[guest post by JVW]

The House Democrat Caucus today nominated Nancy Pelosi (D – eSalon) to serve another term as Speaker of the House. She faced no opposition for the post and her top two lieutenants, Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip James Clyburn, were also returned to their leadership positions. Rep. Pelosi now must win election to the Speaker’s chair when the entire House convenes in January. Democrats are expected to hold a margin of somewhere between eleven and twenty-one seats, depending upon how final recounts come out, and thus far only one Democrat member, Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, has announced that she will not vote for Rep. Pelosi.

This result comes as no surprise to me, even though four years ago I was amazed that Democrats were returning to leadership positions the exact same crew that had lost the House majority in 2010. In a way, I think this is probably the smartest move the Dems could make. If it is indeed true that Aunt Nancy has pledged that this will be her final term in party leadership, it makes a lot of sense to me to let her deal with a narrow House majority, a Senate controlled (God willing!) by the other party, and a President who — to put it mildly — might be highly susceptible to the pleadings of whomever has his ear at any given moment. Better to have an experienced hand on her last hurrah dealing with this nonsense then hand the Speaker’s gavel over to some novice, let alone run the risk of an intra-party donnybrook right now which could conceivably end up electing a Republican Speaker.

But it sure is going to be fun to watch the Dems jockeying to see who replaces her in two years. I can’t see us in 2022 greeting 83-year-old Speaker Steny Hoyer or 82-year-old Speaker Jim Clyburn should the Dems maintain their majority, so get ready for a civil war on the donkey side.

– JVW

NBC News summarizes the shameful events of the past day:

Consider the last 24 hours:

• The two Republican members of Wayne County’s canvassing board voted against certifying its election results before reversing course, and Trump praised the action: “Wow! Michigan just refused to certify the election results! Having courage is a beautiful thing. The USA stands proud!”

• In Nevada — a state Trump lost by 2.4 percentage points — the president’s campaign team filed a lawsuit asking a judge to either declare Trump the winner or to reject the state’s election results.

• In Pennsylvania — which Biden won by more than 82,000 votes — Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani was in court asking a judge to overturn the state’s results. (“At bottom, you’re asking this court to invalidate some 6.8 million votes thereby disenfranchising every single voter in the commonwealth,” the judge said.)

• And to top it off, the president on Tuesday fired the federal government’s head of cybersecurity, who had debunked many of the conspiracy theories that Trump’s team had been promoting.

Dana highlighted that last bit of outrageous retaliation here.

Meanwhile, Trump superfans — the same people who screamed about a “coup” when law enforcement investigated evidence of numerous weird connections between Trump’s campaign and Russia — seem just fine with these attempts to render meaningless the actual verdict of voters.

It’s simply evidence that Trump is a would-be strongman, and a surprisingly large percentage of his supporters would like him to be dictator — and don’t care in the slightest about the will of the actual voters or our constitutional structure.

It’s not going to work. But the fact that so many people want it to work is frightening and scandalous.