The Philadelphia Unemployment Project is trying to head off or at least raise awareness of the fiscal cliff that will hit the US unemployed population on 31 December. It's already too late to avoid a lengthy period between unemployment checks, even though the House passed the CARES Act back in March and an amended HEROES Act in October.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck "Schumer accuses [Senate Majority Leader] McConnell of inserting a 'poison pill' in the package because McConnell said he has offered to take away corporate liability protections from the package if Democrats drop state and local funding from the bill.
"Schumer said to compare the two things is 'false equivalence' because corporate immunity is expressly partisan, when state and local funding is a solution to a real and urgent problem."
The House and Senate are trying to complete 12 separate spending bills by the 20th of this month.
Since the Associated Press (AP) called the election (They've been calling elections for 170 years) for Joe Biden, the margin of victory has been certified by all of the states to be 306 Electoral Votes for Biden and 232 for the incumbent and now off-going Trump. Vote percentage is Biden 51.4%, actual votes are 81,283,495. For Trump, the figures are 46.9% and 74,223,755. As many liberal bloggers have made clear, this was NOT a close election!
Nevertheless, Trump and his legal team, headed by the once-Mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, have racked up a score of one victory to (as of 12 December) 56 defeats. The most humiliating defeat was dealt by the Supreme Court, that disposed of the matter in a single-page order. The official reason was lack of standing (Why was Texas trying to interfere in a Wisconsin vote?), but the real damage is "The fundamental part of democracy that makes it work is the acceptance of losing."
Violetta, Karamo, Ken
What's the off-going President's goal? According to the younger George Bush's campaign manager Karl Rove, it's just to prepare for a run in 2024. I have no doubt Trump will run again at that point, but according to a blogger in Daily Kos, "...things are more insidious than that." Dartagnan's basic idea is that Trump is making war on truth itself. By getting 17 states and over 120 House Republicans to back the lawsuit despite "The lawsuit filed against Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin repeats false, disproven, and unsubstantiated accusations about the voting in four states that went for Trump’s Democratic challenger," means that a substantial chunk of the Republican Party is willing to ignore the truth if it means appearing to remain loyal to the off-going President.
Rich, Violetta, Karamo.
One of the latest cases in Wisconsin is truly amazing. Trump's people want to throw out 221 thousand ballots because "there wasn’t a proper written request made for the ballots..." This is the sort of complaint that can be adjudicated before early voting begins, not several weeks after voting ends. These votes were clearly cast in the good-faith belief that the votes were valid. To their eternal dishonor, three of the seven judges agreed with the complainants.
Stephen Miller brings up several similar complaints, that votes were cast in good faith, but that the Trump Administration wants them thrown out. But hey "corrupt corporate media" and Democrats oppose forensic analyses of the votes, so it's all a fraud. Again, the problem is that they want to "correct defects" long after the votes were cast.
So of course, the off-going, one term President wants to keep battling on well over a month after it was called for the other guy.
On Friday, 11 December, the "Proud Boys", a violent, neofascist hate group, committed acts of violence in New York. A couple was attacked by more Proud Boys. There's a dispute over whether these attacks were more like Nazi attack in the early 1930s or whether they're more like US cross-burnings by the KKK. In Washington DC, "Pro-Trump protests" held a second “Million MAGA March” (It was a few tens of thousands) on the 12th. The off-going President expressed great enthusiasm for all of this and didn't condemn any of it.
Update: President-Elect Joe Biden delivers a good summary of all of the ways in which the off-going President Trump tried to litigate his loss and to justify throwing out the results. Good rah-rah stuff for a good, free and fair election!