KTRK: “An effort to have Texans vote on whether they want to secede from the United States is gaining the support of at least one state lawmaker. Rep. Kyle Biedermann of Fredricksburg said he plans to file a bill that calls for a referendum on the effort to leave the U.S. ‘The federal government is out of control and does not represent the values of Texans,’ Biedermann said in a statement. ‘That is why I am committing to file legislation this session that will allow a referendum to give Texans a vote for the State of Texas to reassert its status as an independent nation.'”

“The effort has been championed by the Texas Nationalist Movement, an organization headed by Daniel Miller, who has been promoting the idea of secession for 20 years. ‘Texans are tired of living under 180,000 pages of federal laws, rules, and regulations administered by 440 separate agencies and 2.5 million unelected bureaucrats,’ Miller said Wednesday. ‘If all federal laws, rules, and regulations were printed out and stacked, it would be taller than the San Jacinto Monument.’ The proposed bill would join hundreds of others filed ahead of the 87th Texas Legislature, which is scheduled to convene in January. Despite the idea, as a practical matter and matter of law, secession isn’t an option in the nation. Historical and legal precedents make it clear that Texas could not pull off a Texit – at least not legally. ‘The legality of seceding is problematic,’ Eric McDaniel, associate professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, said to the Texas Tribune in 2016. ‘The Civil War played a very big role in establishing the power of the federal government and cementing that the federal government has the final say in these issues.'”

“President-elect Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden revealed Wednesday that he is under investigation by the top federal prosecutor in Delaware for his taxes. The probe was disclosed five days before Joe Biden is expected to be formally selected as the next president by the Electoral College.”

“Hunter Biden said in a statement, ‘I learned yesterday for the first time that the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Delaware advised my legal counsel, also yesterday, that they are investigating my tax affairs… I take this matter very seriously but I am confident that a professional and objective review of these matters will demonstrate that I handled my affairs legally and appropriately, including with the benefit of professional tax advisors,’ Hunter Biden said” – CNBC.

All 50 States and the District of Columbia have now certified their election results, and as expected, the results show Democratic President-elect Joe Biden has secured 306 Electoral College votes and will be the 46th President of the United States, the New York Times reports.

In what lame duck president Donald Trump described in 2016 as a “landslide” in the Electoral College, Biden won 306 electoral votes to just 232 for Trump.

Seventeen states have filed amicus briefs with the Supreme Court in support of the lawsuit brought by the State of Texas to overturn the election results in key battleground states that lame duck president Donald Trump lost in the November election, according to Reuters reporter Brian Heath.

Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia filed to support the efforts of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to disenfranchise voters from four states:  Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The Republican Governors Association has elected Arizona Governor Doug Ducey its new chair and Kim Reynolds of Iowa its vice chair.

“Governor Doug Ducey’s exemplary leadership in the great State of Arizona has prepared him well to assume the role of Chairman of the RGA, and I look forward to his accomplishments on behalf of our nation’s Republican Governors,” said outgoing RGA Chair Governor Greg Abbott in a statement. “Following the RGA’s widespread success in the 2020 election, Republican Governors can count on Governor Ducey to maintain the organization’s effectiveness and help expand their majority even further.”

Claiming that Facebook has undertaken monopolistic and anti-competitive actions designed to suppress any nascent business rival, the Federal Trade Commission has sued Facebook in federal court to break up the social media giant.

The FTC lawsuit claims that Facebook’s acquisition of social media platform Instagram and messaging app WhatsApp were efforts by Facebook to consolidate power in the social media industry in violation of the anti-trust Sherman Act.

The lawsuit seeks the remedy of forcing Facebook to divest itself of Instagram and WhatsApp as well as being “permanently enjoined from imposing anticompetitive conditions on access to APIs and data.”

Attorneys General from 46 states, the District of Columbia and Guam have filed a separate antitrust lawsuit over Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp, according to USA Today.

“For nearly a decade, Facebook has used its dominance and monopoly power to crush smaller rivals and snuff out competition, all at the expense of everyday users,” said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement.

From a court filing by the Federal Trade Commission.

[Updated at 3:41 p.m. ET to include information about the lawsuit filed by the states’ attorneys general.]

“U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, announced the committee has scheduled a hearing on Wednesday, December 16, titled ‘Examining Irregularities in the 2020 Election’ and released the following statement:
‘Today I gave notice for a hearing for next Wednesday titled ‘Examining Irregularities in the 2020 election.’ I am mindful that many of the issues that have been raised have been, and will continue to be, appropriately resolved in the courts. But the fact remains that a large percentage of the American public does not view the 2020 election result as legitimate because of apparent irregularities that have not been fully examined. That is not a sustainable state of affairs for our country. The only way to resolve suspicions is with full transparency and public awareness. That will be the goal of the hearing'” – Media advisory notice to congressional pool from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee.

From The Bulwark: “My Call With Ron Johnson: He Knows Biden Won But Won’t Admit It” written by Mark Becker, former chairman of the Brown County, Wisconsin Republican Party. “Yes, Donald Trump is an asshole” Becker quotes Johnson as admitting during said call.

The Senate Finance and House Foreign Affairs Committees have begun an investigation into Jared Kushner’s family’s sudden windfall that helped the Kushner family meet a $1.2 billion payment due on their property at 666 Fifth Avenue in New York City, the Financial Times reports.

A large sum of money was secured by Brookfield Asset Management from Qatari interests as the Trump Administration put pressure on the Qatari government and backed a Saudi blockade of the nation.

Kushner, married to outgoing president’s Donald Trump’s favorite child and a senior advisor to the president, was deeply involved in negotiations with Middle Eastern leaders at the time, and members of Congress are looking into the possibility that US foreign policy was shaped by Kushner’s desire to secure funds to bail out his family business. 

KDKA: “Gov. Tom Wolf has tested positive for coronavirus. He released a statement Wednesday: ‘During a routine test yesterday, I tested positive for COVID-19. I have no symptoms and am feeling well. I am following CDC and Department of Health guidelines. Frances has been tested and, as we await the result, is quarantining at home with me. I am continuing to serve the commonwealth and performing all of my duties remotely, as many are doing during the pandemic.'”

Philadelphia Inquirer: “A Pennsylvania appellate court on Wednesday denied the latest in a string of legal challenges seeking to roll back certification of the election results, ending the last active court battle in the state over the outcome of the race. In a four-page opinion, Commonwealth Court President Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt dismissed the suit brought by a group of nine GOP state lawmakers, led by Rep Daryl Metcalfe, saying they had waited too long to file their challenge.”

“They ‘are unable to demonstrate a clear right to relief or likelihood of prevailing on the merits because their underlying action … is really an improper and untimely election contest,’ she wrote. Metcalfe’s suit, filed Friday, followed a string of other recent lawsuits filed by President Donald Trump’s allies in the GOP, even as Trump himself appears to have abandoned his campaign’s efforts to bludgeon its way to victory through the courts. The ruling from Leavitt, a Republican, came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court declined a request from U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, a Republican also from Butler County, to void the state’s certified results, which declared President-elect Joe Biden the winner in Pennsylvania by some 81,000 votes. Metcalfe’s suit in state court sought a similar goal. But unlike Kelly, who had argued that the law that widely expanded voting by mail in the state was unconstitutional, Metcalfe zeroed in on decisions by elections administrators and the state’s Supreme Court that which he called ‘so severely flawed it is impossible to certify the accuracy of the purported results.'”

At 10:00 P.M. on Election Evening, we were at 97% win with the so-called “bookies”.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2020

Fourteen groups designated as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Anti-Defamation League received funds totally $4.3 million from the Paycheck Protection Program coronavirus relief funds, according to a report by NBC News.

The PPP funds were designated to help small businesses maintain employee salaries during the coronavirus pandemic, although it is unclear how many employees some of these organizations have.

The data show that the American Family Association, a group that claims the United States is undertaking a “homosexual agenda” and lobbying against LGBT rights, received $1.39 million, and the New Century Foundation, which advocates to “keep America white” received $51,600.

“Millions of voters, including the core group of Trump supporters – whites without college degrees – face bleak futures, pushed further down the ladder by meritocratic competition that rewards what they don’t have: higher education and high scores on standardized tests. Jockeying for place in a merciless meritocracy feeds into the status wars that are presently poisoning the country, even as exacerbated levels of competition are, theoretically, an indispensable component of contemporary geopolitical and economic reality.”

“Voters in the bottom half of the income distribution face a level of hypercompetition that has, in turn, served to elevate politicized status anxiety in a world where social and economic mobility has, for many, ground to a halt: 90 percent of the age cohort born in the 1940s looked forward to a better standard of living than their parents’, compared with 50 percent for those born since 1980. Even worse, those in the lower status ranks suffer the most lethal consequences of the current pandemic. These forces in their totality suggest that Joe Biden faces the toughest challenge of his career in attempting to fulfill his pledge to the electorate: ‘We can restore the defining American promise, that no matter where you start in life, there’s nothing you can’t achieve. And, in doing so, we can restore the soul of our nation.’ Trump has capitalized on the failures of this American promise. Now we have to hope that Biden can deliver” – New York Times.

The Third First Lady asked a volunteer member of her staff to check with the Office of Management and Budget to see if there was any budget or allowances for former First Ladies, even though the First Lady does not get any salary while her husband is in office, CNN reports.

As she spent the past weeks tagging items in the White House to go into storage, to the Trump’s New York apartment or to Mar-a-Lago, Melania Trump has told those close to her that she “just wants to go home” and leave the Washington political scene.  There was no specifics about what she considers home, and whether she considers “home” to include her husband.

Former First Ladies do not get any allowances or budgets to undertake enterprises once they leave the White House.  The only funds available to them is a $20,000 annual allowance provided after her husband dies.

CBS 46: “Police are on the scene of a standoff at a synagogue in northeast Atlanta and a busy intersection is shut down as a result. DeKalb County Police say the incident involves a person inside a synagogue near the area of Lavista Road and Carolyn Drive. The intersection is currently shut down as police attempt to take that individual into custody. Commuters are being asked to avoid the area, if possible. No other information is available at this time.”

UPDATE 12:33pm 12/9/20: Subsequent reporting reveals that this still-ongoing incident is not terror-related and a single individual appearing to be suffering from mental health issues is holed up alone in the building. Police report there is no danger to anyone else in the area.

Washington Post: “For the past four years, American democracy has been in firefighting mode. Our institutions, our norms and our democratic values were being torched by the president himself. Thankfully, voters doused those flames on Nov. 3 by rejecting four more years of Trumpism. The United States’ authoritarian emergency will soon be over. As we move into the next phase of repair and rebuilding, though, there’s an uncomfortable truth all Americans must now face. The problem wasn’t just President Trump. The problem was also us.”

“Every so often, history produces dangerous demagogues. When that happens, citizens are tested: Do you unite to reject a politics of fear, division and authoritarianism? Or does the country splinter, with half fighting back and the other half cheerleading as a would-be despot seeks to undermine democracy to consolidate power? Now we know the answer: America splintered. When presented with a man who saw democracy as a pesky inconvenience, a huge chunk of the American electorate didn’t just accept him. They cheered, applauded and sported his memorabilia. They embraced him not in spite of his authoritarian impulses, but because of them. To understand why this happened, we have to acknowledge a depressing reality: A substantial proportion of Americans are “authoritarian voters.” In other words, they crave the leadership of a strongman without significant checks. Moreover, their political preferences are only about outcomes, not process. If they want to ban Muslims from entering the country or to stop abortions, authoritarian voters aren’t particularly bothered if the norms of democracy are shredded, so long as they get their way.”

#OVERTURN

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2020

Wall Street Journal: “A sweeping multistate legal effort by President Trump and his supporters to override President-elect Joe Biden’s victory has reached the end of the line, with losses in courts at all levels including the U.S. Supreme Court. In the five weeks since Election Day, the Trump campaign and other Republicans have lost in court at least 35 times in six pivotal states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. In several other cases, the campaign or allies withdrew claims after filing them.”

“On Tuesday, the Supreme Court in a one-sentence order turned away a last-ditch effort by Pennsylvania Republicans to invalidate votes from the state’s vote-by-mail system enacted by the state legislature last year. No justice noted a dissent to the order, which was released on the deadline for states to complete election results before the Electoral College meets and casts its vote on Dec. 14. Trump campaign lawyers promised to push forward. ‘The only fixed day in the U.S. Constitution is the inauguration of the president on January 20,’ the Trump campaign’s legal team said. In some of the cases, judges criticized Republicans for making sweeping allegations of voting irregularities and fraud without any proof. In others, courts said they raised relatively minor claims but sought unprecedented action, such as the rejection of millions of votes.”

“YouTube will now begin to remove new content that ‘misleads people by alleging that widespread fraud or errors changed the outcome of the 2020 election.’ The company said decision comes after enough states certified results to determine Biden as President-elect” reports CNN’s Jim Sciutto.

“President Trump on Wednesday touted Texas’ suit demanding the U.S. Supreme Court block the Electoral College votes of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, calling it the ‘big one.’ ‘We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!’ Trump wrote on Twitter. Trump’s legal team has faced repeated setbacks in challenging the results of states that went for President-elect Joe Biden. Trump’s team could file an amicus brief in support of Texas’ suit. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued battleground states Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin on Tuesday to challenge their 2020 presidential election results.”

“‘These elections in other states where state law was not followed … affects my voters because these are national elections, and so if there are fraudulent things or things that affect an election and state law is not followed as is required by the Constitution it affects our state,’ Paxton told ‘Fox & Friends’ on Wednesday. ‘It affects every state.’ ‘We can’t go back and fix it, but we can say, OK, let’s transfer this to the legislature … and let them to decide the outcome of the election. That would be a valid constitutional situation,’ Paxton continued. The legal challenge seeks to invalidate the 62 Electoral College votes from those four battleground states and award Trump a second term, alleging unconstitutional changes to election rules before the vote” – Fox News.