Biden picks Denis McDonough for Veterans Affairs, Susan Rice for top domestic policy job

Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of a small group of congressional Republicans who have spoken out against Trump’s refusal to accept the election results, released a video tearing down the president’s claims that Biden will be an “illegitimate president.”

“While you may not like the election results, that doesn’t make the election fake,” Kinzinger says talking into the camera. He adds that fraud in U.S. elections exists, but is minimal and wouldn’t change the outcome.

“Failing to accept this reality puts us in a very dangerous moment in time,” the Air Force pilot warns. “As a society we’ve become unmoored from facts and from reality.”

We’re teaching our children, he goes on, that in politics “to win is everything and tweeting and yelling the loudest is the path to victory ... it’s toxic and consuming and we wonder why depression and suicide rates are sadly on the rise in this country.”

Kinzinger’s social media plea comes after weeks of countering Trump and other Republicans who have spread falsehoods and baseless conspiracies about the presidential election.

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Thursday urged Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, to cancel a planned hearing next week on election “irregularities.”

During floor remarks in which he chided his Republican colleagues for not recognizing Biden as the president-elect, Schumer argued that Johnson’s planned hearing would promote “quackery and conspiracy theories.”

If Johnson refuses, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) should intervene, Schumer said.

“He should acknowledge the results of the election,” Schumer said of McConnell. “Doing otherwise would add fuel to the fire that is undermining faith in our wonderful democracy.”

Later Thursday, Johnson told reporters he is not planning to cancel the hearing.

“This is important for us to know, even in the future, as well," he said.

While announcing his hearing on Wednesday, Johnson said, “The fact remains that a large percentage of the American public does not view the 2020 election result as legitimate because of apparent irregularities that have not been fully examined.”

The hearing is scheduled for Wednesday next week, two days after the electoral college is scheduled to vote.

Trump wants to keep his job.

Or he wants people to think he wants to keep his job so that he can keep fundraising off his effort to keep his job. Or he wants people to think he’s fighting to keep his job because he wants them to think that the 2020 presidential contest was stolen from him so that he can argue he didn’t actually lose the race. Or all of them. Or some combination of them.

It’s not clear in part because it’s not clear what Trump’s actual endgame is. It’s also not clear because, by all appearances, Trump isn’t actually all that interested in his job — at least, not in doing it at the moment.

A majority of the House Republican conference has signed onto an amicus brief in a Texas lawsuit seeking unprecedented judicial intervention in disallowing the results from four key swing states that went for Biden.

Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.), head of the conservative Republican Study Committee, spearheaded the effort to round up support on Capitol Hill. Johnson emailed all House Republicans on Wednesday to solicit signatures for the long-shot Texas case after Trump called and requested he do so.

In all, 106 House Republicans signed onto the amicus brief. They include most of Trump’s allies on Capitol Hill but notably few members of House Republican leadership. House Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) is the only GOP leader in the chamber to sign on to the brief.

“Because the Framers recognized elections could be corrupted or stolen, they created the Electoral College as a safeguard and empowered state legislatures to ensure the integrity of our unique election system,” the brief states. "Yet before the 2020 election, rationalized in some instances by the occasion of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the constitutional authority of state legislatures was simply usurped by various governors, state courts, state election officials, and others.”

There has been no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 presidential race. Nonetheless, the signatories claim that the election “has been riddled with an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities.”

The signatories urged the court to "provide an objective review of these anomalies and to determine for the people if indeed the Constitution has been followed and the rule of law maintained.”

A handful of Republicans on Thursday spoke out against the effort. Among them was Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.), who said on Twitter that the case “represents a dangerous violation of federalism” and “sets a precedent to have one state asking federal courts to police the voting procedures of other states.”

“I cannot support an effort that will almost certainly fail on grounds of standing and is inconsistent with my beliefs about protecting Texas sovereignty from the meddling of other states,” Roy said.

Keith Newell contributed to this report.

The four states targeted by Texas in a last-chance appeal to the Supreme Court implored the justices Thursday to dismiss the effort to overturn the election results.

“The cascading series of compounding defects in Texas’s filings is only underscored by the surreal alternate reality that those filings attempt to construct,” wrote Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D). “Texas’s effort to get this court to pick the next president has no basis in law or fact. The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”

Texas is seeking to sue Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia — all swing states President Trump won in 2016 and Democrat Joe Biden carried in 2020 — to void the election results, which it said were tainted. Trump has encouraged the suit, calling it “the big one,” and seeking to intervene.

It is unknown when the justices will decide whether to accept the case, which seeks to take advantage of the allowance that suits between states may be filed directly at the Supreme Court. But the targeted states said any claims in the filings have already been examined by lower courts and dismissed.

Georgia’s Attorney General Christopher M. Carr (R) said in his filing that the vote in his state was counted three times, “including a historic 100 percent manual recount.” The count has been defended against all lawsuits, he said, and “Georgia has won each one.”

“Texas nevertheless asks this court to transfer Georgia’s electoral powers to the federal judiciary,” Carr wrote. “Respect for federalism and the constitutional design prohibits that transfer of power, but this court should never even reach that issue.” Instead, he said the court should simply reject the request to file a complaint as inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s rules.

The Texas filing has become something of a free-for-all at the court. Texas is supported by 17 states that Trump won. The targeted states have support from 22 states, the District of Columbia as well as Guam and the Virgin Islands. They said accepting Texas’s complaint “would overrule a century’s worth of precedent, upend state election systems nationwide, and invert core principles of federalism.”

Ohio, a state Trump won, said it was not supporting Texas. The Constitution does not give courts the power to dictate how states exercise their constitutional authority, its attorney general said in a filing.

Maya Smith contributed to this report.

Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.) said he will a support a national defense bill when it comes to a vote in the Senate, defying Trump’s opposition to the measure.

Perdue, who is locked in a bitter runoff election battle that’s outcome could tilt the balance of power in the Senate, is not alone among congressional Republicans dismissing Trump’s veto threat.

The House passed the bill Tuesday 335 to 78.

Perdue affirmed that he would support the defense bill at a campaign stop Wednesday, according to the Augusta Chronicle. It’s unclear whether Perdue would then vote to override a Trump veto if it came to that.

The legislation funds Pentagon programs, but it also pays for service members’ annual pay raises and other compensation. It directs money to military bases, of which there are 13 in Georgia.

Trump first opposed the bill over language ordering that military installations named for Confederate leaders be changed. He also says he will veto the legislation because it does not repeal legal protections for social media companies like Twitter and Facebook, which he accuses of being biased against conservatives.

Attacks on the voting company Dominion and the integrity of the election by Trump and his allies are posing a conundrum for election security advocates.

On one hand, they’ve long battled with Dominion and other top voting machine vendors to take security more seriously and be more transparent about their operations so they can be vetted by outside security experts.

“If there’s one positive piece that comes out of this it would be greater oversight of election vendors,” said David Levine, elections integrity fellow at the Alliance for Securing Democracy.

Dominion, along with two other major vendors, control about 80 percent of the U.S. market for election systems. “If there’s a successful cyberattack against one of them, that could have devastating consequences,” Levine said.

Congressional bickering over a new economic relief package escalated Thursday, as lawmakers traded blame and put negotiations over critical legislation on the brink of collapse.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested Thursday that discussions over emergency legislation could stretch beyond Christmas, even though multiple critical programs expire at the end of this month, and there are fresh signs the economy is weakening. The Labor Department on Thursday announced that 853,000 Americans filed jobless claims last week, a big increase from the week before, a sign that the economy could be sliding backward as new coronavirus cases pile up.

Staffers for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also told leadership offices in both parties Wednesday night that McConnell sees no possible path for a bipartisan group of lawmakers to reach an agreement on two contentious provisions that would be broadly acceptable to Senate Republicans, according to a senior Democrat familiar with the negotiations.