| | |  | BY RENUKA RAYASAM | Presented by |  |
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| With help from Myah Ward BREAKING — Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account , saying he had repeatedly violated its policies on glorification of violence. WHAT NOW? A fissure in the Republican party split wide open today. Some GOP members are now considering voting for a second impeachment of Trump. The Nightly chatted with Congressional reporter Kyle Cheney over Slack about what this week’s events mean for the days and weeks ahead. This conversation has been edited. Are there actually enough votes for Congress to remove Trump from office? Democrats are really riding their anger at the moment, driving impeachment forward without filling in some of the thorny procedural blanks that usually come with it. They’ll have to confront that over the weekend — things like permitting Trump to present a defense, filing evidence on the public record, etc. But it seems like nothing will stop the momentum. They are furious and shaken by what the president unleashed on the Capitol, which we know has resulted in five deaths. As for the Senate, Lindsey Graham says the votes just aren’t there. He’s probably right. But it’s a dynamic situation. The politics of it are completely unclear (and frankly, an afterthought in the House). The main variable is Trump. Does he lay low for the rest of his term or does he continue efforts to subvert the election results, including in ways that could stoke more violence? Does 2024 play in Republican’s calculus about whether or not to remove Trump from office? The reality is, Trump’s actions here are indefensible. Not many Republicans are seriously trying. I don’t see a lot of people trying to make excuses for him. A permanent bar on running for office is one of the sentencing options should the Senate convict, and there may be some temptation for the Republicans who want to have a clear shot at the 2024 nomination. But the base has not abandoned Trump entirely — at least yet. I think the uncertain politics of this really fraught moment will play out in ways that are impossible to understand right now. Did Wednesday’s riot change any dynamics on the Hill? It does seem like the scars of the riots have sobered up a few people. A bunch of Republican senators who were planning to endorse challenges to Biden’s win backed off. The House looks like a different universe. Those members redoubled even after the violence. These moments of unity in the face of tragedy have been disappointingly brief in recent history, but if any single event could change that calculus, an attack on the seat of government could be it. Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi are old and can’t stick around forever. Who should we be watching now to see who will gain power next? The Kevin McCarthy vs. Liz Cheney (no relation) dynamic is an important one for the GOP conference, especially now. Cheney represents a mainstream brand of Republicanism that Trump sought to stamp out and is still, in some way, in battle with. McCarthy, at least over the course of the past few years, has molded himself in Trump’s image and earned the resounding endorsement of the factions of the caucus that are most aligned with Trump as a result. Without Trump at the top, any detente between these competing segments of the conference will be over. Some of it will depend on how active a role Trump intends to play in the party after he leaves office — and just today he said he plans to play a major one. On the Democratic side, the jockeying will happen similarly quickly. Pelosi has said she intends to cede her gavel after this term, though there are some nagging suspicions that she might decide she wants to stay a bit longer. Nevertheless, AOC has really staked out turf as a progressive force, but not one who is unwilling to put in the work of navigating the complexities of the Democratic caucus. A lot of the frontline members who gave Pelosi the majority in 2018 were defeated in 2020. And the midterms won’t be kind to Democrats if history is any guide. It’s truly been the longest week ever. I am so happy that I didn’t make any New Year’s resolutions. Haha, same, I’ve already forgotten everything I might’ve resolved to do anyway.
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House Speaker Nancy Pelosi walks with 60 Minutes correspondent Lesley Stahl of CBS News in a hallway at the U.S. Capitol. | Getty Images | Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. RIP Tommy Lasorda. Reach out at rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam.
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| | A message from Salesforce: The most extensive vaccine program in history is upon us. Distributing COVID-19 vaccines to the public fast and at scale can make a difference for hundreds of thousands of lives. That is why Salesforce is helping provide digital vaccine management using data-driven information powered by its trusted Customer 360 platform. Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance, is using Saleforce’s platform to help equitably distribute billions of vaccines to 190 countries. Learn about secure digital vaccine management solutions at Salesforce.com/vaccines. | | | | | STAYING POWER — The Rev. Raphael Warnock joined an elite class of Black politicians when he upset incumbent Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler in Georgia this week. He will be the 11th African American to ever serve in the chamber since 1870. His challenge, however, will be staying there. Warnock’s victory only puts him in the Senate through 2022, meaning the Ebenezer Baptist Church senior pastor needs to gear up for another campaign to win a full six-year term in just 22 months, write Nolan McCaskill and Sabrina Rodriguez. Only four Black politicians have ever completed a full term in the Senate. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), the nation’s first Black president, and Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), the soon-to-be first African American, Asian American and female vice president, aren’t among them. Unlike the House, which grew its ranks of Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American members this year, the Senate has sorely lagged in racial diversity, despite this country’s rapidly changing demographics. There are a number of reasons for this. The barriers to entry are high, for starters. Party leaders often don’t see aspirants of color as viable candidates who can win, particularly in the South, and don’t invest in them early enough, according to interviews with a dozen Democrats, including several current and former lawmakers, candidates, campaign aides and advisers. Voter suppression tactics, they said, such as from purged voter rolls, fewer polling locations and stringent voter ID roles, play a role as well, because they drastically narrow the pool of eligible voters.
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| | GET THE BIG PRE-INAUGURATION SCOOPS IN TRANSITION PLAYBOOK: Inauguration Day is quickly approaching. Is the Biden administration ready? Transition Playbook brings you inside the transition and newly forming administration, tracking the latest from Biden world and the transition of power. Written for political insiders, this scoop-filled newsletter breaks big news and analyzes the appointments, people and emerging power centers of the new administration. Track the transition and the first 100 days of the incoming Biden administration. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | WHAT AN ORIENTATION — On Sunday, Carolyn Bourdeaux (D-Ga.) got the keys to her Longworth office. On Monday, she recorded the voicemail greeting to the office phone. On Tuesday, Bourdeaux, who campaigned for Warnock and Jon Ossoff in her suburban Atlanta district, stayed up all night watching returns for Georgia’s Senate runoffs. On Wednesday, she spent six hours huddled in a dark office waiting for Capitol police to quell a violent riot before staying up all night again, this time to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The freshman lawmaker was prepared for a frenetic first week in office: Georgia has been at the center of Trump’s false election fraud claims. While she was being sworn in, her phone was blowing up, she said, with calls and tweets about Trump’s recorded conversation with Georgia’s secretary of State. She prepared a statement for the expected debate after Republican lawmakers objected to Georgia’s vote count. Then there were the logistics of setting up a functioning office during the pandemic. Most of her staff came into the office to pick up laptops and then promptly went home to work. “We are setting up under some of the most difficult circumstance faced by a freshman class in modern history,” Bourdeaux said in an interview with Nightly this evening. The week’s events have shaken Capitol Hill veterans. But even before the riot, freshmen lawmakers were navigating complicated politics, personal threats and pandemic logistics all while trying to find their way around the building. “I got lost in the tunnels every day, on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday,” said Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.). She couldn’t figure out the keys to her member office at first. “On Wednesday, I thought ‘I can do this.’” Mace’s kids, 11 and 14, watched her swearing-in on Sunday from her office and she planned to keep them in D.C. for the week doing remote schooling from her office, but after warnings about potential violence on Wednesday, she sent them back home. Mace, who voted to certify the election results, chatted with the Nightly while lying on a sofa in her office under a blanket and a dog.
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| Rep. Peter Meijer (R-Mich.) said that his office phones haven’t been fully functional — they haven’t set up call forwarding so remote staffers can field calls at home — but he’s been flooded with calls from people in his district urging him not to certify Biden’s victory and to “stop the steal.” His first vote was to certify Biden’s win, one that’s normally completely uncontroversial, and he knew it “would probably be one of the most monumental votes” in his career, he said, one that would put him at odds with many members of his own party. “They were signing on to the letters of objection — it has to be a physical piece of paper — there are people doing that even after we have reconvened in the Capitol while blood was drying 100 feet away,” he said. Meijer said he’s optimistic that Republicans will unite after the vote and that calm will be restored to Congress. But for now he’s still emotional about his first week in office. “What’s your policy on printing profanities?” said Meijer. “I’m fucking furious right now.”
| | DON’T TELL MARTHA’S VINEYARD — The legal team that defended Trump from impeachment is rushing to his side as it happens again. With House Democrats pushing to impeach the president before he leaves office, Alan Dershowitz, the Trump-allied celebrity attorney, argued that Trump’s encouragement of this week’s Capitol riots was “constitutionally protected” speech. He said it would be his “honor and privilege” to take on the legal defense. SKIP DAY — Biden said today that Trump’s announcement on Twitter that he would not attend his successor’s inauguration later this month is a “good thing.” Biden, who took questions from reporters at an event in Delaware, said Trump’s decision to shatter yet another norm of the American presidency is “one of the few things he and I have ever agreed on.”
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| | | | | PARDON ME? Trump has long argued that he has the power to pardon himself, and reportedly has been telling aides he’s considering doing it in the next 12 days. Legal scholars are divided over whether he possesses this untested use of presidential power. Nightly’s Myah Ward asked Caroline Mala Corbin, a constitutional law professor at the University of Miami School of Law, to break down the debate. Why are legal scholars divided? The constitutional basis for the president’s pardon power is found in Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, which states that presidents “shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.” As with many provisions of the Constitution, the pardon clause is not self-explanatory. Nor is there judicial precedent on the question of self-pardons because no prior president has so abused the pardon power as to try and pardon himself. With an ambiguous text and no precedent, it is not surprising that scholars disagree about the constitutionality of self-pardons. Most, however, think the president cannot issue a self-pardon, pointing out, for example, that a self-pardon contravenes the president’s duty to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as mandated by Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution. So Trump does not have this power, in your view? I would put myself firmly in the no camp. Certainly it would be a dangerous precedent if a president could simply pardon himself for any and all federal crimes. Also in the no camp is the Department of Justice. The Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department declared in August 1974, just days before Nixon resigned, that “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the President cannot pardon himself.” Thus, even if Trump does pardon himself, there is no guarantee that the pardon would be recognized as valid. The past week’s events do not change the analysis, although with another impeachment looming as a result, it is worth noting that while the constitutional text does not address the question of self-pardons, it does unambiguously state that the president may not grant pardons for impeachment.
| | SEASON FINALE — In a week that’s difficult to glean comedy out of, Matt Wuerker takes us through the week’s political cartoons and satire , which attempted to tackle the historic and chaotic week in Washington.
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| | | Nightly asks you: What are you most hopeful about heading into 2021? Send us your answers through our form, and we’ll use select responses next week.
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| | A NEW YEAR MEANS A NEW HUDDLE IS HERE: Huddle, our daily congressional must-read, has a new author! Olivia Beavers took the reins this week, and she has the latest news and whispers from the Speakers' Lobby. Don’t miss out, subscribe to our Huddle newsletter, the essential guide to all things Capitol Hill. Subscribe today. | | | | | | | LONDON AILING — London Mayor Sadiq Khan declared a “major incident” in the capital today, warning that the spread of coronavirus was now “out of control” and the city’s hospitals are “at risk of being overwhelmed.” London now has 35 percent more Covid patients in its hospitals than at the peak of the U.K. epidemic in April. Between Dec. 30 and Jan. 6, the number soared from 5,524 to 7,034 and could continue to rise, Khan said.
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56 percent The increase in Covid-19 incidence in university counties with in-person instruction, comparing the 21-day periods before and after classes started, according to a new CDC report . Counties without large colleges or universities experienced a 6 percent decrease in incidence during similar time frames. |
| | | EXTRA CREDIT — In Thursday’s Nightly , we asked a spectrum of political thinkers and figures to assess what letter grade they’d give American democracy at the end of the Trump era. Tonight, one final entry, from Sewell Chan, editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Times. He emails Nightly: Trump has not changed my assessment of American democracy; he has affirmed it. Our great experiment is in peril. Trump was not the author of these woes; he was a gifted opportunist, exploiting forces that were set in motion decades ago, in particular the ’70s: soaring inequality; the rise of a winner-take-all economy; deregulation; eroding middle-class incomes; prioritization of global finance and capital over local economies, especially manufacturing; white racial backlash; and a loss of confidence in government, in leaders and in institutions. Although the polarization has not been symmetric — I consider Republicans more blameworthy — the truth is that our democracy won’t be stable if we don’t have a stable center-right party, and that’s a vulnerability that anyone who loves our democracy needs to reckon with, regardless of ideology. I give us a nearly failing grade right now — D. To avoid an F — which could mean a world-threatening collapse of our state and society — we urgently need a more fair economy. We need a Democratic government that delivers results (getting the pandemic under control, shoring up wages and employment, addressing the climate crisis), but also a principled center-right party that encourages entrepreneurship, innovation, communities and stability (i.e. actual conservatism) instead of exploiting far-right anxieties and hatreds. We will also need an information ecosystem incentivized to support facts instead of lies, and that means regulation of social media (something both left and right can agree on). If we don’t have a shared basis of facts, we are unable to have reasoned debate about values.
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