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+At least 12 Republican senators will object to certifying the results of the 2020 election. +

+

+On Saturday, 11 current and incoming Republican senators announced in a joint statement that they would object to the congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory next week in a futile effort to hand outgoing President Donald Trump an unelected second term in office. +

+

+The statement — led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — also calls for the creation of an electoral commission modeled on a similar committee assembled in 1877, saying the commission would conduct “an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states.” +

+

+Citing “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities,” the letter also argues that states should be allowed to “evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.” +

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+NEW: @SenTedCruz leads a group of senators calling for an emergency ten-day audit of Electoral College results. pic.twitter.com/owjvsgwXt2 +

+— Grace Segers (@Grace_Segers) January 2, 2021 +
+
+

+The days after the 2020 election have indeed seen unprecedented allegations of voter fraud — but all have been found to be without merit by the judicial system, state elected officials, national security officials, and elections officials. Nevertheless, Cruz and the other members of the group — Sens. Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Steve Daines, John Kennedy, Marsha Blackburn, and Mike Braun, as well as Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis, Roger Marshall, Bill Hagerty, and Tommy Tuberville — maintain otherwise. +

+

+Lummis, Marshall, Hagerty, and Tuberville were elected in November and have yet to be sworn in, but will be seated Sunday ahead of a session of Congress dedicated to the electoral vote certification on January 6. +

+

+In their plans to object to the certification, the 11 lawmakers join Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who announced his own plan to object last week, and a sizable majority of the House Republican Conference, led by Trump devotees like Rep. Louie Gohmert, who have said they will do the same. +

+

+“74 million Americans are not going to be told their voices don’t matter,” Hawley said of his effort on December 30, conveniently ignoring the fact Biden won the election by a margin of more than 7 million votes over Trump, and that, in the US system, their votes hold equal weight. +

+
+
+

+Somebody has to stand up. 74 million Americans are not going to be told their voices don’t matter pic.twitter.com/DMa7sRyoAh +

+— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) December 31, 2020 +
+
+

+Ultimately, the Republican plan to object will lead nowhere. Though a bicameral group of Republicans will be able to successfully object to the certification of results, the Democratic majority in the House means that the effort will ultimately fail there — and it may not stand much of a chance in the Senate either, where the No. 1 and No. 2 Republicans in the chamber — Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Majority Whip John Thune — have come out against it. +

+

+“In the Senate, it would go down like a shot dog,” Thune told reporters in December 2020. “I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense to put everybody through this when you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be.” +

+

+Other Republicans, including Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse, have criticized Hawley’s plan. And In a statement Saturday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) came out strongly against the lawmakers’ plan to object. +

+

+“I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States,” she said, “and that is what I will do January 6 — just as I strive to do every day as I serve the people of Alaska. I will vote to affirm the 2020 presidential election.” +

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+
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+Sen. @LisaMurkowski (R-Alaska): "I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and that is what I will do January 6—just as I strive to do every day as I serve the people of Alaska. I will vote to affirm the 2020 presidential election." pic.twitter.com/P2JYIXXahD +

+— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) January 2, 2021 +
+
+

+Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who represents one of the swing states Trump has contested, also criticized those who plan to oppose the certification on Saturday, saying in a statement: “A fundamental, defining feature of a democratic republic is the right of the people to elect their own leaders. The effort by Senators Hawley, Cruz, and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in swing states like Pennsylvania directly undermines this right.” +

+

+Trump, on the other hand, signaled support for the lawmakers’ efforts, retweeting Hawley’s praise of Cruz and his allies, and seeming to characterize certification as “an attempt to steal a landslide win.” +

+

+Ted Cruz’s “election commission” would investigate fraud that’s been repeatedly proven nonexistent +

+

+Plan to object aside, the “electoral commission” plan backed by Cruz and 10 of his colleagues is nonsense. For one, the commission they demand has no precedent in the modern era and no realistic prospects of being convened. What’s more, the statement is predicated on a series of spurious claims by Cruz and his colleagues that echo similar — and equally baseless — election fraud rhetoric to that heard repeatedly from Trump. +

+

+Election Day — November 3, 2020 — is now 60 days in the past. In that time, Trump and his Republican allies have filed and lost at least 60 election-related lawsuits at all levels of the state and federal court systems alleging voter fraud and other improprieties — and they have failed to prove their case at every turn. +

+

+Recounts in battleground states like Georgia and Wisconsin — both won by Biden — have turned up no evidence of large-scale fraud or irregularities that could have affected the results of the election. And in all 50 states and Washington, DC, the election results have been carefully reviewed by state officials and certified as accurate. +

+

+In short, 60 days of intense scrutiny has turned up exactly zero reasons to believe the letter’s false claim that “the allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election” are worrying — and there’s no reason to believe that an “electoral commission” would turn up a different result. +

+

+That there have been allegations of fraud as never before is true, but as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes pointed out on Sunday, these have been misleading efforts led by Trump, and bolstered by his allies, like Cruz, to overturn the election’s rightful results. +

+

+Cruz and his allies cite the results of this effort in their statement Saturday that widespread belief in the existence of voter fraud — a sort of warped “where there’s smoke, there’s fire” argument — necessitates the creation of an election commission. +

+

+“Reuters/Ipsos polling, tragically, shows that 39% of Americans believe ‘the election was rigged’,” the group said Saturday. “That belief is held by Republicans (67%), Democrats (17%), and Independents (31%).” +

+

+That’s an accurate reporting of the poll’s results — but it does conveniently leave out the likely reason for that widespread belief. +

+

+In reality, the Republican base has been inundated with evidence-free voter fraud rhetoric from every corner of the right-wing universe — from Trump’s Twitter feed to Fox News to stump speeches by Republican senators — almost nonstop since Trump’s election defeat. There’s a direct line between Cruz’s rhetoric and the problem he diagnoses: As Hayes put it on Twitter, “They’ve spent months lying to people, telling them the election was stolen and now turn around and cite the fact that many people believe them as evidence!” +

+

+Ultimately, Saturday’s statement is just the latest foray in a flailing Republican effort to keep Trump in office in opposition to the will of the people. Given that any challenge to certification can be dissolved by a majority vote, and that there are more than enough opponents to these challenges in both the House and Senate, Cruz’s plan seems unlikely to work. +

+

+Biden is poised to again be affirmed the next president on January 6 ahead of his January 20 inauguration. But if Cruz and his colleagues are as genuinely concerned about a “deep distrust of our democratic processes” that “poses an ongoing threat to the legitimacy of any subsequent administrations” as they claim, their own role in disrupting trust in the electoral process deserves review. +

+ +

+Iran plans to enrich uranium to 20 percent purity — a level it last reached before the 2015 nuclear deal. +

+

+An international nuclear watchdog agency said Friday that Iran is preparing to ramp up uranium enrichment to pre-nuclear deal levels in what would be the country’s latest violation of the 2015 agreement. +

+

+According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran plans to substantially increase enrichment levels at its underground Fordow nuclear site, which was prohibited from enriching uranium under the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), an international agreement often known as the Iran nuclear deal, which saw Iran limit its nuclear program in exchange for the relaxation of sanctions. +

+

+Iran resumed enrichment activities at Fordow in November 2019, following President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to tear up the nuclear deal — but at a relatively low level, only about 4.5 percent. +

+

+If Iran follows through on Friday’s pronouncement, that will change. The IAEA says that Iran is now targeting enrichment levels of up to 20 percent, though there is no known timeline in place for that change. +

+

+Previously, the Iran nuclear deal limited Iran to 3.67 percent enrichment, according to Reuters. To achieve weapons-grade uranium, Iran would have to increase enrichment to 90 percent; but, according to the New York Times’s Eric Schmitt, if Iran were to begin enriching uranium to 20 percent purity, “it requires relatively little further enrichment to get to the 90 percent purity that is traditionally used for bomb-grade fuel.” +

+

+Iran has repeatedly said it does not want to develop nuclear weapons, and instead wants to advance its nuclear program for peaceful, scientific purposes. Adversaries such as the United States and Israel, however, have signaled they believe otherwise. +

+

+The new 20 percent enrichment target was set by Iran’s parliament last month in response to the assassination of the country’s top nuclear scientist, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. Fakhrizadeh was killed near Tehran on November 27, 2020, in an ambush that Iran has blamed on Israel. +

+

+And the same new law that mandates 20 percent enrichment also raises the imminent specter of international nuclear inspectors being expelled from the country: According to the New York Times, Iran has set “a two-month deadline for oil and banking sanctions against Iran to be lifted before inspectors are barred.” Currently, the IAEA says it has “inspectors present in Iran on a 24/7 basis and they have regular access to Fordow.” +

+

+Even before Friday, Iran has been taking steps toward regaining pre-nuclear deal capacity — and potentially toward achieving a nuclear weapon. +

+

+In November 2020, Iran began operating advanced centrifuges at another underground nuclear facility, Natanz, and its nuclear stockpile stood at more than 12 times the limit imposed by the JCPOA. +

+

+US President-elect Joe Biden, who will take office on January 20, has indicated that he hopes to rejoin and revive the JCPOA, which was negotiated while he was serving as vice president to President Barack Obama. Some observers see Iran’s enrichment efforts as a way of building negotiating leverage, but it remains to be seen whether recent strides in Iran’s nuclear program could complicate things. +

+

+“I will offer Tehran a credible path back to diplomacy,” Biden wrote in a September op-ed. “If Iran returns to strict compliance with the nuclear deal, the United States would rejoin the agreement as a starting point for follow-on negotiations. With our allies, we will work to strengthen and extend the nuclear deal’s provisions, while also addressing other issues of concern.” +

+

+US-Iran tensions remain high as the clock runs out on Trump’s presidency +

+

+Biden isn’t in office yet, though, and in the meantime, tensions between the US and Iran remain high. January 3 will mark the one-year anniversary of the US assassinating Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani with a airstrike in Iraq, an attack that Iran has pledged further retaliation for. +

+

+Shortly after Soleimani’s killing in January 2020, Iran struck at US forces in Iraq, hitting two air bases with more than a dozen ballistic missiles. +

+

+There were no casualties from the attack, but more than 100 US service members suffered brain injuries, according to the Pentagon. +

+

+Until his death last year, Soleimani was the head of the Quds Force, a component of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. On Friday, Soleimani’s successor, Esmail Ghaani, warned that “American mischief will not deter the Quds Force from carrying on its resistance path.” +

+

+“From inside your own house, there may emerge someone who will retaliate for your crime,” Ghaani said. +

+

+After Fakhrizadeh’s death in November, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani issued a similar threat of retaliation, saying that “Iran will surely respond to the martyrdom of our scientist at the proper time.” +

+

+In addition to Ghaani’s ominous remarks, CNN reported Friday that Iranian naval forces had moved to a heightened level of readiness, though the reason for the change could be defensive: The US has deployed a submarine and nuclear-capable B-52 bombers to the region in addition to existing forces. +

+

+Somewhat discordantly, the Pentagon also recalled the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz, which was previously stationed in the Middle East and North Africa region, to its home port in Washington state on Friday. Critics of the decision told the New York Times the recall needlessly limited the US’ retaliatory options at a tense time, but proponents argued that bringing the ship home was a smart deescalatory gesture. +

+

+As of Saturday, however, that move appears to have done little to deescalate tensions in the region. +

+

+In a tweet, Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif claimed provocateurs were hoping to spur military action, writing, “New intelligence from Iraq indicate that Israeli agent-provocateurs are plotting attacks against Americans—putting an outgoing Trump in a bind with a fake casus belli. Be careful of a trap, @realDonaldTrump. Any fireworks will backfire badly, particularly against your same BFFs.” +

+
+
+

+New intelligence from Iraq indicate that Israeli agent-provocateurs are plotting attacks against Americans—putting an outgoing Trump in a bind with a fake casus belli.

Be careful of a trap, @realDonaldTrump. Any fireworks will backfire badly, particularly against your same BFFs. +

+— Javad Zarif (@JZarif) January 2, 2021 +
+
+

+Baghdad’s Green Zone, which is home to the US embassy, was the target of a rocket attack last month believed to have been carried out by Iran-linked militias, though Ghaani denied any involvement. +

+

+In response, Trump has issued threats of his own in recent weeks: “Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible,” Trump tweeted on December 23 after the attack. “Think it over.” +

+
+
+

+...Some friendly health advice to Iran: If one American is killed, I will hold Iran responsible. Think it over. +

+— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 23, 2020 +
+
+

+Separately, Trump reportedly considered a strike against Iran in November of 2020 but was talked down by his advisers, who warned that such a move could quickly escalate into a larger conflict. +

+

+Despite the mutual saber-rattling, however, Al Jazeera reported Saturday that some experts believe Iran will look to avoid a major confrontation with the US in anticipation of a coming Biden administration. +

+

+Northwestern University international studies professor Danny Postel told Al Jazeera, “I think this is a very critical moment in US-Iran relations where there might be a chance to remove war from the equation and find a diplomatic solution to at least this core issue of Iran’s nuclear program.” +

+ +

+Vice President Mike Pence will not be allowed to pick the next president. +

+

+On Friday, a federal court in Texas dismissed the latest in a long line of Republican lawsuits intended to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. +

+

+The suit, which was brought late last year by US Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and a slate of would-be Republican electors in Arizona, asked the US District Court for eastern Texas to grant Vice President Mike Pence the “exclusive authority and sole discretion under the Twelfth Amendment to determine which slates of electors for a State, or neither, may be counted.” +

+

+Such authority — which Pence very much lacks — would grant the vice president the power to choose the next president, clearing the way for Pence to throw the election to President Donald Trump and install him to an unelected second term in office. +

+

+In reality, Pence does have a role to play when Congress meets to certify the Electoral College’s votes on January 6, but it is more a formality than anything. As vice president, Pence is also president of the Senate — thus, according to the 12th Amendment, Pence’s job is to “open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” The actual certification of the votes, though, falls on Congress. +

+

+In his case, Gohmert claimed vice presidents were meant to be more than “the glorified envelope-opener in chief,” a position at odds with more than a century of established practice. +

+

+The court, however, didn’t consider the merits of that claim in its Friday ruling. In a 13-page order dismissing the suit, Trump-appointed Judge Jeremy Kernodle concluded that the court was “without subject matter jurisdiction” to hear the suit in the first place, arguing that the plaintiffs lacked standing — essentially, that they would not be harmed should the certification process proceed — that the suit relied too heavily on convoluted hypotheticals, and that the plaintiffs weren’t even suing the right person. +

+

+Specifically, Gohmert sued Mike Pence — the very person to whom his lawsuit would grant sweeping powers if successful. +

+

+Pence, understandably, wasn’t exactly on board. In a response from Trump’s own Justice Department requesting that the Texas court deny emergency relief to Gohmert on behalf of Pence — acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark, joined by two deputy assistant attorneys general — wrote that “the Vice President is not the proper defendant to this lawsuit.” +

+

+“If plaintiffs’ suit were to succeed,” the Justice Department filing continues, “the result would be to remove any constraint the Electoral Count Act places on the Vice President. To the extent any of these particular plaintiffs have a judicially cognizable claim, it would be against the Senate and the House of Representatives.” +

+

+The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported Friday that Trump was upset the Justice Department took this stance, and that he complained to Pence about it. The judge, however, agreed that suing Pence was improper. +

+

+There were also a few rather important factual errors. Notably, as pointed out by lawyer Akiva Cohen on Twitter, the suit claims that Arizona has appointed competing sets of electors, a situation that would mean the state would submit two sets of votes to Congress. But there are no competing slates of electors, in Arizona or elsewhere. The results of the 2020 presidential election — which was won by President-elect Joe Biden — have been certified in all 50 states and the District of Columbia, and no state legislature attempted to appoint an alternate slate of pro-Trump electors. +

+
+
+

+Oh, Gohmert and crew also think they're a State legislature, apparently.

Plus they figured "outright lying to a federal court" was a good way to start a complaint.

No, "the State of Arizona" hasn't "appointed two competing slates of electors" pic.twitter.com/TSWxmHkkb7 +

+— Akiva Cohen (@AkivaMCohen) December 28, 2020 +
+
+

+As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained in December, pretend Republican electors in a handful of key swing states won by Biden did meet to cast their votes for Trump, but those votes have absolutely no legal force or substance behind them. Each state has only one valid set of electors — and those electors confirmed Biden’s Electoral College win last month, 306 to 232. +

+

+Gohmert, for his part, appears to be in denial: “Judge rules ‘no standing’ in my lawsuit to toss fraudulent Biden electors,” he tweeted Friday. “If I don’t have standing, no one does. When no one ever has standing, what good is a court system?” +

+

+And he strayed into even more dangerous territory Saturday in an appearance on the conservative cable network Newsmax, falsely claiming that if Trump is not allowed to steal the election from Biden, “it will mean the end of our republic,” and saying, “in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM.” +

+
+
+

+Louie Gohmert on Newsmax: "But if bottom line is, the court is saying, 'We're not going to touch this. You have no remedy' -- basically, in effect, the ruling would be that you gotta go the streets and be as violent as Antifa and BLM." pic.twitter.com/cZIdGTiQls +

+— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 2, 2021 +
+
+

+Gohmert’s case isn’t the first Republican election lawsuit to run into issues of legal standing — the Supreme Court rejected a wide-ranging lawsuit brought by Texas last month for the same reason — but with Inauguration Day rapidly approaching, Trump and his allies are running out of time to launch new attempts to stop Biden from taking office. +

+

+Biden’s inauguration doesn’t mean challenges like Gohmert’s — which, according to the Washington Post, his legal team plans to appeal — will vanish. But that doesn’t mean they stand a chance of succeeding either. +

+

+As University of California Irvine law professor Rick Hasen put it on Twitter last month in regard to a different lawsuit: “People ask me when the litigation is going to stop. I say perhaps not through the entire Biden presidency. But when will the serious litigation stop? It already has.” +

+

+Gohmert’s lawsuit is a preview of what’s to come in Congress +

+

+Gohmert’s deeply unserious attempt at a lawsuit, however, is just one expression of the post-election mania gripping the Republican Party. And the court’s Friday ruling — which drops Trump and his Republican allies’ court record to 1-60 in post-election litigation, according to Democratic voting rights lawyer Marc Elias — won’t be the end of it. +

+

+Republicans in both chambers of Congress have already stated their intention to object to the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory when lawmakers meet on January 6, and Trump, who returned to the White House early on Thursday after a holiday sojourn in Florida, has been busy promoting a rally centered on overturning the election results the same day. +

+
+
+

+The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal! +

+— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 1, 2021 +
+
+

+Needless to say, Trump’s planned rally will be utterly ineffective in challenging the election results — but that doesn’t mean it will be harmless. The last time pro-Trump protesters descended on Washington en masse, violence broke out and at least five people were stabbed. +

+

+And though Republicans’ efforts on the Hill are equally doomed to fail, they will ensure a protracted certification process come Tuesday. With support from at least one Republican senator guaranteed — Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri got behind the effort on Wednesday — the GOP can temporarily hold up the process by objecting to a state’s electoral results. +

+

+According to Vox’s Andrew Prokop: +

+
+

+Under this process, if at least one House member and one senator object to the results in any state, each chamber will hold a vote on the matter. For the objection to succeed, both the House and the Senate must vote in favor of it. Otherwise, it fails. (And since Democrats will control the new House, any objection to Biden’s win will surely fail in that chamber. +

+
+

+Failure seems a near certainty in the Senate as well. Democrats currently hold 48 seats in that chamber, and a number of Republican lawmakers have expressed disdain for Hawley’s plan. According to Politico, Alaska’s Sen. Lisa Murkowski has called it “awful;” Utah Sen. Mitt Romney said it was “disappointing and destructive;” Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said, “I don’t think it’s a good idea;” and Nebraska’s Sen. Ben Sasse said, “Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.” +

+

+New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi reported Friday that a GOP official said senators have been so openly angry with Hawley “because they think he knows better. As the official put it: ‘He’s not some moron like Louie Gohmert.’” +

+

+That isn’t to say Hawley won’t get some support: According to a CBS report on Saturday, as many as a dozen Republican senators, including three new members, might join Hawley in objecting. These senators reportedly include: Texas’s Sen. Ted Cruz, Oklahoma’s Sen. James Lankford, and Alabama’s incoming Sen. Tommy Tuberville. +

+

+Overall, though, according to Senate Majority Whip John Thune, the effort will “go down like a shot dog” in the Senate. +

+

+Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell also opposes the effort — but according to Gohmert, as many as 140 Republican representatives plan to object to the vote totals in the House. +

+

+As Prokop points out, none of this will work out for the GOP. Regardless of what further undemocratic hijinks may be planned, Biden won the presidency, and his win will be confirmed again on January 6. +

+

+The efforts of Gohmert, Hawley, and other Trump allies do, however, underscore a continued and dangerous unwillingness on the part of a major US political party to accept the results of a free and fair election — and the corrosive effect that might have on democracy is cause for concern, regardless of how successful their efforts are. +

+

From The Hindu: Sports

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From The Hindu: National News

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From BBC: Europe

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From Ars Technica

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