the mob was dispersed, they went throughout the D.C. metro area randomly beating up people whom they could victimize. Later that afternoon, my daughter, who does not live in D.C. but in Arlington, across the river, was out walking her dog, and saw these thugs spewing out of the Metro station like toxic waste. She had to do a 180. Arlington was placed under curfew that night. All these occurrences, including having to worry about my own family's safety, left some pretty vivid impressions, to say the least.  

Jane Meyer/New Yorker:

Why McConnell Dumped Trump

After the Capitol assault—and after losing his perch as Majority Leader—the senator finally denounced the outgoing President. Was it a moral reckoning or yet another act of political self-interest?

Several Republican advisers argued to me that McConnell had no reasonable choice. If he had confronted Trump before the Georgia runoff, they said, Trump would have launched a civil war within the Party, possibly even commanding his supporters not to vote. “It could have been worse,” the former Trump official said. “Trump could have attacked” the two Republican Senate candidates, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, or the National Republican Senate Campaign Committee. As one of the advisers put it, “McConnell was trying to keep the wheels on the train for a few more hours.”

The price of Trump’s coöperation, however, grew ever higher. According to a well-informed Republican insider, Trump made unconscionable demands behind the scenes. He threatened to withhold his support for Loeffler and Perdue, and refused to campaign for them unless they joined his attacks on Georgia’s election officials and repeated his false claims of widespread election fraud. Days before the runoff, the insider said, the President forced Perdue to leave the campaign trail for a secret meeting at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s private club in Palm Beach, Florida. There, Trump coerced Perdue not just into taking his side on election fraud but also into supporting an increase in the size of pandemic-relief checks to two thousand dollars—a figure that McConnell and Senate Republicans opposed. If Perdue refused, Trump made clear, he might withdraw his support. At the time, a spokesman for Perdue’s campaign denied that Trump had pressured Perdue. But, soon after the Mar-a-Lago meeting, both Perdue and Loeffler began echoing Trump’s call for larger relief checks, placing themselves and McConnell in an embarrassing political bind. Trump, meanwhile, went on Twitter and attacked McConnell’s opposition to the bigger relief checks, calling it a “death wish.” The President’s behavior toward the candidates led the insider to a simple conclusion: “Trump is a thug.”

Here’s the problem for Republicans: office holders like Brad Raffensperger and Mitch McConnell would rather the white supremacy stay genteel and quiet to keep the majority.

QAnon and the Republican base, increasingly the same as in Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert, want it said out loud. They’d rather be loud and in the minority than suffer the embarrassment of compromise (let alone admission of guilt, error, or defeat).

It’s going to be a rough few years. Republicans will simply refuse to acknowledge losses so long as there is no price to be paid for it.

KC Star:

‘Bamboozled.’ Hawley mentors stunned by conduct, but early warning signs were there

Since the Capitol rampage, Hawley’s mentors have disavowed him. Donors have demanded refunds. Colleagues have called for his resignation or expulsion. And those who helped guide his career are asking themselves if they missed something essential about their former mentee.

“I am more than a little bamboozled by it, certainly distressed by it,” said David Kennedy, the Stanford professor emeritus of history who served as Hawley’s academic adviser and wrote the foreword to his 2008 book on Teddy Roosevelt.

But the Lexington columns suggest that Hawley’s ideology took root long before he entered public life, and that his passage from Roosevelt scholar to Trump’s ideological heir was not entirely unforeseen.

NY Times:

Prosecute Trump? Biden Is Wary, but His Voters Are Eager

Urging unity, the president-elect has tried to focus on his policy plans. But many of those who elected him are still fixated on his predecessor: “He’s a crook and he needs to pay.”

Interviews with two dozen Biden voters across the country found near unanimity that it was important for the Senate, the Justice Department and state prosecutors to aggressively pursue Mr. Trump, his family members and top aides — holding them accountable well beyond the impeachment charge against the president for inciting the Capitol riot on Jan. 6. The consensus cut across differences of ideology, income, race and sex.

“He’s a crook and he needs to pay for the crimes he’s done,” said Teresa Steele, a Republican in Denton County, Texas, who voted for Mr. Biden.

The word ‘diner’ does not appear in the report. Keep working it, media.

What will actually happen with impeachment? I expect Republican senators to keep moving the goalposts until they are left with “We can’t vote to impeach a president of our own party, and that’s the bedrock principle we live by. It doesn’t matter what he did.”

Megan K Stack/New Yorker:

The Week the Trump Supporters Disappeared

In Washington, D.C., our leaders sealed themselves off from a rebel force that didn’t arrive.

As the new President took the oath of office on Wednesday, there were neither parties nor protests in the streets of Washington. Instead, there was mostly quiet, punctuated by the sirens of convoys careening around, the churn of helicopters overhead, and newscasters narrating the unseen news for viewers around the planet. Deep within the rings of checkpoints and soldiers, Joe Biden became President. People outside the security watched on their phones or not at all; most of them were reporters, soldiers, or police. There were rumors that a pro-Trump gathering would be held on the plaza at Union Station, but no such spectacle appeared: a few preachers droned about Hell and feminists while passersby heckled them and pigeons swooped low over their heads. At Judiciary Square, a lone middle-aged man made his way along the sidewalk, wearing a plain winter hat rolled low over his forehead and a disposable blue medical mask. He was an unremarkable figure except for the sign he carried: “THIS LOOKS LIKE PYONGYANG / THERE ARE ONLY POLICE AND MILITARY / NO CIVILIANS.”

The man didn’t want to speak, he explained to reporters. His signs contained everything he wished to express. He pulled a second placard from behind the first and propped it against a nearby tree: “BIG TECH CENSORSHIP KILLED DEMOCRACY.”

Peter Beinert/NY Times:

Why Are There So Few Courageous Senators?

Here’s what we need to do if we want more Mitt Romneys and fewer Josh Hawleys.

Now that Donald Trump has been defanged, leading Republicans are rushing to denounce him. It’s a little late. The circumstances were different then, but a year ago, only one Republican senator, Mitt Romney, backed impeachment. In a party that has been largely servile, Mr. Romney’s courage stands out.

Why, in the face of immense pressure, did Mr. Romney defend the rule of law? And what would it take to produce more senators like him? These questions are crucial if America’s constitutional system, which has been exposed as shockingly fragile, is to survive. The answer may be surprising: To get more courageous senators, Americans should elect more who are near the end of their political careers.

This doesn’t just mean old politicians — today’s average senator is, after all, over 60. It means senators with the stature to stand alone.

WKRG:

Actions by GOP attorneys general could damage credibility

By supporting efforts to overturn the results of the presidential election, most of the nation’s Republican state attorneys general may have undermined their offices’ long-held special status in federal courts.

In December, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed legal papers attempting to overturn the results of the presidential election based on unfounded claims of election fraud in four states that voted for President-elect Joe Biden. The Republican attorneys general for 17 other states made legal filings supporting his effort, which was rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Daily Beast:

Fox News Launches ‘Purge’ to ‘Get Rid of Real Journalists’

Fox News on Tuesday fired the political editor who was tasked with defending the network’s election night decisions that especially angered President Donald Trump and his allies.

Politics editor Chris Stirewalt’s exit from the network coincided with the sacking of at least 16 digital editorial staffers, including senior editors. People familiar with the situation said the layoffs—a “blood bath,” as multiple Fox News insiders described it—were perpetrated by Porter Berry, the Sean Hannity crony now in charge of remaking Fox’s digital properties in the image of its right-wing opinion programming.

Lou Zickar/USA Today:

Centrist Republicans, speak up! We must take a stand against the insurrectionists

If you are a principled centrist or principled conservative, now is not the time to remain silent.

For as the tragic events on Jan. 6 at the U.S. Capitol made clear, the divide in the Republican Party is no longer between the center and the right wing. The divide in today’s GOP is between the insurrectionist wing and everyone else.

David Leonhardt/NY times:

Underselling the Vaccine

And what else you need to know today.

Now a version of the mask story is repeating itself — this time involving the vaccines. Once again, the experts don’t seem to trust the public to hear the full truth.

This issue is important and complex enough that I’m going to make today’s newsletter a bit longer than usual. If you still have questions, don’t hesitate to email me at themorning@nytimes.com.

Right now, public discussion of the vaccines is full of warnings about their limitations: They’re not 100 percent effective. Even vaccinated people may be able to spread the virus. And people shouldn’t change their behavior once they get their shots.

These warnings have a basis in truth, just as it’s true that masks are imperfect. But the sum total of the warnings is misleading, as I heard from multiple doctors and epidemiologists last week.

“It’s driving me a little bit crazy,” Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown School of Public Health, told me.

“We’re underselling the vaccine,” Dr. Aaron Richterman, an infectious-disease specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, said.

“It’s going to save your life — that’s where the emphasis has to be right now,” Dr. Peter Hotez of the Baylor College of Medicine said.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines are “essentially 100 percent effective against serious disease,” Dr. Paul Offit, the director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, said. “It’s ridiculously encouraging.”

But still, don’t change your behavior immediately. Iit’s a short term thing but keep your guard up until community spread drops.

Ronald Brownstein/CNN:

Trump leaves America at its most divided since the Civil War

The January 6 assault on the US Capitol capped four years in which Trump relentlessly stoked the nation's divisions and simultaneously provided oxygen for the growth of White nationalist extremism through his open embrace of racist language and conspiracy theories.

In the process, Trump has not only shattered the barriers between the Republican Party and far-right extremists but also enormously intensified a trend that predated him: a growing willingness inside the GOP's mainstream to employ anti-small-d-democratic means to maintain power in a country demographically evolving away from the party.

The result has been to raise the stakes in the ideological polarization of the parties that has been reshaping American politics for decades.

McKay Coppins/Atlantic:

The Coming Republican Amnesia

How will the GOP recover from the Trump era? Pretend it never happened.

As Donald Trump lurches through the disastrous final days of his presidency, Republicans are just beginning to survey the wreckage of his reign. Their party has been gutted, their leader is reviled, and after four years of excusing every presidential affront to “conservative values,” their credibility is shot. How will the GOP recover from the complicity and corruption of the Trump era? To many Republicans, the answer is simple: Pretend it never happened.

Monmouth University Poll:

Authoritarianism Among Trump Voters

Among panelists who reported voting for Trump in the 2020 election, just over 4 in 10 score in the highest quartile of the Right Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale when the original survey weights from the 2019 survey are applied. This leaves just over half of Trump supporters who are not classified as having high authoritarian inclinations. [It should also be noted that only a handful of President-elect Joe Biden’s voters in the panel have a high RWA score – too few to break out in this analysis.]

Dave A Hopkins/Honest Graft:

In the End, the Trump Presidency Was a Failure on Its Own Terms

Trump succeeded in preventing Hillary Clinton from leading the country, but he wound up empowering Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer instead. He railed against liberal elites who predominate within social institutions like universities, media organizations, and technology companies, but his time in office only saw a continued progression of leftward cultural change in American society and a parallel departure of highly-educated voters from the Republican Party. The conservative intellectual project has not suffered as much damage in many decades as it did over the past four years; conservative thinkers and writers were internally divided into pro- and anti-Trump factions, were exposed as holding a limited ability to speak for the conservative mass public, and were deprived by Trump's behavior of a precious claim to moral superiority over the left. And the fact that the Trump administration is leaving office complaining of being "silenced" and "canceled" by a multi-platform social media ban imposed on its leader is evidence enough of its lack of success in gaining influence over the tech sector.

A final, inadvertantly-acknowledged testimony to the failure of the Trump administration was its prevailing communication style. Both the outgoing president and his succession of spokespeople stood out for two distinctive traits: a lack of commitment to factual accuracy and a perpetually grouchy demeanor. The typical public statement from this White House was a misleading claim delivered with a sarcastic sneer. Of course, no member of the administration would admit on the record that the Trump presidency was anything less than a parade of unparalleled triumphs. But it doesn't make sense to lie so much unless the truth isn't on your side, and there's no good reason to act so aggrieved all the time if you're really succeeding as much as you claim.

Axios with a must-read:

Beginning on election night 2020 and continuing through his final days in office, Donald Trump unraveled and dragged America with him, to the point that his followers sacked the U.S. Capitol with two weeks left in his term. This Axios series takes you inside the collapse of a president.

Episode 1:  A premeditated lie lit the fire

Trump’s refusal to believe the election results was premeditated. He had heard about the “red mirage” — the likelihood that early vote counts would tip more Republican than the final tallies — and he decided to exploit it.

Episode 2: Barbarians at the Oval

Episode 2: Trump stops buying what his professional staff are telling him, and increasingly turns to radical voices telling him what he wants to hear.

Episode 3: Descent into madness ... Trump: "Sometimes you need a little crazy"

Episode 3: The conspiracy goes too far. Trump's outside lawyers plot to seize voting machines and spin theories about communists, spies and computer software.

Inquirer Editorial Board:

This MLK Day, Congress should remember Dr. King’s economic agenda

“When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. made this warning in his famous ”Beyond Vietnam” speech, exactly one year before his assassination on April 4, 1968.

In 2020, we’ve seen the “giant triplets” in full force. Militarized police forces crack down on racial justice protesters nationwide. The racially driven inequities in America’s provision of health care, as well as inequities in the social determinants of health such as housing and poverty, has made an allegedly “color blind” coronavirus much deadlier for Black people and people of color. And while renters faced eviction, business owners went bankrupt, and people rushed to food pantries, billionaires got richer. Each one of these economic hardships loomed larger and disproportionately impacted the lives of Black, brown, and Indigenous people.

Here is that new CRS piece:

The Impeachment and Trial of a Former President

January 15, 2021

For the second time in just over a year, the House of Representatives has voted to impeach President Donald J. Trump. The House previously voted to impeach President Trump on December 18, 2019, and the Senate voted to acquit the President on February 5, 2020. Because the timing of this second impeachment vote is so close to the end of the Trump Administration, it is possible that any resulting Senate trial may not occur until after President Trump leaves office on January 20, 2021. This possibility has prompted the question of whether the Senate can try a former President for conduct that occurred while he was in office...

The Constitution does not directly address whether Congress may impeach and try a former President for actions taken while in office. Though the text is open to debate, it appears that most scholars who have closely examined the question have concluded that Congress has authority to extend the impeachment process to officials who are no longer in office. 

Anand Ghiridharadas:

We are falling on our face because we are jumping high

A dash of perspective in a dark hour

It’s scary out there right now. It’s going to be scary for some time to come. What has been unleashed, what has been revealed, is ugly. It is what makes democracies die.

In the despair, it is easy to lose perspective. I certainly do all the time. But from time to time, I step back and try to remember where we are as a country on the arc of things.

And I see then that this is both a very dark time and, potentially, a very bright time. It's important to hold these truths together.

When I look down at the ground of the present right now, I feel depressed. If I lift my head to the horizon, I see a different picture.

This is not the chaos of the beginning of something. This is the chaos of the end of something.

Daniel Dale/CNN:

The 15 most notable lies of Donald Trump's presidency

Trying to pick the most notable lies from Donald Trump's presidency is like trying to pick the most notable pieces of junk from the town dump.

There's just so much ugly garbage to sift through before you can make a decision.

But I'm qualified for the dirty job. I fact checked every word uttered by this President from his inauguration day in January 2017 until September 2020 -- when the daily number of lies got so unmanageably high that I had to start taking a pass on some of his remarks to preserve my health.

Forbes:

Fox News Viewership Plummets: First Time Behind CNN And MSNBC In Two Decades

"The unified wall of support for Trump has splintered after last week's assault on the Capitol," said Mark Lukasiewicz, a former TV executive and who now serves as Dean of Hofstra's School of Communication. "Tristan Harris famously said that social networks are about 'affirmation, not information' — and the same can be said about cable news, especially in primetime."

Alexandra Petri:

Now is not the time to point fingers, Julius Caesar. Now is the time for healing.

Julius Caesar, these Ides have been stressful for everyone, and I think the last thing the Roman people need right now is for you to be pointing fingers — at Brutus, at me, or at anyone, as you clutch at yourself and sink onto the Senate steps.

Now is not the time to cast blame and call out names. Now is the time for healing. Please stop bleeding on my toga; that is a sad reminder of a hurtful time I hope we can put behind us. The last thing we need is to be thinking about the past, when I have already dropped my dagger, forgotten every threatening or negative thing I ever said, and am, frankly, ready to move on. Now is the time to come together, for the good of Rome.

For someone who always made a big point of how he was uniting Rome, and who historically was so fond of Brutus, you certainly seem bent on dividing us and making Brutus look bad with your remarks now! “You too, Brutus?” Seriously?

We must focus on the future, Julius, and get back to the people’s business. The Roman people didn’t elect us (technically, the sentence could stop there!) to stand around engaging in pointless recriminations about who stabbed whom with what dagger concealed under whose toga. Ultimately, aren’t both sides at fault here? We can certainly agree that if you had not come to the Senate today, no one would have been stabbed. I’m just saying this to show we all bear some responsibility.

And your final piece:

That’s too bad. 

Greg Sargent/WaPo:

A leaked intelligence memo suggests Trump’s lies could incite more violence

Not long after President Trump earned the crowning distinction of becoming the first U.S. president to get impeached twice, he released a video in which he went further than ever in calling for an end to post-election violence. But here’s what Trump did not say:

First, that Joe Biden is the legitimate winner of the 2020 election. Second, that Trump’s own big lie to the contrary was the singular cause of the deadly mob assault on the Capitol — and is perhaps the fundamental reason we face the threat of more right-wing insurgent violence to come.

A new federal intelligence bulletin that I’ve obtained underscores the stakes of this omission: It flatly warns that the lie that the 2020 election was fraudulent could be a key inspiration of domestic extremist violence going forward.

The Jan. 13 memo doesn’t cite Trump or his role in spreading this lie, but, of course, Trump has relentlessly promulgated it for months.

WaPo:

Biden unveiling $1.9 trillion economic and health care relief package

Proposal is aimed at addressing the nation’s immediate needs; larger recovery package to follow

Poised to inherit a health-care disaster and a deteriorating economy, President-elect Joe Biden is laying out a $1.9 trillion emergency relief plan Thursday night that will serve as an early test of his ability to steer the nation out of the pandemic disasters and make good on his promises to unite a divided Congress.

The wide-ranging package is designed to take aim at the twin crises Biden will confront upon taking office Jan. 20, with a series of provisions delivering direct aid to American families, businesses, and communities, and a major focus on coronavirus testing and vaccine production and delivery as the pandemic surge continues.

Christian Vanderbrouk/Bulwark:

Make. Them. Testify.

Call the Trump officials who resigned in protest to testify at the impeachment trial.

The people closest to Donald Trump knew the risks.

For years, Trump and his most ardent supporters threatened their opponents with violence, insurrection, secession, and even civil war.

Some of his closest aides and establishment enablers gambled that such outcomes might be avoided, that they might escape the Trump administration with their reputations and career prospects enhanced. Or at least intact.

“There’s safety in numbers,” they may have told themselves. “I made the best of a bad situation and advanced causes I believe in.” “My hands are cleaner than others. I wasn’t part of the corruption, the child separation policies, the plot against democracy.”

But this was delusional because this was never a gamble. It was a Faustian bargain. And now some of them are trying to get out of it.

AJC:

Election deniers in state Senate stripped of chairmanships

It’s payback time. The Republican rift in the state Senate came to a head Tuesday when Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan demoted three Republican senators who have backed attempts to overturn the presidential vote in Georgia over baseless allegations of irregularities.

When the bloodletting was over, state Sens. Brandon Beach of Alpharetta, Matt Brass of Newnan and Burt Jones of Jackson were sapped of their political influence on the second day of the winter session.

As our AJC colleague Maya T. Prabhu reports, Duncan stripped Beach of his chairmanship of the Transportation Committee, while Jones will no longer lead the Insurance and Labor Committee. Neither will serve as even a rank-and-file member on the two panels they once led.

Isaac Chotiner/New Yorker:

Learning from the Failure of Reconstruction

To better understand the lessons of Reconstruction for our times, I recently spoke by phone with Eric Foner, an emeritus professor of history at Columbia, and one of the country’s leading experts on Reconstruction. During the conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we also discussed the use of Confederate imagery by those who stormed the Capitol, balancing unity and punishment in the wake of terror, and the historical significance of the two Georgia Senate runoffs.

The most common historical parallel over the past four years has been to European fascism, for a variety of reasons. But there have also been references to American history going back to Jim Crow and the Civil War. How does what we’ve seen in the past week, and specifically what we saw on Wednesday, fit into the larger American story and make those American comparisons especially vivid or interesting in your mind?

Well, I guess the sight of people storming the Capitol and carrying Confederate flags with them makes it impossible not to think about American history. That was an unprecedented display. But in a larger sense, yes, the events we saw reminded me very much of the Reconstruction era and the overthrow of Reconstruction, which was often accompanied, or accomplished, I should say, by violent assaults on elected officials. There were incidents then where elected, biracial governments were overthrown by mobs, by coup d’états, by various forms of violent terrorism.

NPR:

These Are The 10 Republicans Who Voted To Impeach Trump

Ten Republicans crossed President Trump on Wednesday and voted to impeach him for "incitement of insurrection."

It was a historic vote and one that came exactly a week after a pro-Trump mob laid siege to the U.S. Capitol after attending a Trump rally on the Ellipse outside the White House. The Capitol was ransacked and occupied for hours, and, in the end, five Americans died and many others were injured as a result.

The 10 House members who voted to impeach Trump don't cut a singular profile. They come from a range of districts, from coast to coast, some representing places Trump won handily in 2020, while others are in more moderate seats.

Tom Nichols/USA Today:

Trump impeachment: No unity until his morally bankrupt defenders get over him and repent

The people who have supported Trump need to come to terms with what they’ve done and with what they’ve allowed to happen — or it will happen again.

This is moral charlatanism and I say to hell with it.

It is almost impossible to comprehend the sheer moral poverty of the people calling now for unity. Elected Republicans now admit they fear for their physical safety from their own constituents, but instead of thunderous defenses of the Constitution, we have soft mewling from people like Sen. Marco Rubio and his Bible-Verse-A-Day tweets, or the head-spinning duplicity of Sen. Lindsey Graham, who within days of saying “count me out” of any further sedition was jollying it up with the president on Air Force One.

Yascha Mounk/CFR:

After Trump, Is American Democracy Doomed by Populism?

President Donald J. Trump is an authoritarian populist. And one of the key characteristics of populism lies in a leader’s belief that they, and they alone, truly represent the people.

That explains why Trump has kept clashing with democratic institutions over the course of his presidency. Whenever he ran up against the limits of his constitutional authority, he balked at the idea that somebody else—a judge, a bureaucrat, or a member of Congress—could tell him what to do. In his mind, only he had the right to speak for the country.

This helps to make sense of the storming of the Capitol. On one hand, it was a terrible surprise. Before January 6, nobody had expected that a mob of insurrectionists could so easily enter “the People’s House.” But on the other hand, it was a fitting end point for Trump’s presidency: the mob was incited by the populist president of the United States—and that president incited it to action because somebody who believes that he, and only he, represents the people could not possibly accept the legitimacy of an election he lost.

NBC:

This chaotic moment has one root cause: Trump's refusal to accept his loss

First Read is your briefing from "Meet the Press" and the NBC Political Unit on the day's most important political stories and why they matter.

The president begging Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn the election results … More than 140 House and Senate Republicans objecting to the Electoral College count … Trump addressing supporters in Washington (“You will have an illegitimate president … And we can't let that happen.”) … Many of those supporters later storming the Capitol … Trump saying that he won’t attend the inauguration (and getting banned from Twitter) … The drafting of articles of impeachment … And now authorities warning of more armed protests.

All of these events have taken place in just the last 10 days.

And of all them have a simple root cause — the president of the United States refusing to concede an election he clearly lost. (Yes, he acknowledged there would be a new administration and a transition of power, but that’s as far as he’s gone.)

We still need to work on whether there were higher-ups involved with Wednesday’s abysmal law enforcement response.

Richard North Patterson/Bulwark:

The Political Context of the Assault on the Capitol

Bonfires of grievance and dispossession in a country riven by alternate realities.

Demographic sorting and racial and cultural antagonisms have enlisted Trump’s base in a zero-sum war of subjugation against antagonists most will never meet, but with whom they can never compromise. A society so polarized cannot deal with its most urgent problems—or even acknowledge what they are.

Amid the ravages of COVID this schism has turned deadly: The resistance to public health measures has become a form of suicide which doubles as a lethal attack on others. More broadly, the political stasis bred of division is killing our capacity to master our collective future. Inevitably, such a system will disintegrate—or explode.

The paralysis reflects a deeper social pathology with multiple tributaries—the toxins of racial and cultural estrangement; the disintegration of communal bonds; the proliferation of mind-numbing misinformation; the accelerating gaps in wealth and opportunity; the increasingly ossified class system—which, in turn, erode faith in democracy as a means of resolving our problems. Running through this is the crabbed doctrine of shareholder capitalism which reduces human beings to disposable units of production divorced from the conditions that give life dignity: health, safety, security, opportunity.

Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:

F*** You, Ted Cruz

You un-American, anti-democracy, lying sack of sh*t

“Liar or believer?” is often hard to answer. Trump-loving Congressmen Matt Gaetz and Jim Jordan, Fox personality Sean Hannity, MAGA “youth activist” Charlie Kirk, and President Trump himself seem to really believe some of it (though can’t possibly believe it all).

With Ted Cruz it’s easy. There’s no doubt that the Republican Senator from Texas is fully aware that Trumpist claims of mass voter fraud are complete and utter bunk. He’s a Harvard-educated attorney, clerked for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and taught law at UT Austin. He knows that Team Trump lost 61 court cases in their effort to overturn state election results, winning only one (a Pennsylvania case with no effect on the outcome). He knows, contra Trump’s whining, that lack of standing is a perfectly legitimate reason for courts to reject a case. And he knows that the time for legal challenges is over now that states have recounted and audited their votes, and certified Electoral College results.

Nicholas Grossman/Arc Digital:

QAnon Woke Up the Real Deep State

An open letter to QAnon, “stop the steal,” and other communities involved in the Capitol attack

To the QAnon community, and others involved in storming the Capitol:

The Deep State is real, but it’s not what you think. The Deep State you worry about is mostly made up; a fiction, a lie, a product of active imaginations, grifter manipulations, and the internet. I’m telling you this now because storming the Capitol building has drawn the attention of the real Deep State — the national security bureaucracy — and it’s important you understand what that means.

You attacked America. Maybe you think it was justified — as a response to a stolen election, or a cabal of child-trafficking pedophiles, or whatever — but it was still a violent attack on the United States. No matter how you describe it, that’s how the real Deep State is going to treat it.

The impact of that will make everything else feel like a LARP.

LARP is live action role-playing. After a few more repetitions, i won’t need to keep defining it.

Emily Gorcenski/Twitter:

Here's the challenge with disrupting militia plots: most militia dudes are Dunning-Kruger levels of incompetent, but not Dunning-Kruger levels of dangerous. 

So the problem is that militia culture is wrapped up in this sort of virtue signalling nonstop. It's all around trying to project yourself as a leader, a military expert, a tactical master, based entirely on what you've read in Tom Clancy novels 

So a militia might say things like, alright, here's the plan. We're gonna get 1000 guys, and we're gonna set up a barricade at each of the three entrances to the statehouse, and then we're gonna neutralize the security forces. 

Super scary stuff! Just one problem. Where are they gonna get 1000 guys? How are they going to implement a Command and Control structure for 1000 guys? What are they gonna make the barricades out of? 

Kurt Bardella/USA Today:

Trump doesn't deserve post-presidential benefits. Remove him and ensure he won't get them.

In spite of the U.S. Capitol siege incited by President Donald Trump, Republican leaders in Congress continue to oppose any meaningful action to hold him accountable for his seditious conduct. They seem to think that in spite of his dangerous and undemocratic behavior, he should still be the beneficiary of taxpayer-financed perks for the rest of his life.

It has become clear that Republicans are trying to run out the clock on the Trump presidency, using his short-timer status to justify their inaction. “I firmly believe impeachment would further destroy our ability to heal and start over,” tweeted Sen. Lindsey Graham, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy maintained that impeaching Trump so close to the end of his term "will only divide our country more.”

For the record, I don’t remember Republicans in Congress worrying about healing the country when they created the Select Committee on Benghazi for the sole purpose of undermining Hillary Clinton, the Democrats' leading presidential prospect in the runup to the 2016 race. Does this mean that if there was more time in the Trump presidency,  they’d magically be for impeaching him? Last time I checked, they had the chance to impeach him a year ago, and they refused.

Dan Kois/Slate:

They Were Out for Blood

The men who carried zip ties as they stormed the Capitol weren’t clowning around.

I can’t stop thinking about the zip-tie guys.

Amid the photos that flooded social media during Wednesday’s riot at the Capitol—shirtless jokers in horned helmets, dudes pointing at their nuts, dumbasses carrying away souvenirs—the images of the zip-tie guys were quieter, less exuberant, more chilling. And we’d better not forget what they almost managed to do.

It’s easy to think of the siege of the U.S. Capitol as a clown show with accidentally deadly consequences. A bunch of cosplaying self-styled patriots show up, overwhelm the incomprehensibly unprepared Capitol Police, and then throw a frat party in the rotunda. The miscreants smear shit on the walls and steal laptops and smoke weed in conference rooms. Someone gets shot; someone else has a heart attack, possibly under ludicrous circumstances. When they finally get rousted, they cry to the cameras about getting maced.

Olivia Nuzzi/New York:

Senior Trump Official: We Were Wrong, He’s a ‘Fascist’

Advisers have expressed concern and anger over Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, whose actions have been perceived as an effort to secure employment with Trump in his post-presidency, perhaps at the Trump Organization.  “Jared has been telling people, ‘Don’t even deal with him anymore,’” one adviser said. “Mark’s responsible for bringing kook after crazy after conniver after Rudy into the West Wing.” A former senior White House official said, “Morale plummeted under him, huge mistakes were made — and now he’s scrambling to stick around after. He’s a dishonest asshole who pretends to be this religious Southern gentleman. Fuck that.”

The senior administration official put it this way: “The only way it gets to this point are a thousand really bad small decisions. The first time Sidney Powell calls the White House switchboard and is allowed to speak to the president, the next thing you know she and others are in the West Wing — these are areas where the chief of staff has unilateral authority to do what he wants to do.” Instead, the official said, Meadows tells Trump what he wants to hear, and often calls whomever Trump has directed him to call, repeats what Trump told him to say, and then apologizes, explaining that he just needs to be able to tell the boss that he followed his orders.