THE ESTABLISHMENT WON, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE LOST: That’s The Lid’s elegant summary of the second Trump impeachment. Few words, many implications.

GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED ON WHERE WE’RE HEADED: Ben Weingarten explains in The Federalist that, while President Donald Trump is the Left’s immediate target, the ultimate targets are anybody who opposes the Left:

“Trump has personified this dissent, but the effort to delegitimize, de-platform, and ultimately destroy him and anyone around him is merely the opening scene of the ‘Godfather’-like settling of scores with all who threaten the ruling class’s power and privilege. This effort will directly harm not just the thousands of peaceful patriots who had descended on Washington D.C., and their tens of millions of like-minded neighbors across the country, but all Americans.”

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY? An excellent primer for pro-lifers on dealing with the three major claims of pro-abortionists.

WERE THOSE PIPEBOMBS MEANT AS DIVERSIONS? Catherine Herridge, formerly of Fox News and more recently with CBS News, reports investigators think those pipebombs found at the RNC and DNC on January 6 may have been intended to divert law enforcement away from the Capitol itself at a crucial moment. That would also suggest somebody with a command and control structure for the planned riot.

Herridge also notes that the crucial window for understanding the timeline of January 6 events is between 12:45 and 1:15, before President Donald Trump finished his speech to the gathered protestors. If that is true, and there are abundant reasons to think it is, then it’s difficult to ascribe to Trump responsibility for inciting the riot.

Law enforcement documents obtained by CBS News reveal pipe bombs were planted at both the Democratic and Republican National Committee headquarters before the U.S. Capitol. @CBS_Herridge reports on the questions remaining about the intent and coordination of the bombs pic.twitter.com/urvl2qRfGB

— CBS News (@CBSNews) January 13, 2021

DEATH PENALTY ON VIRGINIA’S GREEN MILE: Hans Bader predicts Virginia Democrats will go after life sentences once they do away with the death penalty. And then after they abolish life sentences, they will abolish ….

DOES JAN. 6 TIMELINE VINDICATE TRUMP? Jeff Dunetz takes a look at the analysis of the timeline of events on Capitol Hill in the early stages of the riot and the speech delivered by President Donald Trump to a huge crowd of protestors.

If the timeline plotted by Raheem Kassam and quoted by Dunetz is accurate, then the drive either to impeach Trump (Democrats in Congress) or censure him (Republicans in Congress) for inciting the riot are going to be tough to sustain in any context other than revenge/face-saving.

CHRISTIANS AGAINST CHRISTIANS: Natasha Crain lays out three strawmen being used by anti-Trumper Christians to libel fellow believers who supported President Donald Trump.

CERTAIN EVANGELICAL ‘MEN WITHOUT CHESTS’ GET A WORD POUNDING: There’s just no other way to describe Larry Alex Taunton’s fine deconstruction in the American Spectator of social justice evangelicals Tim Keller, John and Barnabas Piper and others. Here’s a small sample:

“This is because evangelicals in the English-speaking world have confused Christ’s command to love others with being civil as if that were an attribute of God. (It isn’t.) As a consequence, a superficial, self-righteous, good-for-nothing pietism that prefers tone to truth and style to substance has displaced authentic Christianity in many of the roughly four hundred thousand churches in America. This doctrinal malpractice has given us a generation of men, Christian and otherwise, who are what Lewis called ‘men without chests.’”

NEVER-TRUMPER CHRISTIANS GET WHAT THEY VOTED FOR: Focus on the Family chief Jim Daly asks some uncomfortable questions of those who refused to vote for Trump.

REALITY OF TWITTER: The Federalist’s David Marcus puts it about as succinctly as it can be said:

“For all its talk about safety, community, and the health of discourse, we see today that Twitter acts in favor of one interest and one interest alone: its own, even when it means destabilizing the American people. On Friday, the company permanently banned Trump from its platform and began a purge of conservative voices.

“They claim this is needed to protect America from a coup. That is a farcical lie. They did it because their political enemies such as Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley are now out of power, and they mean to keep it way.”

And like Trump said, he’s just standing in the way of the Left’s actual targets, us.

LEFT’S RIOT HYPOCRISY EXPLAINED: Andy Ngo knows Antifa up close and personal as few, if any, other Americans do.

DON’T THINK PROGDEMS AREN’T BEHIND TECH GIANT CENSORSHIP: Hans Bader points to “hate speech” as the enabling concept behind the unprecedented censorship unleashed by Twitter, Facebook, Google and Amazon. My view is nobody should be surprised when it intensifies after His Fraudulency is sworn-in as President.

HERE COMES PERSECUTION: The Left is moving into position to suppress all dissident voices.

PENCE ISSUE IS A DISTRACTION FROM THE REAL ISSUE OF DOES CONGRESS HAVE A BACKBONE: Lots of snarky back and forth among commenters here on Instapundit and elsewhere in the Right media in recent days regarding whether Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to exclude Electoral College votes for Biden in Wednesday’s Joint Session of Congress.

I suggest to folks on both sides of that issue that the more fundamental question is whether Congress has the authority to set aside a state’s Electoral College votes. In my view, there are two key aspects of the question:

First, is there sufficient evidence of fraud in states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and others to justify the decisions of Republican senators Ted Cruz of Texas and Josh Hawley of Missouri to register objections to the acceptance of their Electoral College votes? I haven’t had the opportunity to review all of the evidence for all of the allegations, but, as explained, for example, in this “American Thought Leaders” interview on The Epoch Times with the Data Integrity Group, the evidence of vote manipulation in multiple states is substantial and cries out for a critical investigation.

Second, Congress has an absolute right to set aside the Electoral College votes, according to President Abraham Lincoln, who told Congress on February 9, 1865, that “the two Houses of Congress, convened under the twelfth article of the Constitution, have complete power to exclude from counting all electoral votes deemed by them to be illegal, and it is not competent for the Executive to defeat or obstruct that power by a veto …”

The process seen in Wednesday’s Joint Session, interrupted as it was by the riot around and within the Capitol, was conducted as prescribed in the Constitution. Each properly framed and submitted objection to the acceptance of a state’s certified Electoral College votes gets two hours of debate in the Senate and the House, at the end of which members of both chambers vote on whether to accept or reject the objection.

Congress considered objections in 1969 (the “faithless elector” of North Carolina) and 2005 (Democrat objection to awarding Ohio’s votes to President George W. Bush) under this process and rejected the propositions. But Congress could have accepted the objections, which would have left Electoral College votes on the floor.

This reality should not surprise anybody who is familiar with the manner in which the Founders wrote the Constitution as a “legislative supremacy” document. So long as the Senate and House are of one will, Congress has, as Willmoore Kendal and George Carey wrote, “all of the ultimate weapons in any showdown with either of the other two branches.”

Congress doesn’t like a program or action favored by the President? Congress can defund it. To cite but two examples: Congress doesn’t like how the Supreme Court is ruling? Congress can change the composition of the Court. If Congress has the will, the Founders gave it the power to do pretty much as it pleases so long as it respects the Bill of Rights.

Bottom Line: There is substantial evidence that Congress could have relied upon, had it chosen to do so, in deciding to exclude the Electoral College votes of any of the challenged states Wednesday and thereby made either Joe Biden or Donald Trump our next Chief Executive.

Had I been a senator or representative Wednesday, I would have voted to uphold the challenges presented for Arizona and Pennsylvania (as well as those planned prior to the riot for Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nevada), on the basis of the Data Integrity Group’s statistical analysis, not because doing so would have given Trump another four years in office, but because somebody ought to go to jail after pulling off what is likely the biggest election theft in American history.

Either we have honest elections or we don’t.

UPDATE: Thanks to reader CptNerd for this link to much easier to read version of the full Lincoln quote. I used the Congressional Globe link because the whole page makes interesting, though difficult to decipher in places, reading.

WHY THIS TRUMP SUPPORTER BACKS PENCE: The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz explains his view that Vice President Mike Pence was right on the issue of his authority to accept or reject states’ electoral votes.

POLITICO REPORTS BIDEN, DEMS EXPECT GEORGIA LOSS TODAY: If Politico is reporting it on election day, the Dems must know something.

CHINA CENSORS JOURNALISTS, SO DOES THE WEST: Kurt Mahlburg is an Aussie journalist, book author and Christian blogger who details in this piece for the Canberra Declaration just how deep mainstream media censorship of its own dissenting voices has become in recent years. A bit lengthy but well-worth the reading time.

COMPARE 2021 CLEAVER OPENING PRAYER WITH 1774 FIRST CONTINENTAL CONGRESS: Unfortunately, there is no video, but here’s the full text. It’s also in Victory Girls post Sarah linked (Love the vintage photos and artwork). And if you are really into this kind of thing, here’s the House Chaplin’s prayer archive. Somebody ought to do a study.

A TRUMP MALPRACTICE SUIT AGAINST LIN WOOD? This is getting weirder by the day.

EVERYTHING YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT JANUARY 6: Constitutional lawyer Rick Green describes in layman’s terms the essential issues at stake come Wednesday when the Senate and House meet in a joint session to count electoral votes for president.

A HAPPY NEW YEAR CHALLENGE: Thank God, it’s 2021 and 2020 is now behind us. Speaking of new beginnings, HillFaith has a New Year’s Challenge about the first beginning. Are you up for it?

HOUSING ACTIVISTS CHECK IN, REFUSE TO LEAVE OR PAY: Jeff Dunetz and The Lid report they paid for 16 rooms the first night, which was Christmas Eve, then refused to leave. They are still in the Fife, Washington, Travelodge, and they aren’t paying for the rooms or damages. The activists are with the Tacoma Housing Now group and are demanding that local government pay all of their expenses.

BIDEN’S ECONOMICS WILL CAUSE THE COMING ‘DARK WINTER,’ NOT COVID: As is so frequently the case these days, the Issues & Insights gang puts it best.

“Apparently it never occurred to Biden and his handlers that government intervention, not the virus, caused 2020’s downturn. Nor have they even begun to understand that Democrats’ economic policies, filled with steep, punitive taxes, and impossible-to-jump regulatory hurdles, are a slow-motion march of the economic lockdowns that almost instantly paralyzed the economy this year.”

WILL MCCARTHY, HOUSE GOP GO FOR A COALITION TO OUST PELOSI? There are 10 Democrats in the 117th Congress that convenes next week who voted against Nancy Pelosi for Speaker of the House in the 116th Congress.

With Republicans picking up the same number of seats in the new Congress, nominating one of those 10 Democrats as part of a coalition could end the Pelosi era. But are Republicans making the necessary moves to assemble such a coalition? Not holding my breath.

ASSEMBLY LINE SWALWELLS: A finely thought-provoking contemplation by UncoverDC’s Richard Gagnier on G2 honeypots, small-time Mafia set-ups and the frailty of the human condition.