| Welcome to The Daily 202! Tell your friends to sign up here. On this day in 1940, Germany, Italy and Japan signed a defense alliance called the Tripartite Act, meant to keep the United States from entering World War II. | | |  | The big idea | | The GOP is pre-litigating 2022. And 2024. |  (Washington Post illustration, iStock) | | | The best way to understand the aggressive Republican push to cast doubt on the 2020 election results and rewrite voting procedures in states the GOP controls is not as re-litigating President Biden's victory, though that is a tool for trying to undermine him. Instead, it's better understood as pre-litigating 2022 and 2024: Laying the foundation for challenging or even overturning Democratic victories of the lowercase "d" democratic variety in the future. Yes, I know that this has been blindingly obvious for some time. (Also, I offer my apologies to all of my English teachers for "pre-litigating." I blame years of covering State of the Union "preactions.") | Consider what we've learned | | But consider what we've learned — though "confirmed" might be a better word — over the past week about former president Donald Trump's avalanche of false claims he was cheated out of a second term. And consider he's flirting with running again and has been repeating this nonsense at campaign-style rallies. First, Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and — hardly "Never Trump" politicians — personally investigated the Trump camp's claims of widespread irregularities and found nothing to deter them from voting to certify Biden's victory. | | | | ADVERTISEMENT | | Content From Comcast | | A network with one simple purpose – to keep customers connected |  | We've created a network with one simple purpose: to keep customers connected. In the last 10 years, Comcast has invested $30 Billion – and $15 billion since 2017 alone – to keep America's largest gig-speed broadband network fast, secure, and safe. Because more Americans rely on Comcast to stay connected, we work around the clock to build a better network every single day. Learn how the network keeps you connected. | | | |  | | | | | As my colleague Isaac Stanley-Becker wrote last week: "The episode illustrates how strenuously the president's legal team sought to nullify the results of the election; how flimsy even their more serious claims were; and what little stock the president's own allies placed in his objections, even as they stood steadfastly with their standard-bearer." Second, it wasn't just his "allies" who found the accusations illegitimate. Trump's campaign had determined shortly after the election that many of the loudest false claims of fraud were, well, false. At the New York Times, Alan Feuer reported: "Even at the time, many political observers and voters, Democratic and Republican alike, dismissed the efforts by Ms. [Sydney] Powell and other pro-Trump lawyers like Rudolph W. Giuliani as a wild, last-ditch attempt to appease a defeated president in denial of his loss. But the false theories they spread quickly gained currency in the conservative media and endure nearly a year later." "It is unclear if Mr. Trump knew about or saw the memo; still, the documents suggest that his campaign's communications staff remained silent about what it knew of the claims against Dominion at a moment when the allegations were circulating freely." Third, the ultra-partisan reexamination of voting results in Maricopa County, Ariz., failed to generate credible claims of irregularities, much less fraud. If you're dying for a point-by-point rebuttal of the "anomalies" that the authors of that effort claimed to have turned up, my colleague Philip Bump played tour guide here. Maricopa County itself has been addressing various claims on Twitter here, and on JustTheFacts.vote. My colleague Rosalind S. Helderman reported: "In a letter describing the findings, Senate President Karen Fann (R) — who commissioned the process — stressed the importance of the ballot count showing Biden's winning margin and noted that it 'matches Maricopa County's official machine count.' 'This is the most important and encouraging finding of the audit," she wrote, adding: 'This finding therefore addresses the sharpest concerns about the integrity of the certified results in the 2020 general election.'" | | Fourth, well, let's let CNN's Jamie Gangel and Jeremy Herb tell the story. They reported last week how, shortly before the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, a conservative lawyer working with "Trump's legal team tried to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence that he could overturn the election results on January 6 when Congress counted the Electoral College votes by throwing out electors from seven states, according to the new book "Peril" from Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Robert Costa." "The scheme put forward by controversial lawyer John Eastman was outlined in a two-page memo obtained by the authors for 'Peril'" and which was subsequently obtained by CNN. The memo, which has not previously been made public, provides new detail showing how Trump and his team tried to persuade Pence to subvert the Constitution and throw out the election results on January 6." Fifth, as my colleague Amy Gardner reported, the GOP response to the Arizona experiment has not been second thoughts about similar efforts in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin. Quite the opposite. "While no evidence of widespread fraud has emerged, they have pushed forward at a potential cost of millions in taxpayer dollars — and the risk of further eroding public confidence in U.S. elections, particularly among their own voters." (Amy reported in March how Republicans are trying to take more control over the process of certifying election results, "efforts that voting advocates decried as a blatant attempt to circumvent the popular vote, as President Donald Trump tried to do after his defeat in November.") But the point of what Trump supporters called an "audit" was to feed doubts about the election, doubts that have firmly taken root among Republicans, 59 percent of whom say believing Trump won in 2020 is very, or somewhat, important to what it means to be a Republican, according to a CNN poll. Or, as Trump put it at a July rally in Arizona: "There is no way they win elections without cheating. There's no way." He wasn't talking about 2020. | | |  | What's happening now | | McConnell's GOP is ready to make good on its threats |  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), is flanked by reporters as he returns to the Senate chamber for a vote after attending a bipartisan barbeque luncheon last Thursday. He has said he will block raising the debt ceiling. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite) | | | Senate Republicans are preparing to block a bill funding the government and raising the debt ceiling. | | "The GOP's expected opposition is sure to deal a death blow to the measure, which had passed the House last week, and threatens to add to the pressure on Democrats to devise their own path forward ahead of a series of urgent fiscal deadlines. A failure to address the issues could cause severe financial calamity, the White House has warned, potentially plunging the United States into another recession," Tony Romm reports. | - The argument, revisited: "Ahead of the planned Monday vote, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) staked [out] his party's position — that Republicans are not willing to vote for any measure that raises or suspends the debt ceiling, even if they have no intentions of shutting down the government in the process."
- The counterargument: "Democrats have sharply rebuked that reasoning: They have pointed to the fact that the country's debts predate the current debate, arguing that some of its bills, including a roughly $900 billion coronavirus stimulus package adopted in December, had been racked up on a bipartisan basis."
- The timeline: Democrats "have until Thursday at midnight to craft a plan to fund the government, or else key federal operations will suspend or scale back many operations Friday morning. And they must act before mid-October to raise the debt ceiling, or they could risk the sort of financial calamity that could destabilize global markets. The Treasury Department has not specified an exact deadline."
- But wait, there's more: "Republicans say they are still willing to support a funding stopgap, so long as it is entirely divorced from the debt ceiling. Absent an agreement, Washington would grind to a halt [.]"
| | Biden will receive a booster shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine today at 1 p.m. EST, the White House said. The moment will be televised, and the president will make remarks. Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin John W. Hinckley Jr. will be granted unconditional release 41 years after he shot the former president and three others. "The court acted after the Justice Department agreed to end court supervision of Hinkley, who was freed from a government psychiatric hospital and granted conditional release to live in Williamsburg, Va., in 2016," Spencer S. Hsu reports. | | |  | Lunchtime reads from The Post | | | New York's redistricting is testing Democratic opposition to gerrymandering, Colby Itkwoitz reports. "Reconfiguring New York's congressional districts to benefit Democrats represents perhaps the party's best shot at keeping the House majority. To do so, state Democrats will need to wrestle control of the redistricting process away from a bipartisan commission set up by voters after the last redrawing." | - The temptation to do so will be great: This year marks the first time in a century that the New York Democrats have total control of state government, giving them autonomy over redistricting if they choose to take it."
| | With overdose deaths soaring, the DEA issued a warning about fentanyl-laced pills. "We decided to do this because the amounts are staggering," DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told Devlin Barrett. | - "Officials said the DEA hasn't issued such a public safety alert since 2015, when the agency warned that agents were seeing an alarming amount of heroin laced with fentanyl. Fentanyl, even in much smaller amounts, is deadlier than street heroin. The new public safety alert warns Americans that counterfeit pills, often sold on social media or e-commerce websites, increasingly contain fentanyl or sometimes methamphetamine, posing health risks beyond the dangers of buying prescription pills. The DEA has seized 9.6 million counterfeit pills already this budget year, which is more than it seized in the previous two years combined, officials said."
| | The great car-chip shortage will have lasting consequences, the Wall Street Journal's Stephen Wilmot reports. "Car makers will go to great lengths to avoid a repeat, particularly as their industry is on the cusp of a digital revolution that will require a massive ramp up in chip supplies. Higher inventories are the easiest hedge against future shortages." | - "The irony is that, in the short term, companies building up chip inventories may be making the current shortage even worse, in a dynamic resembling last year's lockdown rush for toilet paper."
| | With abortion largely banned in Texas, an Oklahoma Clinic is inundated. Many women are now traveling out of Texas for the procedure, the New York Times's Sabrina Tavernise reports. At one of Oklahoma's four abortion clinics, at least two-thirds of its scheduled patients now come from Texas. | | |  | On Capitol Hill | |  House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) departs following a news conference at the U.S. Capitol. (Sarah Silbiger/Bloomberg News) | | | Democrats are running out of time to prepare an unpalatable debt limit contingency plan | - "GOP leaders have insisted that Democrats lift the cap on government borrowing without Republican votes, by using the same budgetary move that's helping them take up a mammoth social spending plan as soon as this week. But that's an untested play," Politico's Cailtin Emma reports.
- "It's a lengthy maneuver, too: Experts and congressional aides estimate that adding the debt limit to Democrats' party-line spending bill could take about two weeks, requiring revisions to the budget measure that the party deployed to steer it past a Senate GOP blockade. Two weeks is an eternity, given that Congress could slam into a debt wall in as little as three to six weeks, according to a new estimate from the Bipartisan Policy Center."
- "The House has already cleared a government funding package that would ward off a shutdown on Friday and suspend the debt ceiling through December 2022, essentially hitting pause on the issue through the midterm elections. But that measure is set to die as soon as today in the Senate, where the vast majority of Republicans staunchly oppose any debt limit-lifting measure."
| | |  | More on the Biden agenda | | Sullivan to meet with MBS |  White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan walks toward Marine One on the South Lawn. (Andrew Harnik/AP) | | | Biden's national security adviser Jake Sullivan is traveling to Saudi Arabia to meet with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman | - The trip comes as the U.S. presses for a cease-fire in the years-long war between the kingdom and Houthi rebels in Yemen, the AP's Aamer Madhani reports.
- "Sullivan will be the highest-ranking Biden administration official to visit Saudi Arabia… Sullivan is expected to meet with deputy defense minister Khalid bin Salman, a brother to the crown prince."
- "The Biden White House has largely steered clear of the crown prince since making public in February a CIA report that showed MBS likely approved the killing of Washington Post columnist and Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi."
- Sullivan's trip comes days after the House adopted a provision introduced by Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) "that would end logistical support to Saudi airplanes involved in strikes against the Houthis in Yemen and stop the United States from providing intelligence to Saudi forces that enable the strikes," per CQ Roll Call.
| | |  | German elections, visualized | | | Preliminary results in Germany's election showed a narrow victory for the country's center-left Social Democrats over the conservative Christian Democrats — Angela Merkel's party. With Merkel deciding not to seek reelection, it is the first vote since shortly after World War II without an incumbent chancellor fighting for a new term. "The face of the Christian Democrats, Armin Laschet, however, appeared combative, and said he is ready to enter talks about a government that would exclude the Social Democrats," Rick Noack and Loveday Morris report. "But even from within his own party, he faced mounting skepticism, with one official calling for 'humility' and saying Laschet had lost the election." Olaf Scholz, a lifelong Social Democrat, is possibly Germany's next chancellor. Here's what you need to know about him, from William Glucroft and Morris. | | |  | Hot on the left | | | Republicans are plotting to keep Texas red in redistricting. A proposed congressional map was revealed this morning, Politico's Ally Mutnick reports. "The new map is likely to shore up all of the state's GOP incumbents by packing Democrats together in three new deep-blue seats in the biggest metro areas: Austin, Houston and Dallas, according to several sources close to the redistricting process. The end result is likely to give Republicans control of at least two dozen of the state's 38 districts — but it is not expected to significantly reduce Democrats' footprint, which grew slightly over the past 10 years." | | |  | Hot on the right | | | Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas said approximately 10,000 to 12,000 Haitian migrants who crossed the southern border in recent weeks were released into the United States. In an interview with "Fox News Sunday," Mayorkas said the number could go up as another 5,000 cases are processed. "It could be even higher. The number that are returned could be even higher. What we do is we follow the law as Congress has passed it," Mayorkas said. | | Conservative lawmakers lashed out at the news: |  | | | | | |  | Today in Washington | | | Aside from his booster shot, Biden has no public events in his schedule. Harris will host a reception for the Congressional Hispanic Caucus at 3:30 p.m. | | |  | In closing | | | John Oliver talked about things Americans can do to defend voting rights:  | | | | | And France's Macron got hit by an egg: |  | | | | | Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow. | | |
