James.galbraith

Caucus-goers seated in the section for Joe Biden hold up their first votes in Des Moines, Iowa, February 3, 2020. | Gene J. Puskar/AP

Some Iowa delegates were decided by coin toss. That means it’s close.

A few times on Monday night, at some of the Iowa caucuses, candidates ended up with the same number of votes. There was a tie when it came time to hand out delegates.

So the Iowa voters resolved it with a time-honored election tradition: the coin toss.

As the Des Moines Register explained in 2016, there are a few circumstances when a coin toss becomes necessary, but it usually means the caucus has gotten to the point where it’s ready to award delegates but two or more candidates have the same number of supporters. The winner of the coin toss determines how the delegates in each location will be divided up.

A lot of coin tosses can be the sign of a close race. Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders almost tied overall in Iowa and 13 caucuses were decided by a coin toss that year. This time, while official results are still being tabulated, reporters’ tweets suggest several caucuses have been decided by coin toss so far:

A three-way tie was apparently resolved by picking a name out of a hat.

Given that early returns suggest a pretty even four-way race between Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg, and Elizabeth Warren across the state, this isn’t necessarily a surprise. But flipping coins to determine presidential nomination delegates is another process twist in Iowa, where the caucuses are already more complex and confusing than ever before.

In every caucus location across the state, the people present are going through a three-step process, yielding three different sets of results, to figure out how many delegates each candidate has won. The coin tosses come in if there is a tie at the end of the third step. As Vox’s Andrew Prokop explained:

1) The pre-realignment vote total: This is the initial tally of how many people prefer each candidate at each of the more than 1,600 individual caucus sites (added together for a statewide total). Basically, it’s who got the most votes the first time around.

2) The final vote total: After the first tally, any supporters of a candidate who got less than a certain threshold of the vote (15 percent in most precincts) can shift their support to another candidate. Candidates who are below the viability threshold are eliminated as “nonviable,” and a new and final tally is taken. So this is who got the most votes after a reshuffling.

3) State delegate equivalents: The final vote total at each caucus site will then be used to assign each viable candidate a certain number of county delegates. Then those county delegate numbers will be weighted to estimate their “state delegate equivalents” (how many delegates each candidate will get at the Iowa state convention).

These coin tosses are not going to determine who gets the Democratic nomination (at least, probably not). About 1 percent of the nearly 4,000 delegates that will be won over the next few months are up for grabs in Iowa. The state has 41 delegates total, and it seems just a handful will be awarded by this throwback tradition.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) said on Monday that she would not vote to convict President Donald Trump, but also offered a damning portrayal of Congress for its handling of the impeachment proceedings.

In her floor speech, Murkowski described Trump’s behavior as “shameful and wrong,” but said Congress had failed, too.

“The House failed in its responsibilities and the Senate — the Senate should be ashamed by the rank partisanship that has been on display here,” Murkowski said. “So many in this chamber share my sadness for the present state of our institutions. It’s my hope that we’ve finally found bottom here.”

During her speech, Murkowski condemned the House for what she said was a rush through the impeachment process, while also criticizing her Senate colleagues on both sides of the aisle for failing to approach the impeachment trial with an open mind. She lambasted the media for what she called “careless coverage” when Speaker Nancy Pelosi did not immediately send the articles of impeachment over to the Senate after they passed in the House.

Murkowski added that the House could have pursued censure and did not have to jump to impeach.

“I cannot vote to convict,” she said. “The Constitution provides for impeachment but does not demand it in all instances.”

Similar to her Republican colleague Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Murkowski said it would ultimately be up to the voters to offer the final verdict on Trump’s behavior in November.

She also called on Congress to do more to stop the legislative branch from ceding authority to the executive.

Murkowski on impeachment: 'The house failed in it's responsibilities'

“This process has been the apotheosis of the problem of congressional abdication,” Murkowski said. “Through the refusal to exercise war powers, or relinquishing the power of the purse, selective oversight and unwillingness to check emergency declarations designed to skirt Congress — we have failed.”

Murkowski was viewed as a key swing vote during the Senate impeachment trial, particularly when it came to hearing from witnesses. She ultimately voted against it, concluding that there would be no fair trial in the Senate. The Senate is scheduled to render its verdict at 4 p.m. Wednesday.

Murkowski said after her floor speech on Monday that her decision not to hear from witnesses was based on several factors, but noted that a question from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) about whether the chief justice’s role in the impeachment proceedings contributed to the loss of legitimacy of the court played a role.

“It absolutely took it to a different dimension when you have the suggestion that the courts should somehow be … complicit and in a proceeding where the Supreme Court decides that he is not going to rule,” Murkowski said of the president. “All of a sudden … political fireworks in my head went off.”

In explaining his vote against witnesses, Alexander said the House proved its case that Trump pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine to investigate the Biden family. Murkowski said on Monday that she, too, believed that U.S. military aid was withheld at least in part because Trump wanted the Bidens investigated.

“Based on what we heard, clearly a factor in that was the president was looking for a certain action from President Zelensky as it related to the Bidens,” she said. “I believe that.”

House Intelligence Committee Chair Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) speaks to reporters in the Senate basement at the US Capitol as the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump continues on January 30, 2020, in Washington, DC. | Zach Gibson/Getty Images

In an emotional set of closing arguments, he made his final case for convicting Trump.

House impeachment manager Adam Schiff is looking for just one Republican.

Schiff on Monday made an emotional plea to Republican senators during the closing arguments of the impeachment trial, calling on them to defy their party and vote to convict President Donald Trump.

“Every single vote, even a single vote, by a single member, can change the course of history,” he said. “It is said that a single man or woman of courage makes a majority. Is there one among you who will say, ‘Enough’?”

Schiff’s speech caps off more than two weeks of the impeachment trial, during which House Democrats have presented an overwhelming slate of evidence establishing that Trump withheld US military aid to Ukraine and a White House meeting to coerce the Ukrainian government into announcing political investigations into the Bidens.

In his closing remarks, Schiff said that the greatest risk of not removing Trump is that he’ll keep committing the same offenses. “He has betrayed our national security, and he will do so again. He has compromised our elections, and he will do so again,” he said. “You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is.”

Trump’s defense counsel, meanwhile, has argued that a president’s use of a quid pro quo to advance his election prospects is acceptable as long as it can be construed as action taken in the public interest. Plus, they’ve asserted, it simply doesn’t rise to the level of an impeachable offense.

Senate Republicans, by and large, are poised to stay united and acquit Trump, though House impeachment managers have tried their best to make that decision a tough one for moderate GOP members. In addition to criticizing the arguments advanced by Trump’s defense, Schiff emphasized that Republican lawmakers could still distance themselves from the president’s wrongdoing.

“Truth matters to you. Right matters to you. You are decent. He is not who you are,” Schiff said.

These closing arguments were one of the last steps before the Senate votes to convict or acquit the president of two articles of impeachment on Wednesday afternoon. They represented the final opportunity for House impeachment managers to sway any potential Republican converts to their side, though there are only a few who seem like they could even vaguely be contenders at this point.

Among Republicans, Sens. Mitt Romney and Susan Collins have yet to reveal how they will vote, while Sen. Lisa Murkowski indicated Monday night that she would support acquittal. As Sen. Rand Paul predicted prior to the trial even starting, it’s entirely possible that no Republicans will vote to convict the president.

Senate Democrats, though, could potentially see some defections. Sens. Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Doug Jones are the most closely watched swing votes on Democrats’ side of the aisle.

As Schiff has acknowledged repeatedly throughout the trial, it will take a lot of courage for Republicans to break with Trump, given how loyal the GOP base is to the president. It’s unclear if any of them will find it.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Microsoft Teams went down this morning for nearly three hours after Microsoft forgot to renew a critical security certificate. Users of Microsoft's Slack competitor were met with error messages attempting to sign into the service on Monday morning, with the app noting it had failed to establish an HTTPS connection to Microsoft's servers. Microsoft confirmed the Teams service was down just after 9AM ET today, and then later revealed the source of the issue. "We've determined that an authentication certificate has expired causing users to have issues using the service," explains Microsoft's outage notification. Microsoft then started rolling the fix out at 11:20AM ET, and by 12PM ET the service was restored for most affected users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MojoKid writes: When AMD unveiled its forthcoming Ryzen Threadripper 3990X 64-core processor at CES 2020 this year, the company made no bones about comparing its performance to a many-core competitive platform from Intel. Under the hood of the yet formally released high-end workstation AMD chip are 64 physical cores capable of processing 128 threads in SMT, with a 2.9GHz base clock, 4.3GHz boost clock, and 256MB of L3 cache. All that horsepower resides in a single TRX40 socket with a 280 Watt TDP for a suggested retail price of $3990. Conversely, a dual socket Intel Xeon Scalable Platinum 8280 setup will sport 56 cores across two sockets with over a 400 Watt TDP that costs around $20,000. At CES, AMD showed its new 64-core Threadripper beating the dual Xeon Platinum setup in a 3D rendering application called VRAY, and today additional benchmark numbers have surfaced in SiSoft SANDRA, showing Threadripper 3990X out-scoring the Intel setup by around 18 percent. No doubt, AMD's Threadripper 3900X isn't a CPU for the average mainstream desktop user, but when the chips arrive to market in the near future, workstation and content creation professionals will likely be all over AMD's new 64-core beast chip.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Republican Rep. Rodney Garcia, a state lawmaker in Montana, claims that the U.S. Constitution says socialists should be shot or jailed. According to a report in the Billings Gazette, he made the comments about socialists twice: first at a Republican event on Friday, and then again in discussion with a reporter the next day. At the event on Friday in Helena, he reportedly said he was concerned about socialists entering the government, and suggested there were socialists “everywhere” in Billings.

“So actually in the Constitution of the United States, (if) they are found guilty of being a socialist member you either go to prison or are shot,” Garcia told the reporter. He couldn’t tell the reporter where in the Constitution he had found this information. 

“They’re enemies of the free state,” Garcia continued when asked if he believed it was “fair” to shoot or jail a socialist. “What do we do with our enemies in war? In Vietnam, (Afghanistan), all those. What did we do?”

Speaking to The Washington Post, University of Montana law professor Anthony Johnstone confirmed that “nothing in the Constitution of the United States authorizes the government to punish socialists or anyone else on the basis of their political beliefs.”

"I agree with my Constitution. That's what makes us free. We're not a democracy, we're a Republic Constitution," Garcia said. 

In his last election cycle, Garcia’s opponent was self-identified democratic socialist Amelia Marquez. Her views reportedly align with those of Sen. Bernie Sanders. She told the Gazette, “I wish Rep. Garcia would continue to focus on the issues rather than this constant worry over things that are somewhat ludicrous.”

A glimmer of good in this horrifying situation is that both sides of the aisle are condemning his remarks. “All candidates in attendance — especially those with previous assault charges — must immediately condemn his remarks,” Robyn Driscoll, Montana Democratic Party chair, said in a statement on Saturday, referring to Garcia’s conviction in a domestic dispute. "Rodney Garcia has brazenly flaunted his conviction for a domestic dispute, called single moms deadbeats, and was only elected because he created an illegal campaign cash scam. Now he's publicly calling for people to be shot."

On Saturday, executive director of the Montana Republican Party Spenser Merwin released a statement saying, “Under no circumstance is violence against someone with opposing political views acceptable. It’s disappointing that this isolated incident took away from the weekend’s events which showcased the strength of our statewide candidates and the importance of the upcoming election.”

2020 presidential candidate Bernie Sanders calls himself a democratic socialist, as do some rising stars in the Democratic Party, including New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Donald Trump most recently referred to Sanders as a “communist” and “far beyond a socialist” in a Fox News interview with Sean Hannity. "I think he’s a communist. I mean, you know, look, I think of communism when I think of Bernie,” Trump said, wondering if Sanders got married in Moscow, and then adding, "I think of Bernie sort of as a socialist but far beyond a socialist. … At least he’s true to what he believes."

Vice President Joe Biden congratulates Sen. Joni Ernst and her family, daughter Libby Ernst (left) and husband Gail Ernst, during a ceremonial swearing-in in the Old Senate Chamber at the US Capitol on January 6, 2015, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

But the whole saga shows why Biden’s wrong about the GOP coming around post-Trump.

Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who once called for impeaching former President Barack Obama over his decision to make recess appointments, is now claiming that it’s Democrats who’ve actually “lowered the bar” for impeachment.

On Saturday, Ernst said that former Vice President and 2020 contender Joe Biden “should be very careful” with his words around President Donald Trump’s impeachment. “We can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him,’” she said.

According to Ernst, Republicans could impeach Biden for “turning a blind eye” to his son’s work for Burisma, despite being assigned to take on Ukrainian corruption by the Obama White House.

Ernst attempted to walk back those comments, telling reporters Monday, “that was taken entirely out of context.”

“The point is that the Democrats have lowered the bar so far that … regardless of who it is, if you have a different party in the House than that of an elected president, you can have just random comments thrown out there with folks saying we’re going to impeach,” she continued.

But that accusation, that it’s Democrats who have turned impeachment into a partisan weapon, belies her previous call for Obama’s impeachment when she was a member of Congress in 2014.

For his own part, Biden said Sunday that Ernst’s threat is just more proof that Republicans are afraid to face off against him in the general election. “They very much don’t want to face me, obviously,” he told the Des Moines Register.

But there’s another lesson in this exchange that Biden could be learning.

Biden is nostalgic for the bipartisan political days of yore but Ernst’s comments show why they’re never coming back

Biden frequently reminisces about the way politics used to be done, when elected officials from both parties could come together and hammer out a compromise for the betterment of the country. For months, he has positioned himself as the candidate who can roll back the American political system to one of mutual cooperation.

“I just think there is a way, and the thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House. Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends,” Biden said last May.

Obama also thought that Republicans would come to their senses and work with him on policy after his election. ”My hope, my expectation, is that after the election, now that it turns out that the goal of beating Obama doesn’t make much sense because I’m not running again, that we can start getting some cooperation again,” he said in 2012.

Instead, he faced unprecedented obstruction. Not only was Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court nomination of Merrick Garland infamously held up by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), but Republicans utilized several political tricks to hold up the president’s agenda, as explained by Vox’s Matthew Yglesias:

Republicans began to use filibuster tactics in unprecedented ways, holding up uncontroversial nominations to eat up precious floor time and refusing to confirm anyone at all to certain posts in an effort to stop agencies from functioning. They weaponized the federal debt ceiling and forced economically damaging austerity budgets on the country only to turn around and embrace budget deficits once Trump was in the White House.

Most of all, they orchestrated a series of Benghazi investigations whose purpose they admitted was to hurt Hillary Clinton’s prospects as a presidential candidate while blocking public disclosure of the ongoing counterintelligence investigation of the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia.

The reason why is very simple: There remains little political incentive for cross-party cooperation, as Lee Drutman explained for Vox:

In short, if Joe Biden assumes office in 2021, what incentive will congressional Republicans have to work with him? Helping a President Biden achieve his policy goals would help Democrats become more popular. Republicans’ future electoral success would depend on Democrats becoming less popular. It’s the same as when Obama began his second term in 2013. This is why the “fever” didn’t break.

It’s also why congressional Democrats immediately went into resistance mode following the 2016 election. Why would Democrats ever work with Republicans to help Donald Trump achieve anything? It’s the same logic, but with a very different emotional feel.

Ernst’s original comments, as well as her walk back, show that this is just how politics are. Everything is hyperpartisan and that romantic political age that Biden pines for is probably a thing of the past. But as Vox’s Ezra Klein explained, the vice president’s “idea of who he is was formed in the more collegial Congress of the late 20th century”:

In seeing the humanity of his colleagues so clearly, he has lost sight of the structure that surrounds them; 45 years of personal kindnesses, and a career built in the age of mixed parties, can do a lot to obscure the overarching power of polarization.

President Trump after delivering the State of the Union address on February 4, 2020. | Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

“The damage is really to the glitter of America’s supposed exceptionalism,” an expert told Vox.

President Donald Trump’s acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial won’t just serve as an indictment of the American political system, it will also deal a body blow to US foreign policy efforts to curb global corruption and promote the rule of the law.

For decades, a fixture of American diplomacy has been to get other nations to follow America’s example. There’s a top-level official at the State Department and multiple bureaus there that work on these very issues.

The Ukraine scandal at the center of Trump’s impeachment saga was initially part of those efforts. The administration would only send nearly $400 million in military aid as long as Kyiv had made strides in tackling its corruption problems. The Pentagon last May certified Ukraine had done enough defense-sector reforms to merit the support.

Caroline Brehman/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images

But despite this, Trump personally held up the money to extract something else from Ukraine: an announcement that it would open an investigation into the Bidens.

That clear abuse of power for Trump’s own political gain led the Democratic-majority House to impeach the president. Afterward, the Republican-held Senate chose not to investigate further by declining to call any witnesses in its trial of the president. And on Wednesday, the Senate took the final step: acquitting Trump on both articles of impeachment (though one Republican, Utah’s Sen. Mitt Romney, voted to convict).

This means that, ultimately, the system designed to keep the top levels of the US government from descending into lawlessness has failed.

That, as former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves and others say, will now make it harder for the US to tell other nations to follow America’s lead.

Trump’s acquittal, then, will do immense damage to America’s “soft power,” Washington’s ability to convince other nations to do what the US wants without using military force.

It essentially kneecaps a key aspect of US foreign policy, and all because of the president’s misbehavior and Republicans’ refusal to break with him over it.

“Trump represents the greatest destruction of American soft power in history,” Luis Rubio, the president of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations, told me earlier this week.

Why the US cares about ending global corruption

In 2017, the Center for Global Development senior fellow Kimberly Ann Elliott wrote about the problems corruption can wreak on the world.

“When it is pervasive and uncontrolled, corruption thwarts economic development and undermines political legitimacy,” she wrote. “Less pervasive variants result in wasted resources, increased inequity in resource distribution, less political competition, and greater distrust of government.”

The solution? “The spread of democratization and market reform should reduce corruption in the long run,” she argued, while noting that the exposure of widespread corruption could lead to widespread public anger at first.

Pushing countries to be more democratic and liberalize their economies has been a core tenet of US foreign policy for years, one followed by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

One reason is that it makes America look good to get another country to run its government better and treat its people well. The other reason is that it benefits America to have more stable countries with fewer security problems to trade with.

But many nations, particularly more autocratic ones, are loath to change their ways. The US could use its military might to force governments to do what it says, but that would be dangerous and costly, and other countries would surely turn on America. The US, then, hopes the power of its example at home can inspire corrupt governments that flout the rule of law to reform.

The problem is the “soft power” America wields is dwindling thanks to Trump and his allies.

Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

One clear example of this was a situation George Kent, a top State Department official on European affairs, described in his closed-door deposition to the House last October during the impeachment inquiry. He discussed the Trump administration efforts to stop Ukraine’s government from opening an investigation into former President Petro Poroshenko. Per Kent, a top Ukrainian official looked back at the Americans and said, “What? You mean the type of investigations you’re pushing for us to do on Biden and [Hillary] Clinton?”

“The damage is really to the glitter of America’s supposed exceptionalism”

In an ideal America, Trump would have received a severe reprimand for abusing his power and his corrupt practices, like using the presidency to enrich himself and his family. Even if short of impeachment, Republicans could’ve placed severe political pressure on Trump by showing him their support has limits.

That’s not what happened. Instead, Trump’s party will be responsible for letting him get away with the Ukraine scandal basically unpunished. As moderate Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) out it when explaining she would vote to acquit Trump, she (and surely others) claim Trump has “learned” from the impeachment experience and will alter his behavior.

Leah Millis-Pool/Getty Images

Of course, Trump has been formally impeached, and that in itself is significant. But given that no House Republicans voted for impeachment, Trump and his allies can argue (and have) that it was merely a partisan political ploy and not the serious rebuke for his behavior it is supposed to be.

It’s worse when considering one of the arguments Trump’s legal team made: that a president can basically do whatever he wants in order to get reelected if he believes his reelection is good for the country.

“Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest,” Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz contended in front of the Senate last week. “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”

He went on:

It would be a much harder case if a hypothetical president of the United States said to a hypothetical leader of a foreign country, ‘unless you build a hotel with my name on it, and unless you give me a million dollar kickback, I will withhold the funds.’ That’s an easy case. That’s purely corrupt and in the purely private interest.

But a complex middle case is, ‘I want to be elected. I think I’m a great president. I think I’m the greatest president there ever was. If I’m not elected the national interest will suffer greatly.’ That cannot be impeachable.

That’s a deeply troubling message to send to the rest of the world, particularly autocrats who want to remain in power for years. Now when US diplomats tell their foreign counterparts to be less corrupt, fix partisan problems, and adhere to the rule of law, there’s a greater chance those talking points won’t resonate.

“Toxic partisanship and deepening ideological fault lines in America, without question, has a significant impact on America’s role as a promoter of democracy and beacon of human rights,” Richard Javad Heydarian, an expert on US-Asia relations at the National Chengchi University in Taiwan, told me earlier this week. “The damage is really to the glitter of America’s supposed exceptionalism.”

And should Trump be reelected despite all this, Heydarian continued, it would send a strong message to foreign governments that a leader can disregard the law while not losing public support, especially since he’ll have fewer restrictions on his behavior during a second term.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

This is why most Democrats running for president are pushing for anti-corruption measures to be even more central to US foreign policy. Progressives say they are horrified by how Trump has cozied up to dictators and authoritarians from Saudi Arabia to Russia to North Korea. His “America First” style has also led him to ignore human rights and democracy around the world, values the US historically stood for (at least in theory), in favor of the economy and trade.

The way to reverse Trump’s damage? Stopping corruption worldwide. The theory, as progressive foreign policy proponents tell me, is that authoritarians benefit from corrupt practices — like having access to dark money or putting sycophants in positions of power. Thus, by curbing that behavior, the US will help democracy flourish and raise its soft-power standing.

But it’s unclear whether a new Democratic administration would be able to reverse the damage Trump’s acquittal will have on America’s prestige.

In fact, the US actually has become a more corrupt country on Trump’s watch. According to the watchdog group Transparency International, the US was tied for the world’s 16th-least corruption nation in 2017. As of 2019, America slipped to 22nd.

The world, without question, has taken notice — and it’s already hurting US foreign policy. “This severely undermines America’s credibility and moral ascendancy,” says Heydarian.

Can you help Trump escape accountability and still consider yourself a person of integrity?

Supporters of President Donald Trump held a “Stop Impeachment” rally in front of the Capitol on October 17, 2019. | Olivier Douliery/AFP via Getty Images

The truth of impeachment.

Senate Republicans are preparing to acquit President Donald Trump — and convict the American political system.

Trump was never really on trial in the Senate. Not in the sense of a true trial, where the objective is to understand the truth. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell made that clear from the outset. “Everything I do during this I’m coordinating with White House counsel,” he said. “There’ll be no difference between the president’s position and our position as to how to handle this.”

Rather, it was America’s political system that faced the true trial. And the truth was revealed.

Let’s start with where the Senate’s impeachment trial effectively ended: Sen. Lamar Alexander’s (R-TN) announcement that he’d vote against calling witnesses.

Alexander is retiring this year. He’s a member of the Republican old guard, an elected official who remembers the Senate before it was broken by polarization, who yearns for the way things used to be.

It was the combination of institutional memory and the freedom offered by retirement that made Alexander such a closely watched vote. That is, itself, an unsettling fact: that retirement was necessary to even imagine the independence necessary for a typical Republican to break with party.

Pause to note the strangeness of the situation: Why should a vote to simply hear Bolton’s testimony be understood as a break with the Republican Party? Viewed from another, more principled, angle, to vote to hear Bolton should have been understood as loyalty to party. Bolton had proven himself to his fellow Republicans through years and years of service. He’s been a far more loyal soldier in the Republican trenches than Trump.

But even that wasn’t enough.

It is worth parsing Alexander’s reasoning for voting against witnesses closely. In a long series of tweets, he laid out his argument. It rests on two main points.

First, Alexander says:

In other words, we don’t need to know what Bolton knows because we already know enough, and what we know is that Trump is guilty, and what he is guilty of is not impeachable.

The problem here is obvious: This is an argument for voting against conviction, not for voting against witnesses. We do not truly know what Bolton knows until we hear from him. So why not hear from him? What is Alexander doing this week that is so important he can’t spend a few days hearing first-hand testimony?

This tees up Alexander’s deeper argument:

I want to say this as clearly as I can: This is not an argument against impeaching Donald Trump, or calling witnesses. This is an argument that nullifies the legitimacy of the impeachment power so long as the president’s party can maintain discipline.

The Founders didn’t believe there would be a partisan impeachment because they believed America would resist political parties altogether. But the Founders weren’t naïve. They understood that American society would see factions, and those factions would engage in politics. In Federalist 65, Alexander Hamilton writes that impeachment “will seldom fail to agitate the passions of the whole community, and to divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.”

“In many cases it will connect itself with the pre-existing factions, and will enlist all their animosities, partialities, influence, and interest on one side or on the other; and in such cases there will always be the greatest danger that the decision will be regulated more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.”

In joining his Republican colleagues to vote against witnesses, to say nothing of conviction, how is it possible to avoid the conclusion that Alexander is regulating the process through the comparative strength of parties, rather than real demonstrations of innocence or guilt?

His argument sets up a closed loop of partisan tautology: No Republican can or should vote for impeachment because no Republican is voting for impeachment.

Bipartisanship isn’t a condition external to Alexander’s decisions. It is a condition that will be decided by Alexander’s decisions. He is making impeachment more partisan on the grounds that others made it more partisan before him.

Alexander goes on to say:

As a kicker, this is darkly perfect. Alexander is voting for a shallower, more hurried impeachment trial partly on the grounds that the process has been ... shallow and hurried.

The revealed nature of the Republican Party

At times, impeachment has felt like an experiment in which we keep layering on more absurd conditions to see what the Republican Party will accept.

What if Trump releases a call record in which he said Biden’s name repeatedly, directly to Ukraine’s president?

Not enough? Okay, What if we also have him tell Ukraine and China to investigate Biden on TV?

How about if we have a series of Republican foreign policy appointees testify to the House that he did it?

Still nothing? Wild.

Okay, how about this: We get John Bolton, hero of the American right, scourge of liberals, to say that he will testify, under oath, that he personally heard Trump say the aid was contingent on Ukraine going after the Bidens, and that he heard Trump say it earlier than anyone has yet known.

I mean, surely?

And still, nothing. Worse than nothing. As Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) put it, in response, Senate Republicans effectively voted to put cotton into their ears, so they wouldn’t have to hear what Bolton said.

What this reveals is that, in 2020, loyalty to Trump is what defines a Republican. It is also what defines a conservative, as CPAC, the leading conservative conference, made clear after Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) voted to hear Bolton’s testimony:

Polarization vs. the American political system

Richard Nixon wasn’t impeached over Watergate. He resigned. And the reason he resigned is that two Republican senators, Barry Goldwater and Hugh Scott, alongside John Rhodes, the leader of the House Republicans, told him his party wasn’t going to stand by him.

Buried in this story is a fundamental reality about our political system: there is nothing automatic in our system of constitutional accountability. Nixon’s misdeeds did not automatically trigger impeachment, and it was not even the technical impeachment process that removed him from office. Our system is driven by what political parties to choose to do.

So let me ask a question: does anyone honestly and truly believe that if Watergate happened today, with this Republican Senate, that Nixon would’ve been forced to resign? Even Fox News doesn’t think so. Recall what Geraldo Rivera told Sean Hannity:

If you look at charts of party polarization in Congress, the Nixon impeachment comes near a low point in party polarization. American politics was not split between two parties that were internally united but divided against each other. It was split between two parties internally divided and so able to work with each other.

In my book, Why We’re Polarized, I tell the story of how that changed. But for our purposes here, the point is it did change, and we are now at a historic high point in party polarization.

That our system worked to stop Nixon is part of our national mythology. It is part of the story of American politics as successfully self-correcting. But if that story is no longer true, then what does that mean for American politics?

Impeachment is built atop the belief that Congress would be offended, as an institution, if the president were abusing power to amass power. It has no answer for a president abusing power in a way that amasses power not just for himself, but for his congressional allies. It has no answer for a political system in which a congressional majority recognizes it may lose power, even lose the majority, if they hold a president accountable, and so refuse to do anything of the sort.

Because make no mistake. Trump is not the last threat our system will face, and he is not the worst. He is clumsy and distractible. His moral compass is sufficiently broken that he cannot tell the difference between corruption and competition, and so he blurts out his schemes, believing them “perfect.” And yet, the centrifugal pull he exerts on his party let his lawyer argue, in the well of the Senate, that so long as Trump believes that his reelection is in America’s interest, nothing he does to secure it can be impeachable:

That moment should have been a wake-up call to Senate Republicans. To hear the president’s hand-picked lawyer make a case for functional despotism, a case that it is clear the president himself believes, should have shocked them into realizing what it is they were permitting.

But the fact that it did not shock them does not mean it cannot shock us.

The Constitution’s framers did their job, in their time. They designed a system of government that worked to call the country, with all our flaws and all our potential for greatness, into being. But they did not design a system of government that is working in our time. That is our job.

[It is the crowning achievement of Professor Dershowitz' long career. Not in a good way. ]

Much has been written about what Prof. Alan Dershowitz's idiosyncratic (to put it mildly) views on the scope of the impeachment clause. Here's what he said Wednesday on the Senate floor, responding to a question about whether a quid pro quo can ever constitute an impeachable offense:

The only thing that would make the quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were in some way illegal. Now, we talked about motives.  There are three possible motives a public official might have.  The first is in the public interest…. The second is in his own political interest. And the third would be in his own financial interest, just putting money in the bank….

I want to focus on the second. Every public official believes that his election is in the public interest…. And if a president does something that he believes will help him get elected, in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.

The emphasis, I think it's fair to say after watching the video, is Professor Dershowitz's.

He clarified his position on Friday morning in an NPR interview:

NPR:  Some people understood you to say the president can do anything to get reelected just by saying his reelection is in the public interest. Did you mean to say the president can do anything?

DERSHOWITZ: I not only didn't mean to say it. I didn't say it. I never said anything like that. In fact, in the beginning of my statement, I talked about how strongly I supported the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Obviously, Richard Nixon committed many crimes in an effort to get reelected. He thought his reelection was in the public interest. My response was to a question about quid pro quo. The question was, if a person does something completely legal, the president does something legal completely within his power, but he was motivated in part by a desire to get reelected, would that turn that motive into a corrupt motive? And my answer was, no, it wouldn't turn into a corrupt motive. It would turn it into a political motive. But if he did something unlawful, if he did something improper, if he did something that violated the law, clearly a good motive would not serve as a justification.

I gave as an example President Lincoln, who called the troops back from the battlefield to go to Indiana to vote for the Republicans in Indiana. He was motivated in part by the public interest. He was motivated in part by his partisan interests. That clearly would not be an impeachable offense.

Law professors—even Harvard law professors—say a lot of ridiculous things from time to time, and I do not ordinarily use this platform to comment on them. Dershowitz's preposterous theory—that "purely noncriminal conduct including abuse of power and obstruction of Congress are outside the range of impeachable offenses," as he put it in his lengthy House testimony—has, as far as I can tell, virtually no support in the legal community. Quite the opposite; it has been roundly condemned and thoroughly discredited by scholars and commentators across a very broad spectrum of opinion and political persuasion, from Phillip Bobbitt and Laurence Tribe to Jonathan Turley (yes, the same Jonathan Turley who testified on behalf of the Republicans in the House impeachment hearings) to John Dean to my co-bloggers Keith Whittington, Ilya Somin, and Josh Blackman.

The only people other than Prof. Dershowitz himself (and Benjamin Curtis, White House Counsel to Pres. Andrew Johnson**) who took it seriously are those Republican Senators for whom it conveniently served as a kind of Harvard-certified constitutional patina for their decision not to call any witnesses to the impeachment trial: "After all, as Prof. Dershowitz demonstrated, even if the President's quid (military assistance) was offered explicitly and intentionally in exchange for the sole quo of Ukrainian help in discrediting a political opponent—even if John Bolton had secretly taped Trump saying that very thing to Zelensky ("You're not getting a nickel, Mr. Z., until I hear on CNN that you're investigation Joe Biden")—the President cannot be removed from office. So what's the point of hearing additional evidence on the matter?"

** Curtis advanced a version of the Dershowitz theory—which should perhaps be called the Dershowitz-Curtis theory, in honor of the only two prominent legal scholars who have adopted it—at Johnson's impeachment trial, and Dershowitz, in his extended remarks earlier in the week in the President's defense, cited to Curtis (and to no one else) in support of his theory no fewer than 24 separate times.

For a professor of constitutional law, this is quite an achievement: Concocting some personal theory, mostly out of constitutional fluff and nonsense, and then persuading people at the highest reaches of the US government to adopt it and act upon it! This would ordinarily be cause for congratulations, but I very much doubt that history will congratulate Prof. Dershowitz for his accomplishment.

I don't claim to be an expert with any deep knowledge of the history of the Impeachment Clause.  But one hardly has to be an expert to see how thoroughly odious and dangerous the Dershowitz-Curtis theory is.

A few examples. Remember Nixon's "enemies list"?  The American people, Prof. Dershowitz is telling us, cannot remove from office a president who orders the IRS and other federal agencies to harass those on the list of his political opponents.  Or a president who withholds federal highway funds earmarked for State X until the State agrees to disable some fraction of the voting machines in its big cities. Not impeachable. The president tells the leader of Y that (quid) he will veto any NATO action to counter Y's upcoming invasion of Z, as long as Y invests $100 million in a disinformation plan targeting the president's opponent in the upcoming election. Nothing we can do about it until that president is up for re-election.

Keith Whittington gives his own examples:

A president who brazenly granted pardons to minions who engaged in criminal activity to advance the president's own goals should not be tolerated until election day. A president who categorically refused to cooperate in any way with congressional investigations into misconduct in the executive branch need not be tolerated for another four years. A president who sweepingly refused to enforce laws with which he disagreed under the cloak of prosecutorial discretion need not be left in the position of chief executive. A president who rashly used American military power to assassinate American citizens and foreign leaders abroad or invited cataclysmic war need not be left as commander in chief. A president who stubbornly refused to use military force to protect American citizens and territory from foreign military aggression need not be left to serve out his term. A president who directed executive branch officials to use all available lawful tools to harass and intimidate their political enemies without any credible rationale for doing so need not be left in office to continue his campaign of governmental harassment.

According to Dershowitz, a president who did any of these things—indeed, a president who did all of these things—cannot be removed from office.

That is pernicious nonsense. As Whittington correctly points out, it is "contrary to the very purpose of including the impeachment power in the constitutional scheme. The framers recognized that the president, and other government officers, might abuse the discretionary power with which they are entrusted and they might do so in ways that are simply intolerable."

And incidentally, the example Dershowitz uses in support of the D-C theory is telling: Lincoln, he argued, could not be impeached for "call[ing] the troops back from the battlefield to go to Indiana to vote for the Republicans in Indiana," even if he was motivated "by his partisan interests."

Now, Lincoln didn't do what Dershowitz said he did. He didn't actually order that the troops be allowed to go "vote for the Republicans" in Indiana; he ordered that the troops be allowed to go vote, period—in the hope and expectation, of course, that they would vote Republican.

But suppose he had allowed them to return home only if they would "vote for the Republicans"? What if he let the soldiers return home only if they took an oath to vote Republican? Or if he gave those willing to take such an oath (but not others) $20 to defray their traveling costs?

In Dershowitz' view, that could not be an impeachable offense; Lincoln's "partisan motive" can't convert something not otherwise illegal into something for which he can constitutionally be removed from office.

If for some reason you are not deeply troubled by that outcome, do bear in mind that there might come a time when a president who does not share your particular political persuasion acts in this way.

Someone once defined chutzpah as the child who, after being convicted of murdering his/her parents, begs the court for mercy on the ground that he/she is an orphan.  I've got another illustration: Senators who say "Let the people decide in the 2020 election!" while simultaneously giving the President the tools to do whatever he wants and whatever he can, short of outright criminality, to distort that very process. We are likely to pay a high price for this perversion of our constitutional checks and balances, if not in 2020 then sometime down the road.

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Democratic caucus-goers stand to be counted at the party caucus in precinct 317 at Valley Church on February 1, 2016 in West Des Moines, Iowa.  | Brendan Hoffman/Getty Images

The caucuses have a low turnout rate. Accessibility is a big reason.

The ideal Iowa caucus is a crowded room of people holding a spirited argument about politics, electability, and passionately held beliefs. But to Iowa caucus-goer Emmanuel Smith, who has osteogenesis imperfecta — otherwise known as brittle bones disease — the prospect of jostling over caucus votes is terrifying.

Smith suffers from persistent chronic pain and fatigue, and being in crowded spaces is risky. When they participated in the 2016 Iowa caucuses, the very layout of the room presented a challenge.

“If somebody backs into my wheelchair and falls and topples me, I’m going to get very badly injured,” Smith, an advocate with Disability Rights Iowa, told Vox in a recent interview.

If Smith lived in another state, it would be easy enough to cast a primary ballot in-person or vote absentee by mail. But with the Iowa caucuses, voting is an in-person, hours-long event where Iowans have to physically travel to one of the state’s 1,678 precincts to participate. Voting in the caucuses is a physical act — congregating with other people who support the same candidate.

This is inherently limiting. Just 15.7 percent of Iowa’s voting-eligible population participated in the caucuses in 2016 — a fraction of the 52 percent of New Hampshire voters who turned out a week later for that state’s primary. Even during Iowa’s record-setting turnout of the 2008 elections, it was still just 16.1 percent.

Access to the caucuses has long been a problem in Iowa, and not just for those with disabilities. Think of the elderly, those who don’t speak English, parents of young children who can’t afford a babysitter, or folks who simply can’t take time off work to go and caucus for hours.

“This system was designed for 40 people in a living room,” said John Deeth, a longtime party activist and member of the Johnson County Democrats executive committee.

Smith, for one, would prefer a system that gives more voters access — even if it means switching from a caucus to a primary and giving up being first.

“I don’t think we should be able to trade away the ability for people to participate in order to preserve the status quo,” Smith said.

Iowa’s low turnout has to do with accessibility

The caucuses have grown exponentially from the living room days of the 1970s when party leaders mainly controlled the candidate selection process. But as power shifted to voters and the caucuses became more of a draw, finding a big enough place to fit everyone turned into more of a challenge.

“We do anticipate record crowds and with that comes challenges. The challenges are size and parking,” said Ed Cranston, chair of the Johnson County Democrats in Iowa. Johnson County is ground zero for spatial problems; it’s home to Iowa City and the University of Iowa, meaning high turnout from students and faculty.

Deeth is the one tasked with finding a big enough caucus site for the 50-plus precincts in Johnson County. Every four years brings challenges; for instance, this year Deeth was turned down by a church and a high school that scheduled a wrestling meet on caucus night, “so we’re in an elementary school instead of a high school.”

His search for a room big enough to hold enough caucus-goers encapsulates a problem in certain parts of Iowa; Democrats want more folks to turn out, but sometimes there’s literally not enough space to hold them.

“If less people showed up, I wouldn’t be upset,” said Deeth. “It’s not that I want less people to participate, it’s just we’re straining our capacity. We can’t build buildings. We can’t build parking lots. We are doing the best we can with the resources we’ve got.”

After the Democratic National Committee nixed the Iowa Democratic Party’s plan for a virtual, tele-caucus this year, the state’s Democratic party has allowed separate satellite caucuses in an attempt to boost accessibility. Many are happening in nursing homes around the state to accommodate the elderly. Smith, the disability rights advocate with brittle bones disease, is holding one in their apartment building. Some caucuses are offering child care on-site, as the Gazette columnist Lyz Lenz wrote for the Cedar Rapids-based newspaper.

Still, there have been lingering complaints from caucus-goers that the satellite caucus was poorly advertised and hastily arranged, and put the burden on individuals to organize.

“We don’t think there’s systemic approaches to solving the inaccessibility of the causes for many marginalized people,” said Jane Hudson, executive director of Disability Rights Iowa. “The parties keep giving these bandaged kinds of fixes that have a lot of problems themselves. But they’re disenfranchising a lot of people.”

The Iowa Democratic Party didn’t respond to a request for comment from Vox.

“The Democratic party is keenly aware of issues of access,” said Sue Dvorsky, a former Iowa Democratic Party chair and longtime party activist. “We know the caucus is not an election, it is not a constitutionally protected right. It is a process where we begin to elect our delegates, it’s not our primary.”

Dvorsky believes the current Democratic party officials are doing the best with what few resources they have. While she and many others think the caucus system should stay, Deeth thinks the persistent accessibility issues with the caucus mean it’s time to seriously consider moving to a primary system.

“I just hope that when it’s over, we take an honest look at ourselves and decide, can we really continue to justify this?” Deeth said.

Democratic presidential candidate Julián Castro marches with supporters at the Polk County Democrats’ Steak Fry on September 21, 2019, in Des Moines, Iowa. | Scott Olson/Getty Images

The two states give white voters outsized influence.

Iowa and New Hampshire, two states widely seen as setting the tone for the presidential primary, have one major thing in common: They’re extremely white.

Both states’ populations are roughly 90 percent white — a stark contrast with both the country, which is 60 percent white, and the Democratic Party’s base, nearly 40 percent of which is made up of people of color.

That discrepancy has always been a point of contention. But now, particularly as the Democratic Party places a larger focus on representation than ever before and a once historically diverse field of candidates has narrowed to a slate of white frontrunners, it’s driving home a pointed question: Does the order of the early primary states discount voters of color? The data, as it stands, suggests that it does.

Because of their position in the primary calendar, Iowa and New Hampshire have an outsized influence on the outcomes in later states and on the nomination process writ large. According to one analysis by FiveThirtyEight’s Geoffrey Skelley, there was a 37-point change in national polls after John Kerry won in Iowa and New Hampshire in 2004.

Before he dropped out of the 2020 Democratic race, former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro was vocal in his opposition to the current primary order; he raised it as one of his chief issues.

“We can’t as a Democratic Party, continually and justifiably complain about Republicans who suppress the vote of people of color, and then turn around and start our nominating contest in two states, that even though they take their role seriously, hardly have any people of color,” Castro said during a campaign event last November.

Plenty of alternatives have already been floated: Other more representative states could vote earlier, for one, or entire regions could even rotate which one gets to vote first. Existing state laws, however, complicate the ability to change the status quo. While this question won’t be resolved in 2020, it’s one that certainly isn’t going away.

Iowa and New Hampshire voters’ outsized influence, briefly explained

Iowa established its status as a first-in-the-nation caucus in 1972, while New Hampshire has done the same with its primary since 1920. Although their positioning was initially just a matter of timing, both states began to take on growing importance after George McGovern and Jimmy Carter picked up momentum in the 1972 and 1976 elections, respectively, after scoring major victories in Iowa. That power has only grown ever since.

“The eventual nominee almost always wins Iowa or New Hampshire, or at least beats expectations in one of those two states,” Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, previously told Vox. President Bill Clinton in 1992 remains the only candidate in the past three decades to secure the Democratic nomination without winning either state.

The sequential nature of the primary imbues Iowa and New Hampshire with particular weight: The outcomes there ultimately affect candidates’ performances in other crucial early states like South Carolina and Nevada, given the momentum that candidates pick up from both the media and overall voter sentiment. In 2008, for example, Barack Obama’s victory in the Iowa caucuses helped address electability concerns some voters had, fueling his victory in South Carolina and eventual nomination.

In fact, the impact one voter has in either of the first two states is that of five voters on Super Tuesday, according to a 2011 study from economists Brian Knight and Nathan Schiff, who looked at how polls in later states changed after the earlier contests had taken place.

While there are advantages to having Iowa and New Hampshire so early in the primary calendar — they’re both easier for candidates to traverse compared to larger states, and they have more accessible media markets, both of which make it easier for an underdog to gain a profile — the skewed make-up of their electorates is a major reason to argue that they shouldn’t occupy this position.

The two states don’t represent the US or the Democratic Party

Currently, Iowa and New Hampshire are a far cry from truly being representative of the Democratic electorate. They don’t account for the party’s racial diversity, among other things, as Vox’s Dylan Matthews detailed in a 2016 piece:

A whopping 88.7 percent of Iowans and 92.3 percent of New Hampshirites are non-Hispanic whites; only 63.7 percent of Americans as a whole are.

Only 3.4 percent of Iowans are black; 13.2 percent of Americans are.

Unlike the rest of the country, Iowa and New Hampshire do not have particularly large immigrant populations. Only 4.7 percent of Iowans and 5.6 percent of New Hampshirites are foreign-born, compared with 13.1 percent nationwide. Only 7.2 percent of Iowans and 8 percent of New Hampshirites speak a language other than English at home; 20.7 percent of American families do.

New Hampshire and Iowa are also markedly less urban than the rest of the country; they have cities, but none are particularly big. Des Moines, Iowa’s biggest city, has only 209,220 people; Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest, only has 110,448.

And the effects of this are wide-ranging: Not only does this schedule inadvertently devalue the role that different voters have in the primary, some experts see the focus on the early states also clearly determining the candidates that are considered more viable.

“It is fair to say if South Carolina were voting first and not Iowa and not New Hampshire, we’re probably talking about Joe Biden’s situation and his viability in a different way,” University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala told Vox.

According to the RealClearPolitics polling average, Biden continues to have a 13-point lead over the rest of the field in South Carolina (where the Democratic electorate is 60 percent African American), while polls are closer in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Questions have also emerged about whether the order of the primary calendar has helped promote an overwhelmingly white field of contenders.

“Someone could point to Barack Obama, he won Iowa, so how could you say candidates of color are disadvantaged?” says UC Riverside political science professor Karthick Ramakrishnan. “In order to do well in these states, candidates of color have to run deracialized campaigns and that’s not helpful for the Democratic Party, which depends disproportionately on communities of color.”

Illinois has emerged as a potential contender for the coveted first spot, though other reforms have been proposed, too

An analysis from FiveThirtyEight suggests that another Midwestern state might be a better option for the country’s first primary: Illinois. Skelley examined the racial, ethnic, and education breakdowns of the country, and ranked the states in the order that they reflected these splits.

The country as a whole is made up of 39.7 percent white voters with no college degree, 23.5 percent white voters with a college degree, 20.4 percent black voters, 8.9 percent Hispanic voters, and 7.4 percent all other voters, Skelley determines. Illinois was the state that most closely aligned with this breakdown, he found. The state is 37 percent white voters with no college degree, 23.7 percent white voters with a college degree, 22.1 percent black voters, 8.9 percent Hispanic voters, and 8.3 percent all other voters.

Illinois is followed by New Jersey, New York, and Florida; neither New Hampshire nor Iowa even cracked the top 30.

In addition to shifting the order of primary states, those who favor reform have proposed other ideas like rotating the order of states to give different regions the opportunity to go first or a national primary in which every state votes at the same time.

It’s worth noting that some of these suggested tweaks could inadvertently harm candidates who aren’t as well-funded. A national primary, for example, could prove significantly more expensive for a candidate who’s trying to introduce themselves to a larger electorate.

And, because of Iowa and New Hampshire laws, change isn’t expected to be easy.

Existing state laws make primary order pretty tough to change

The thing about Iowa’s and New Hampshire’s positioning in the primary is that it is protected by state laws.

Both states’ laws explicitly lay out when the caucus or primary will take place: Iowa’s says that its caucuses must happen eight days before any other state’s proceedings, while New Hampshire’s guarantees that its primary will always be first.

“I mean, none of Iowa, New Hampshire, nor South Carolina are going to unilaterally change state laws protecting their positions on the calendar,” Josh Putnam, a lecturer at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, told Vox. “That just is not going to happen.”

Updates to the primary calendar will only take place if the Democratic National Committee tries to push for them, Scala tells Vox.

And experts don’t think this will occur in the near term. “Given that both political parties have rules that protect the timing of primaries — ensuring the continued hegemony of early states — I don’t see this changing anytime soon,” says Howard University political science professor Niambi Carter.

At the end of every presidential cycle, the nomination process is reexamined by the Democratic National Committee, which could be an opportunity for potential discussion of changes, particularly if the Democratic candidate doesn’t wind up winning in November.

Scala says the DNC could impose penalties in order to pressure states to change their schedule, a method that’s been used by the Republican National Committee in the past. These penalties could include dinging candidates who campaign in Iowa and New Hampshire earlier in the race, a move that would deter them from participating in these primaries, forcing states to reconsider their timing.

Another complicating factor, of course, is the Republican primary, which would likely have to change as well given the degree of resources and planning that each state engages in to put on these elections.

The infrastructural barriers, it seems, would pose a massive obstacle to implementing the caucus and primary reforms that many Democrats are increasingly demanding. But those demands keep getting louder.

BURLINGTON, Iowa—A crush of new Democratic voters, mobilized by a wave of anti-Trump energy, will arrive at their caucus precinct, and there will not be enough voter-registration forms. The lines will be long, and some Iowans, many of them elderly, will shiver in the cold for hours before getting inside. The caucus itself will be pandemonium: There won’t be enough preference cards for caucus-goers to write down their favorite presidential contenders. Voters will be incensed when they learn about the new realignment rules. There will be miscounts and recounts. And at the end of the night, once all the numbers have been crunched and recrunched, Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders will each claim victory.

This is Sandy Dockendorff’s nightmare scenario for tonight’s caucus. The 62-year-old former nurse, who is running a caucus in the small town of Danville, laid it all out for me over coffee last week. Her worst fears are unlikely to be realized. “The party has done everything it can to make sure that’s not the case,” she said. But the caucus is extremely complex, and rule changes threaten to make it even more bewildering for voters to navigate and complicated for the press to cover. The biggest fear: Democrats may not have a clear winner—a scenario that could further threaten Iowa’s imperiled first-in-the-nation position.

“Caucus chairs are more concerned this cycle than I’ve ever seen them,” Dockendorff said. “They’re very nervous.”

[Read: The Iowans who reject their state’s special privilege]

Dockendorff has organized and led a dozen caucuses since she moved to the state from Virginia in 1996, and she’s used to being a keeper of caucus knowledge. She gets a lot of questions about the caucus from confused Iowans and out-of-state reporters, and she delights in the intricacies of the process. Sitting across from me at a café in Burlington, wearing purple glasses on her face and sunglasses on her head, she used a piece of paper to illustrate a set of realignment scenarios. While we spoke, a middle-aged woman came over to our table and sat down, hoping Dockendorff could help assuage some of her fears: “I heard some really scary news on Twitter today about the caucuses!”

This year, Dockendorff has fielded a lot of questions. The parties have run the caucus the same way for decades: Voters show up to an assigned precinct—a church or an elementary school in their neighborhood, say—and stand under a sign or in a corner associated with their favorite candidate. For half an hour, people hustle between groups, trying to coax fans of other candidates to join their team. Then organizers count each candidate’s supporters, and there is a realignment period, during which people can switch allegiances. Members of any candidate group that doesn’t get at least 15 percent of caucus-goers must move to a new candidate. Once this part is done, delegates are assigned to the remaining contenders using a mathematical formula, and reported to the state party.

For the 2020 contest, though, there are a few major changes. Caucus-goers who choose a viable candidate in the first round can’t switch. For the first time ever, voters will write down their choices on preference cards, in case there’s a recount. If a precinct has only a small number of delegates to give out, even supporters of viable candidates may have to realign; which group realigns could depend on a coin toss. (The state party instructs caucus chairs to bring their own quarter or some “other method to conduct a game of chance.”) “Some precincts have three delegates, and it’s not inconceivable that five candidates are viable,” Dockendorff said.

But the most crucial development this year is that each of Iowa’s 1,700 precincts is required to report two data points in addition to its final delegate count: the totals each candidate received in the first count and the totals they received after the first realignment.

Releasing these numbers is meant to add transparency to the process. But the new rules make it more likely that several Democratic candidates will claim victory on Monday. The traditional winner—the Democrat who receives the most delegates—will be able to boast the best organizing strategy in Iowa. But it’s about more than just delegates, Dockendorff said. “There’s going to be somebody who’s going to be able to say, ‘Look, we had 1,000 more people show up to the caucuses for us. Obviously we’re the strongest,’” she explained. And the candidate who ends up with the most total supporters after the realignment—when voters from unviable groups find a new group—can brag that he or she has built the broadest coalition of support, or has the most persuasive organizers.

Releasing three results “could be a huge problem,” Steffen Schmidt, a political-science professor at Iowa State University who has taught classes about the caucus, told me. Being able to spin any combination of results into a win will make it easier for candidates to stay in the race through New Hampshire and beyond, even though the Iowa contest typically serves as a way to winnow the primary field. “I don’t get why, instead of transparency and simplicity, the party has gone deeper into great complexity and resulting confusion,” Schmidt said. Other caucus leaders are worried too. I talked with Reyma McCoy McDeid, an activist in Des Moines who is running a satellite, or remote, caucus for voters with disabilities, about what she expects on caucus night. “Oh, God,” she said with a laugh. “In 2016, there were three candidates, and it was mayhem. We have how many candidates now? … Caucus night is going to make 2016 look like a cakewalk.”

[Read: Iowans vote first, if they can vote at all]

People like McCoy McDeid and Dockendorff, who are volunteers, already have a lot to handle. They’ll be balancing several sets of paperwork, using math formulas to calculate candidates’ viability and apportioning delegates. Now they’ll also have to reexplain the rules and the results for caucus-goers. “There are going to be so many people who have been through caucuses for years who don’t realize that the rules have changed,” Dockendorff said. Many of these voters “are going to have an absolute conniption fit.”

Is the caucus really worth all this trouble? I asked Dockendorff. Obviously, the contest brings attention and resources to the small state that wouldn’t otherwise have either. But as I’ve written before, Iowa’s prominence in the primaries is under harsh scrutiny from critics who argue that the state is too white to be representative of the Democratic Party writ large and that the caucus system itself is inaccessible to many, including people with disabilities. Dockendorff acknowledges that those problems are serious. But ultimately, the caucus process is not only valuable but necessary, she told me. “The kind of candidate that can win in Iowa is the kind of candidate I want to see in the Oval Office,” she said. A candidate “can’t be but a better human being for having been assaulted with this humanity in its purest form.”

If Iowa hopes to maintain its privileged status, it’s crucial that everything go smoothly tonight. During the 2016 caucus, volunteers were unprepared for the overwhelming turnout; there were technological problems, reporting errors, and multiple coin flips. Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by 0.25 percent—the closest margin in Iowa history—which led many Sanders fans to accuse the state party of putting its thumb on the scale for Clinton. Another chaotic caucus could be the final straw for the contest’s credibility. And Dockendorff believes that many Americans are rooting for the caucus to fail. If the party process doesn’t work, she said, “some people who are not fans of the Democratic Party will feel vindicated.”

The Falcon and Winter Soldier, Wandavision, and Loki all get teases in Marvel first Disney+ trailer

Since the beginning of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Captain America and Iron Man have been a constant. But we now have an idea of what the world will be like without them, as the first mini trailers for The Falcon and the Winter Soldier, WandaVision, and Loki, three upcoming Marvel TV series that will air exclusively on Disney+, was released during the Super Bowl.

The three shows were spliced into a (very short) Super Bowl trailer. Falcon is seen launching Cap’s signature shield. Wanda, a.k.a. Scarlet Witch, and Vision find themselves in an I Love Lucy-like alternate reality. And Loki just says he wants to burn it, whatever “it” may be, all down.

Each of these stories picks up with the characters’ Endgame journeys.

Falcon and the Winter Soldier are trying to carry on Captain America’s legacy. Wanda is mourning Vision’s death. And Loki from 2012’s Avengers, thanks to some time loop hijinks, is alive instead.

Beyond seeing these characters’ own personal onscreen adventures, there’s added interest in these series since it’s the first true look we’ll have at Marvel’s Phase 4, which will now include the studio’s blockbuster movies and Disney+ shows. Marvel’s forthcoming Black Widow film will hit theaters in May, but it’s a prequel of sorts, taking place before the events of Endgame. Meanwhile, The Eternals, a Marvel movie that’s slated for November, will presumably tell a story that takes place in the past, since its characters are part of an alien race that predates humans in the MCU.

These Disney+ shows, while not blockbuster movies, will be the first glimpses at the state of the MCU post-Endgame.

The Falcon and The Winter Soldier, WandaVision, and Loki do not have official premiere dates yet. But Falcon and WandaVision are slated for 2020.

If you can afford it and your immune system can handle it, get your flu shot. Then freak out over the many different things that can kill you.

People have some very strong feelings about caucuses. Namely, whether they are actually democratic or not. There’s a lot of important stuff to unpack in that discussion, especially when it comes to race, gender, and physical access, but one point that’s slowly getting more attention is how people with children are supposed to make it work. Affordable child care impacts all parents, but in a society where child care more often than not falls on a woman, caucuses can feel anti-mom. Not to mention, some people of any gender are single parents. On the flip side, bringing young children into something as long and chaotic as a caucus may be unpleasant for everyone involved, even if there are some accommodations. So, what to do? This year, volunteers for Sen. Elizabeth Warren are offering free child care to some attendees, as reported by CNN.

Volunteers will provide free child care to some families in the Iowa City area on the evening of Feb. 3. Sign-up information, which parents or guardians can complete online, asks for the standard babysitting info, like the child’s age, bedtime, allergies, or other health issues. It also asks that families give permission for kids to stay up past their bedtime or watch a movie or video. 

“Accessibility and opportunity are important to our campaign, and we do everything we can to make sure everyone who wants to can volunteer and participate on caucus night,” Warren’s Iowa communications director, Jason Noble, said to Bloomberg.

Staff columnist Lyz Lenz recently wrote about the Iowa caucus child care issue over at The Gazette, arguing, “In 2020, 100 years after the 19th Amendment was passed, Iowa’s mothers are still effectively disenfranchised from caucusing.”

Whether child care falls on both parents or just one, the burden doesn’t begin and end with simple responsibility. Child care can be expensive, especially if one or two people in a household are missing night shifts or gig economy work to caucus, to begin with. Child care can also be expensive if you have more than one child at home, or if your children have certain medical needs or disabilities. 

Of course, caucuses are tough, if not totally inaccessible, for some people who aren’t parents. For example, people who work more than one job, live with certain disabilities, or seniors might feel the barrier of entry for a caucus is simply too hard. As The New York Times recently noted, even people running for the nomination have a hard time hyping up caucuses.  

The free child care idea is getting a lot of support on Twitter. 

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Let’s be real- the lack of child care accommodations during primaries, caucuses + general elections are a form of voter suppression that disproportionately hurt low income caregivers, esp women. And it’s not better in progressive spaces. #AllOfUs4Warren https://t.co/N0Lkj6w9Ea

— Bob Bland 🗽 #AllOfUs4Warren (@bobblanddesign) February 2, 2020

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This is what happens when women run for office: Warren campaign volunteers offering caucus night child care https://t.co/tIdj0THcdQ

— Dulce Vasquez (@vasquezdulce) February 2, 2020

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When your candidate campaigns the way they intend to lead post elections. https://t.co/R1k6w8nXHk

— Leslie Mac (@LeslieMac) February 2, 2020

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Because a lack of child care means women, and especially working class women, are not able to participate fully in our democracy. @ewarren sees us. #WinWithWarren https://t.co/WtQUVDyCSX

— Paulina Gonzalez-Brito ✊🏽 (@paupau323) February 2, 2020

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I didn't caucus in 2016. I had a baby and a 2yo. My husband worked late that night, and we didn't have any other child care. Team Warren understands that everyone's voice counts, and they've been here supporting Iowa parents from the beginning. https://t.co/fs31ckTA91

— Lisa Bell (@CoffeeCoping) February 2, 2020

Earlier today, Warren also tweeted about her proposal for universal child care.

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I struggled to find affordable child care for my own kids – and it’s a zillion times harder for parents today. That’s why I’ve got a #UniversalChildCare bill to make child care free for millions of families. pic.twitter.com/wS3d4bD7Cs

— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) February 2, 2020

One of the problems with electing brick-stupid people as senators, as Republican voters have taken to doing in droves since the election of the first non-white American president broke what was left of their brains, is that those senators tend forever to be saying the quiet parts out loud.

Sen. Joni Ernst, inflicted on us by Iowa for some reason, has been (1) frothingly angry at the impeachment of Donald Trump for merely doing crimes, (2) eagerly leaping to television cameras to (for free) further the very same conspiracy Donald Trump was attempting to get out of the Ukrainian government for a few hundred million dollars, and (3) is now insisting that since Democrats meanly impeached Trump for crime-doing well maybe Republicans will impeach a theoretical President Biden too because screw you, that's why.

“Joe Biden should be very careful what he’s asking for because, you know, we can have a situation where if it should ever be President Biden, that immediately, people, right the day after he would be elected would be saying, ‘Well, we’re going to impeach him,’” Ernst told Bloomberg News.

For what reason?

“For being assigned to take on Ukrainian corruption yet turning a blind eye to Burisma because his son was on the board making over a million dollars a year.”

Bloomberg News notes, to their small credit, that this is not true. This is a conspiracy theory. In the real world as inhabited by those of us not raised by paint fumes, Biden demanded the removal of Ukrainian prosecutor Viktor Shokin for not prosecuting alleged corruption in companies like Burisma. Biden was acting on behalf of the United States government and State Department to further an official United States policy, one shared by the European Union and by Senate Republicans themselves. Because Shokin, now Rudy Giuliani's bestest friend after he came up with a host of theories on why everyone in Ukraine but him were the crooked ones, was corrupt.

What Bloomberg News does not point out, however, is that this makes Joni Ernst a liar. Not just a liar, but either a willful propagandist or an unwilling idiot, someone who allegedly is responsible for help writing our laws but who has not, at any point, been able to grasp even the most fundamental of information about the trial that she just fidget-spinnered her way through. She is furthering a lie, and using it as reason why Dear Leader's new enemy must be retaliated against, and justifying both the lie and the retaliation on the indignity of Dear Leader being asked to answer for doing what even her fellow Republican senators agree was a crooked act.

Sen. Joni Ernst may be taking the fascist path on these things but she is, thank God, not a bright fascist. A smarter Republican would have shut their pie-hole long ago but she just keeps going, apparently on a mission to show that her home state of Iowa will put literally anyone in a position of Republican power. Liars, white supremacists, you name it.

It was soon-retiring Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander who effectively ended the impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump, doing so with a statement that asserted House managers had indeed proven that Trump used U.S. military aid as bargaining chip for obtaining a smear of his election opponent, but that doing so was merely "improper", and not an impeachable offense. Alexander thus settled on the answer that would do the most injury to our democracy and the rule of law: the "president" did it, the "president" was caught doing it, and the "president" is now allowed to do it, going forward, with no repercussions other than facing a vote he is now allowed, by Senate decree, to rig.

Defending this extremist, cancerous nullification on Meet the Press, Alexander did himself no favors. Alexander said that what Trump should have done, if he was so "upset" about Joe Biden and Ukraine, “he should have called the attorney general, and told him that, and let the attorney general handle it the way they always handle cases involving public figures.”

Why didn't he, asked his host? “Maybe he didn't know to do it,” Alexander said, letting loose a small chuckle after tossing that turd on the table.

Chuck Todd pushed back on this notion that Trump, entering his fourth year of office, was "still new to this"; Alexander allowed that "the bottom line it's not an excuse. He shouldn't have done it."

Let's just savor that, for a moment, as Alexander's continued defense for why Trump cannot be held accountable to the same standards as every other public figure corrodes our Constitution. Alexander is suggesting here that maybe Dear Leader was, as Robert Mueller's team concluded of Dear Leader Jr., during the last attempt by the Trump family to further international corruption if it is on their behalf, simply Too Stupid To Not Crime.

Trump may have an entire administration behind him, the top ranks stuffed with Republican radicals all, and a kept attorney general of his own mold, but Donald Trump is a stupid, stupid, stupid man. In three years nobody has been able to explain to him how to not crime. Through nearly a year of Rudy Giuliani scheming and Trump inserting Giuliani and his allied criminals into the decision-making loops of the State Department, White House and Budget Office, none of the myriad involved officials were able to inform him of how an "investigation" of such corruption would actually be done. If he were serious about it. If he had non-criminal motives.

Is it possible for Trump to be that stupid? Perhaps. He still believes "stealth" aircraft are literally invisible, after three years; his absolute immunity to learning absolutely anything is so impressive that we surely will come out of this with a new brain disease being named after him. It is less possible for every single member of his staff, sans John Bolton and subordinates, to also have accidentally crimed out of ignorance. Not impossible, but not likely.

In any event, the Alexander pitch is, somehow, worse than before. Not only has it been proven that Trump extorted Ukraine in order to gain an election favor, and not only is he now allowed to do that, the alternative being some (any) form of Senate check on his new discovered power, but Trump is allowed to break our laws if he is or can claim to be so very stupid that he simply cannot remember or absorb them.

If that were not enough, Lamar gave away the last bit of the game at the end.

"Now I think it's up to the American people to decide, okay, good economy, lower taxes, conservative judges, behavior that I might not like, the call to Ukraine. Weigh that against Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders and pick a president.

He broke the law, but we got our "conservative judges." He may have violated the Constitution, his oath of office, the public trust and the very foundations of our democracy, with the eager help of the Senate and the "conservative" press, but it is either rank corruption or electing a Democrat so rank corruption, hints Lamar, it is.

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LAMAR ALEXANDER: If the president was upset with what the Bidens were doing in Ukraine, he should've called the attorney generalCHUCK TODD: Why didn't he then?ALEXANDER: Maybe he didn't know to do it pic.twitter.com/nHqcSgm8ve

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 2, 2020

Sen. Joni Ernst said on Sunday she’s confident President Donald Trump will not solicit foreign interference in another U.S. election if he's acquitted as expected in the Senate impeachment trial.

“I think that he knows now that, if he is trying to do certain things, whether it’s ferreting out corruption there, in Afghanistan, whatever it is, he needs to go through the proper channels,” the Iowa Republican said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

To root out corruption in Ukraine, she added, the president should have instead gone to the Justice Department and other international organizations for help, but instead “chose to go a different route.”

Later, Ernst said she intends to vote for Trump’s acquittal.

“Whether you like what the president has done or not, we can argue this up one side and down the other all day," she said. "Does it come to the point of removing a president from office? I don't believe this does.”

A President Andrew Yang might pardon President Donald Trump.

One of the entrepreneur's 2020 rivals, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, has suggested she would appoint a task force to investigate Trump’s wrongdoing if she won the presidential election.

But Yang on Sunday said that would make moving forward difficult.

"You suggested ... that President Yang might pardon President Trump, why?" “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos asked the candidate.

Yang responded that he would listen to the guidance of his attorney general, but added, “You have to see what the facts are on the ground.”

“If you look at history around the world, it's a very, very nasty pattern that developing countries have fallen into, where a new president ends up throwing the president before them in jail,” Yang said on ABC’s “This Week.”

“That pattern unfortunately makes it very hard for any party to govern sustainably moving forward with a sense of unity among their people,” he continued. “And so to me, America should try to avoid that pattern if at all possible.”

In 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned his predecessor, Richard Nixon, after he resigned amid the Watergate scandal. “It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must,” Ford said in September 1974.

Yang has criticized the media and Democrats for being “obsessed over impeachment.” After the December PBS NewsHour/POLITICO debate, Yang said he didn’t remember any voters asking about impeachment on the campaign trail.

"Americans are not focused on this in the same way the networks are," he told CNN at the time.

The entrepreneur has consistently polled in sixth place in Iowa, which is holding its caucuses Monday, and just came off a 17-day bus tour there. “We think we'll surprise a lot of people on Monday night,” he said Sunday, “and we've got a ton of support in New Hampshire.”

In the Iowa caucuses, voters whose first-choice candidate doesn’t reach 15 percent support in a precinct can back another candidate on a second ballot. Where does Yang expect most of his supporters to go if he doesn’t meet the 15 percent threshold?

“We have a very, very diverse group of supporters. I can't speak for where they would head,” he said.

However: “I do have a sense that many of them have supported Bernie in the past, but many of them supported President Trump and they might just leave.”

Donald Trump, relatable man of the people, beloved of diner customers throughout The Heartland, does not know who is playing in the Super Bowl. And despite his vast experience in pretending he’s an expert on things he knows nothing about, he can’t even hide it.

Asked about his preference in the game, Trump said, “Well, I love them both, let's just say. But I will tell you, some two very interesting teams and interesting players, some really great players. And it's going to be hopefully a great Super Bowl.”

No, this doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Senate Republicans are letting the man off the hook for trying to obtain foreign interference to win an election. His administration is taking food assistance away from people who need it to survive, relaxing restrictions on the use of landmines, accelerating climate change, and so much more. He personally is emboldening white supremacists and rapists everywhere. He embraces authoritarian leaders around the globe.

So his ignorance about who’s in the Super Bowl and his clumsy attempt to hide it is barely even a footnote on the hour in which it became obvious. But it’s also another potent reminder that truly we live in the stupidest time, that this level of ignorance not just about policy but about the basics of U.S. culture can somehow be set aside in the portrayal of Trump as someone whose appeal comes from anything but the vicious bigoted impulses he stokes. No one really thinks he’s likable or just like them or that he knows what their lives are like. His supporters are fervently in love with him, and there’s no possible explanation but the racism and nationalism and misogyny and bullying and, possibly, to a small extent, envy over his crass deployment of the wealth he pretends he didn’t just inherit. That is what it is, and what it is is sickening, but what’s truly gross is the media’s willingness to pretend that his appeal is anything else.

Leading Off

● Arizona: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, with 11 judges participating en banc, has overturned a ruling by a panel of three of the circuit's judges that had upheld restrictions backed by Arizona Republicans on counting votes cast in the wrong precinct but in the right county, as well as limitations on who can turn in another person's absentee mail ballot on their behalf. The latest ruling determined that the laws were invalid because Republicans had intentionally discriminated against Native American, black, and Latino voters.

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Campaign Action

​Arizona has largely transitioned to mail voting, but the court observed that only 18% of Native American voters receive mail service, and many living on remote reservations lack reliable transportation options. That has led some voters to ask others in their community to turn their completed ballots in, a practice Republicans have sought to deride as "ballot harvesting" in an attempt to delegitimize those voters. The law that the court just struck down had restricted who could handle another person's mail ballot to just a close relative, caregiver, or postal service worker.

The ruling also invalidated a GOP-backed provision prohibiting out-of-precinct voting, where a voter shows up and casts a ballot at the wrong polling place but in the right county on Election Day. Under the invalidated law, such voters could only cast a provisional ballot, which were automatically rejected if it was later confirmed that the voter had indeed showed up at the wrong polling place.

Following this ruling, voters who appear at the wrong polling place will still be able to cast a ballot for the races in which they would have been eligible to participate at their correct polling place, such as statewide contests for president or governor.

Republican state Attorney General Mark Brnovich said he would appeal to the Supreme Court. Given the hostility toward voting rights shown by the court's conservative majority, there's a strong risk that this ruling will be overturned.

Felony Disenfranchisement

● Washington: Democratic state senators have passed a bill out of committee to end the disenfranchisement of people on parole or probation for a felony conviction. If the bill becomes law, only people who are currently incarcerated would remain unable to vote.

Voter Registration and Voting Access

● Massachusetts: Voting rights advocates are hoping Massachusetts lawmakers will finally pass same-day voter registration this year after proposals have failed in recent years, with supporters urging the heavily Democratic legislature to advance one of three various bills (known as H 636, H 685, and S 396) out of committee ahead of a key Feb. 5 deadline. Democratic Secretary of State Bill Galvin supports the concept, and he said that it could be implemented in time for the November general election if lawmakers act soon.

● Virginia: Democrats and a handful of Republicans in Virginia's state House have passed a bill to both remove the excuse requirement to vote absentee and establish in-person absentee voting similar to traditional early voting. State Senate Democrats recently passed a similar bill, but one chamber will have to pass the other chamber's bill before a final version can be sent to Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam for his expected signature.

Election Security

● Puerto Rico: Legislators in Puerto Rico are reportedly expected to soon pass a bill that would have the entire commonwealth vote online by 2028, a move that would dramatically increase the vulnerability of the island's elections by exposing them to direct hacking.

The bill would establish a pilot effort during which early and absentee voters could vote online in the 2020 elections, and all voters would have that option in 2024. By 2028, Puerto Rico's election commission would be able to decide whether voters could only vote online, but the bill doesn't specify how internet voting would be conducted or secured.

Although advocates of easier voting access have long considered online voting as potential reform to boost turnout, election security experts have widely warned against internet voting as impossible to truly secure from all threats. The ACLU has sent a letter to Gov. Wanda Vázquez urging her to veto the bill if it reaches her desk, and it's possible that the group could file a lawsuit if the measure ultimately becomes law.

● Tennessee: The 6th Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously upheld a lower court ruling that rejected a lawsuit seeking to prohibit Tennessee from using its remaining paperless voting machines in the upcoming elections over security concerns. The court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case, finding that they had failed to demonstrate how they had been or were likely to be harmed. The plaintiffs have yet to indicate whether they will seek a further appeal.

● West Virginia: West Virginia's Republican-run legislature has unanimously voted to pass a bill allowing voters with certain disabilities to cast their ballots electronically over the internet, sending the bill to GOP Gov. Jim Justice for his signature. Lawmakers said they feared that not passing such legislation would leave them vulnerable to a lawsuit given that some voters are unable to cast a paper ballot without assistance. However, election security advocates have warned that any type of internet-based voting is potentially vulnerable to hacking.

Voting Rights Expansions

● Burlington, VT: The City Council in Burlington, Vermont's largest city, has reversed course and voted not to place a referendum on the ballot this March that would have granted voting rights in local elections to noncitizens with permanent legal resident status. Supporters withdrew the measure from consideration, stating that voters mistakenly believed undocumented immigrants would have gained the right to vote. Backers said they hope to revisit the legislation in the future.

● New York City, NY: Despite growing support on the New York City Council for a bill that would grant voting rights in local elections to hundreds of thousands of noncitizens with permanent resident legal status, Democratic Mayor Bill De Blasio has cast doubt on the measure. A majority of council members have signed on as sponsors, but it would take a two-thirds supermajority to override a potential veto by De Blasio. Democrats hold nearly every seat on the council but are divided between more progressive and moderate factions.

Redistricting

● Colorado: Colorado Democrats have advanced a bill out of state House committee along party lines to end the practice of "prison gerrymandering" by counting incarcerated people for redistricting purposes at their last address instead of where they are imprisoned (and can't even vote). Democrats hold majorities in both legislative chambers and the governor's office, meaning there's a decent chance this bill will become law.

● Wisconsin: Democratic Gov. Tony Evers has signed an executive order creating a nonpartisan advisory commission for redistricting that will submit proposed maps to the legislature. These maps would not have the force of law, and Republican lawmakers would reject any maps that don't maintain their gerrymanders. However, Evers' move could provide reformers with ammunition in court if lawmakers deadlock and the judicial branch has to step in and draw new maps after the 2020 census.

Electoral College

● Virginia: By an 11-10 vote, with three Democrats siding with Republicans, a committee in the state House has failed to advance a bill to add Virginia's 13 Electoral College votes to the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact. However, it's still possible that Democrats could reconsider the bill this session. Democrats hold full control of state government and could pass this bill without any GOP support, but they can only afford a limited number of defections in the likely event that Republicans unanimously oppose the legislation.

Voter Suppression

● Kansas: After Republican Secretary of State Scott Schwab recently said his office would not be ready to implement countywide "vote centers" in time for the 2020 elections, legislators in both parties are considering legislation—or a lawsuit—to ensure compliance with their intentions.

Last year, lawmakers from both parties passed a law letting counties decide whether to switch to a vote center system, which allows voters to cast their ballot at any polling place in their county instead of just their local site.

This move was intended to improve voting access and save money by more efficiently allocating election staff and resources on Election Day, but Schwab claims that his office won't have time to finalize the regulations needed to implement the new system until after 2020. Republican state House Majority Whip Blake Carpenter is reportedly drafting a bill to authorize counties to implement the new vote centers without Schwab, while Democratic state Senate Minority Leader Anthony Hensley said he's considering a lawsuit.

● Texas: A federal district court has ruled that Texas must register three voters who updated their driver's license address online but were unable to update their voter registration at the same time. The plaintiffs had argued that Texas was violating federal law by refusing to offer online registration updates even though it allowed registration updates for voters updating their driver's licenses in-person or by mail. However, the court's ruling is only limited to these three plaintiffs, likely because of the timing of the soon-approaching March 3 primary.

This case follows a previous lower court ruling that similarly held that Texas was violating federal law by failing to offer online registration updates when people change their address online. However, that ruling was overturned by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which determined that the plaintiffs in that case lacked standing because they had subsequently been able to re-register by other means. This latest case features three plaintiffs who had moved but had not re-registered, which could solve their standing problem if this case again finds its way before the 5th Circuit.

In a separate effort, Democratic Party organizations are seeking to intervene in and revive the original lawsuit as a way to avoid the possibly lengthy time needed for the newer suit to succeed. However, this latest ruling suggests that the court could expand the impact of its decision to affect all voters who may want to update their address and registration online ahead of the November general elections.

Elections

● Mississippi: Republican legislators in a state House committee sided with Democrats to unanimously recommend to the full House not to overturn an election where Democrat Hester Jackson-McCray defeated GOP state Rep. Ashley Henley by 14 votes. Henley had, without evidence, alleged voting improprieties and urged her colleagues to overturn the election results simply because she was unhappy with the results.

Democrats feared Mississippi Republicans would heed Henley's request because they did something very similar after the 2015 elections. In that instance, Democratic state Rep. Bo Eaton and GOP challenger Mark Tullos had tied, and pursuant to the established procedures for such situations, a drawing of lots took place that saw Eaton prevail. But Republicans in the legislature simply overturned that defeat thanks to their gerrymandered state House majority. A federal court rejected a lawsuit by Eaton, saying it lacked jurisdiction.

The recent committee vote doesn't officially settle the matter, but the GOP-majority House appears unlikely to reverse course. If Jackson-McCray's victory is validated, she would be the first African American elected to the legislature in suburban DeSoto County since at least Reconstruction and possibly the first ever.

Ballot Measures

● Michigan: Michigan's state Court of Appeals has upheld a lower court ruling that struck down most of the restrictions Republicans had imposed on the ballot initiative process in a 2018 lame-duck session after voters had approved ballot measures to reform redistricting and expand voting rights in that year's elections.

One provision the court invalidated would have required people gathering ballot petition signatures to disclose in an affidavit and on the petition if they were paid or volunteers.

Another provision that was also struck down would have prevented any group seeking to get on the ballot from gathering more than 15% of petition signatures from any of the state's 14 congressional districts. But because Republicans gerrymandered the map—emails obtained in a federal lawsuit exposed how one GOP staffer bragged about being able to "cram ALL of the Dem garbage" in populous southeastern Michigan into only four districts—the law would have made it disproportionately harder to put progressive measures on the ballot than conservative ones.

Republican legislative leaders said they are still considering whether to appeal to the state Supreme Court, where Republicans hold a 4-3 majority. However, Republican Justice Elizabeth Clement has broken with her fellow conservatives on high-profile issues such as allowing the redistricting reform measure to appear on the ballot.

Democratic National Committee chair Tom Perez speaks before the Democratic Presidential Debate at Otterbein University on October 15, 2019 in Westerville, Ohio. | Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

Candidates who have argued for rule changes that would have increased the debate stages’ diversity aren’t for the new rules.

After resisting calls to amend its rules to give more candidates the opportunity to appear on its debate stages, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has announced it will relax its debate criteria after all.

Previously, the DNC required candidates reach a certain threshold in polling and receive contributions from a certain number of individual campaign donors to receive a debate invitation.

Friday, it was announced candidates will no longer need to meet any donor requirements. Instead, to qualify for February 19’s debate in Las Vegas, Nevada, candidates must either: hit 10 percent in four qualifying national polls, 12 percent in two Nevada or South Carolina polls taken by a qualifying pollster, or earn at least one delegate in either Iowa or New Hampshire.

The new rules would seem to benefit former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has refused to accept any donations at all — and who recently received 10 percent support in a national Fox News poll on the strength of a massive nationwide television ad buy. He is not campaigning in any of the first four primary or caucus states, and would have until February 18th to meet the polling requirement for the Nevada debate.

The fact that it is Bloomberg who appears to have the most to gain from the changes has kicked off fresh criticisms that the party seems to be favoring certain candidates over others.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’s campaign had this very complaint in 2016, when it argued the party rigged the primary process in favor of Hillary Clinton. And his campaign was quick to renew its criticism following the rules change.

“To now change the rules in the middle of the game to accommodate Mike Bloomberg, who is trying to buy his way into the Democratic nomination, is wrong,” Jeff Weaver, a senior adviser to Sanders, told the New York Times. “That’s the definition of a rigged system.”

Entrepreneur Andrew Yang — who has advocated for relaxing the requirements before, albeit to encourage diversity on the debate stage — made and even more pointed critique.

Yang accused the party of not only tailoring the debate criteria to include the billionaire, but suggested Bloomberg has tried to avoid the scrutiny debates can bring. “The truth is I don’t think Mike particularly wants to debate,” he said in a tweet late Friday.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren responded to the rule change by highlighting her campaign’s focus on fighting corruption and inequality.

“The DNC didn’t change the rules to ensure good, diverse candidates could remain on the debate stage,” she tweeted. “They shouldn’t change the rules to let a billionaire on. Billionaires shouldn’t be allowed to play by different rules—on the debate stage, in our democracy, or in our government.”

And former Vice President Joe Biden expressed confusion and consternation about the new rules, quipping that Bloomberg isn’t campaigning in the state, which would seem to make any potential appearance on the debate stage useless — at least in the short term.

Candidates have asked for rule changes before, to no avail

As Warren’s statement alluded to, the DNC’s debate rules have been criticized before. Nine candidates protested the DNC rules in a letter to party leadership in December, complaining that the requirements were unfairly hurting candidates of color like Sen. Cory Booker and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Julián Castro, both of whom have now ended their candidacies.

At the time, the party required candidates to receive at least 4 percent support in four DNC-approved polls, and have at least 200,000 individual campaign donors.

Castro, Booker, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, and former Gov. Deval Patrick failed to meet those requirements, making Yang the only nonwhite candidate onstage during December’s debate. In the letter, candidates asked the DNC to consider holding them to one of the two requirements, either the required polling or the individual donor threshold, but not both, opening the stage to more candidates.

But party officials declined to make the changes.

“The DNC will not change the threshold for any one candidate and will not revert back to two consecutive nights with more than a dozen candidates. Our qualification criteria is extremely low and reflects where we are in the race,” the DNC said in a December statement to Politico.

Yang and his supporters kept pressure on the DNC following that debate, asking it to commission more polls, arguing that having more data could open new paths to the stage for diverse candidates. Again, the DNC refused, and January’s debate was the first to feature no candidates of color.

Party officials have argued that the fact the field has gone from being the most diverse in history to being mostly white is not their fault. DNC chairman Tom Perez suggested in December that candidates should simply work harder to impress voters, for instance.

“I’m not doing the polling,” Perez told the New York Times. “I’m a huge fan of Cory Booker. I think the world of him. I worked with him dating back to when he was mayor. And if voters are disappointed that he hasn’t qualified, then when they answer the phone, they need to express their preference for Cory Booker.”

Perez did tell the Times he would be open to tweaking the requirements ahead of the debates in February, March, and April. But now that they have been changed, most of his party’s candidates still aren’t happy.

They argue that the fact the new requirements seem to favor Bloomberg, a man who has spent more than $188 million of his roughly $60 billion fortune on his campaign, is unfair and that the rules now reward using financial might to affect the results.

Obviously money is needed in every campaign — Sanders’s recent rising fortunes in the polls have been attributed by some to his spending $50 million in the fourth quarter of 2019. But those funds were raised by donors — no other candidate is as independently wealthy as Bloomberg, not even billionaire Tom Steyer. This has many campaigns now arguing that if the DNC wanted to change the rules, it should have done so in a manner that didn't appear to help a campaign that has the advantage of having a nearly unlimited budget.

And it also appears to have at least one cash-strapped former campaign lamenting the fact the old rules required its leaders to scrap ideas for voter persuasion investments in order to buy email lists. All candidates have used the lists — and other costly methods, like buying Facebook ads — to raise the money needed to meet the old donor requirements.

When progressive strategist Tim Tagaris asked how the new rule would have changed things for Booker or Castro, members of Booker’s campaign chimed in, with former deputy campaign director Jenna Lowenstein recalling the trade-offs required when the DNC raised its individual donor threshold from 65,000 to 130,000.

“Oh, do you mean the day I literally Control+A+ Deleted a plan for a whole entire early game, early state persuasion strategy and used the money to buy email addresses instead? I don’t remember it. Blacked it out,” she tweeted.

As Seth Masket has explained for Vox, the detailed rules around the debates were an effort by the DNC to avoid criticisms it faced in 2016 about favoring one candidate over another. Instead, they have inspired a fresh slate of concerns. Unlike in 2016, when critiques focused on superdelegates, this debate is more about the party’s identity and what it stands for. And that is a conversation likely to continue well past the next debates.

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After a parliamentary inquiry from Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer to Chief Justice John Roberts as to whether he was aware that presiding judge Salmon Chase broke ties in the impeachment trial of Andrew Johnson, and Roberts said yes he was but he wasn't going to be doing that, the Senate Republicans killed the last-ditch efforts by Democrats to stop this cover-up of an impeachment trial.

The first was an amendment to subpoena Mick Mulvaney, John Bolton, Michael Duffey and Robert Blair as well as documents from White House, OMB and the Defense and State Departments, the Senate Republicans voted to table it unanimously and it failed 53-47. On the second amendment, to subpoena John Bolton, Republicans Susan Collins and Mitt Romney voted with Democrats, but it was still killed, 51-49. The third amendment was to both subpoena Bolton and further that he be deposed in a session presided over by Roberts, then requiring one day for live testimony before the Senate within the next five days. Again Collins and Romney voted with Democrats, but this amendment was also killed 51-49. The final amendment was Sen. Chris Van Hollen's amendment to require that Roberts rule on motions to subpoena witnesses and documents, and to rule on any assertions from Trump of privilege. Chief Snowflake Roberts was defended unanimously by Republicans, and they killed that one 53-47. The underlying resolution governing the remainder of the trial passed again on a party-line vote of 53-47.

We have to end their stranglehold on the republic. Please give $1 to our nominee fund to help Democrats and end McConnell's career as majority leader.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell arrives at the US Capitol as the Senate impeachment trial of President Trump continues on January 31, 2020, in Washington, DC.  | Mario Tama/Getty Images

The witness vote was the last major obstacle for Republicans seeking a speedy trial.

The Senate just guaranteed that President Donald Trump’s impeachment trial will be the first in US history that won’t have witnesses.

In a 51-49 vote, senators voted Friday against considering more witnesses and documents as part of the impeachment proceedings, effectively clearing the path for the president’s acquittal. Republican Sens. Mitt Romney (UT) and Susan Collins (ME) joined with the 47-member Democratic caucus to support additional testimony, while other closely watched swing senators Lamar Alexander (TN) and Lisa Murkowski (AK) stuck with the Republican conference.

Alexander offered a striking rationale for his vote: In a statement he shared on Thursday, he emphasized that he believed the charge that the president demanded a quid pro quo of Ukraine was true. Even so, he concluded that Trump’s actions didn’t reach the level of an impeachable offense.

“It was inappropriate for the president to ask a foreign leader to investigate his political opponent and to withhold United States aid to encourage that investigation,” Alexander wrote.

Murkowski announced her decision in a sharply worded statement that also signaled her desire to avoid a tie vote. She emphasized that it would not be possible to hold a “fair trial” in the Senate, while also dinging the House for purportedly sending articles that are “rushed and flawed.”

“I don’t believe the continuation of this process will change anything. It is sad for me to admit that, as an institution, the Congress has failed,” she said.

While there’s strong public support for calling more witnesses — including from 49 percent of Republican voters, according to a CNN poll — Republicans remain wary of breaking with the president. Although some have cited the legal complications around the witness issue, and how sorting it out could extend the trial, the broader reason for opposing witnesses has always been driven by a reluctance to defy Trump.

The vote on witnesses was one of the last major obstacles for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who has long been eyeing a swift acquittal. The Senate is now poised to vote on the two articles of impeachment next Wednesday.

The fight over witnesses, briefly explained

The debate over calling more witnesses has been an ongoing undercurrent of the impeachment trial. House Democrats had delayed sending over the articles of impeachment because they weren’t sure how the Senate would treat the witness issue, and Democrats wound up forcing a series of votes on the topic from the get-go.

The conflict became even more salient after Bolton said he’d comply with a Senate subpoena — and reportedly confirmed the quid pro quo Trump demanded in his book manuscript.

This past week, interest in witnesses, particularly Bolton, seemed like it was growing. At one point, Romney even posited that it was “increasingly likely” there would be enough Senate Republican votes to support this motion.

Democrats have pushed for witness testimony from individuals with firsthand knowledge about Trump’s condition of Ukraine aid on political investigations, because they argue that these people could provide details about his wrongdoing and fill in gaps in the evidence. Republicans had said that there was no one who had been told directly by Trump about the alleged quid pro quo, an assertion that Bolton’s argument rebuts.

One of Trump’s defense attorneys, Alan Dershowitz, however, sought to neutralize these calls by arguing that further confirmation of this quid pro quo, which Bolton was expected to provide, simply wouldn’t matter. “Nothing in the Bolton revelations, even if true, would rise to the level of an abuse of power or an impeachable offense,” he said in his remarks.

For some lawmakers, this argument may have offered just enough cover to vote against witnesses.

The trial will go until next week

In their perfect world, Republicans would have voted on Trump’s acquittal as early as Friday since they’d like to wrap things up as quickly as possible.

Democrats, however, had threatened to use procedural tactics, including several amendments to a resolution laying out next steps, to extend the length of the trial.

By proposing amendments on Friday, Democrats were able to force votes on different subjects in the same way they did last week, when they pushed every senator to vote on subpoenas for documents from the White House and other government agencies. At the time, those votes kept senators in the chamber until almost 2 am.

As a compromise between the two parties, the trial will be on a break this weekend, and lawmakers will return for final closing arguments on Monday.

After the prosecution and defense close out their cases, Senators will have an opportunity to make floor speeches about the trial on Tuesday, with a final vote on Trump’s conviction or acquittal scheduled for Wednesday after the State of the Union has already taken place.

Indicted Rudy Giuliani associate Lev Parnas has already publicly documented how deeply enmeshed he was in Donald Trump's world and now, in a letter sent by his lawyer to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Friday, he is outlining exactly what he would testify to if given the opportunity. Spoiler alert: It would be absolutely disastrous for Trump.

If allowed to testify, the letter asserts that Parnas would detail Trump's entire Ukraine conspiracy front to back, with receipts, while implicating multiple high-level Trump officials in the process. "If Lev Parnas was called as a witness, he would provide testimony based upon personal knowledge, corroborated by physical evidence including text messages, phone records, documentary evidence, and travel records, which is directly relevant to the President's impeachment inquiry," writes Parnas attorney Joseph Bondy.

Bondy says Parnas will reveal the "genesis" of the relationship between Trump and Rudy Giuliani along with all the GOP operatives who assisted in the effort to remove Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch and gather "dirt" on the Bidens. 

"Those holding various roles in the plot included GOP Super PAC America First, President Trump, Vice President Pence, former Energy Secretary Rick Perry, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Attorney General Bill Barr, Senator Lindsey Graham, Congressman Devin Nunes, Nunes's Staffer Derek Harvey, Journalist John Solomon, Attorneys Joe diGenova and Victoria Toensing, Mr. Giuliani, and others," Bondy writes. Yowzer. That's quite a list. Sen. Graham, eh? That would sure explain a lot. 

Bondy promises that Parnas will illuminate the "thousands of micro-steps" he took to lay the groundwork for the plan, including multiple trips to Ukraine in order to meet with top Ukrainian officials and "directly convey the President's 'quid pro quo.'"

In short, Parnas is offering to give congressional investigators a treasure trove of information. Sure, Parnas comes to the table with a tarnished reputation. But he has the exact profile of a witness that prosecutors use to build criminal cases all the time. Even better, he appears to have documented nearly everything and has somehow managed to finally get control of all his materials and evidence. 

As former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance tweeted, "If his testimony is corroborated by John Bolton, something that his lawyer’s letter suggests but that we won’t know for certain unless they both testify, then Trump is in deep trouble, even if the Senate whitewashes this."

Everyone was indeed in the loop.