| One way to think about the politically vulnerable period between Donald Trump's election loss and President Biden's inauguration is that there were two possible insurrections: The very public one we saw when a mass of Trump supporters swarmed the Capitol on Jan. 6, as lawmakers moved to make Biden's win official. The other being attempted behind the scenes, led by Trump himself. Congress and journalists and federal officials are investigating exactly what happened with the second insurrection. As they do, we're learning just how much pressure Trump applied to the U.S. government to try to overturn Biden's win. The latest entry: Former acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen, the top law enforcement official at the time, privately testifying to the Senate on Saturday. Rosen is a key witness in all of this, and he told senators that Trump essentially wouldn't leave him and others at the Justice Department alone with his requests that they undermine the election results. Jeffrey Rosen was Trump's acting attorney general in the final weeks of Trump's presidency. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) | "The president was persistent with his inquiries, and I would have strongly preferred that he had chosen a different focus in the last month of his presidency," Rosen said in testimony that is just getting leaked now. We also recently learned of Trump pitching the Justice Department, according to notes of someone in the room, "just say the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me [and Republicans in Congress]." Trump didn't succeed in any of that, but it seems that's only because these Justice Department officials told the president "no" to his face. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) heard Rosen's testimony, and he told my colleagues that just a few days before Jan. 6, "another plot was being worked to try to overturn the election using the name and reputation of the Department of Justice." The Fix's Aaron Blake has a running timeline of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It's getting lengthier by the day. Why Democrats are stressing about the new census data For the first time pretty much ever in U.S. history, White people are declining as a portion of the nation's population. That's according to the 2020 Census, which was released Thursday. (The government takes a census of its population once every decade.) That's interesting in and of itself. Another thing to know about the census data is that lawmakers across the nation use it to decide which politicians represent you. That's a problem for Democrats. Republicans control a lot of the state legislatures in key states, and thus they control the map-drawing process, and thus they can gerrymander their way back into power at a national level and find ways to keep ahold of their power in states. It's possible that if Democrats lose control of the House of Representatives in next year's elections, they could be locked out of power for another decade. What can Democrats do? They could pass a federal voting rights bill in Congress that would make it harder for lawmakers to gerrymander. (Both sides gerrymander, though Democrats have become slightly more vocal in recent years about supporting independent commissions to draw fairer lines.) But Democrats would need to act quickly. The data is already out there, and lawmakers can start drawing their maps. And that means Democrats would need to find a way to convince Sens. Joe Manchin III (D-W. Va.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.) to end the filibuster. Bernie Sanders is having a moment Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the chief author of Democrats' $3.5 trillion budget. | He's known as a legislative lightweight, writes The Post's Mike DeBonis. But this week, as chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, the senator from Vermont got the Senate to approve a $3.5 trillion budget that could fulfill liberal wishes to make the American government more expansive. After lawmakers put money to the proposals and vote on it again, they could tout universal pre-K, tuition-free community college, child tax credits, expanded Medicare. Is Sanders too polarizing a name to be behind such a big Democratic push? Democrats don't seem to care, DeBonis reports. They stand behind their policies. "If Republicans 'want to be opposed to the $300 child tax credit, they want to be opposed to expanding Medicare, they want to be opposed to expanding child care," Sanders said. "If they want to tell their constituents that we can continue to ignore climate change, they're going to lose the next election.' " |