| Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square. But because he won't publicly acknowledge that, his loyalists can't either. That includes many elected Republican lawmakers who,won their own elections on the same ballots as Trump. On Thursday, a Democratic-controlled House committee held a hearing looking into how and why Arizona Republicans kept questioning that state's results for Biden. A GOP-led audit in Arizona actually found more votes for Biden in that state's biggest county; the firm they used to retrace people's paper ballots was unequivocally clear in their findings that Biden won. That was awkward for Republicans who had championed their recount as a "we'll-show-them" moment about the 2020 election. But a bigger problem for Republican lawmakers is how to move forward given there is no amount of evidence that will get Trump to back off from trying to undermine Biden's victory. One Trump loyalist — Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) — got caught in that tricky dynamic on Thursday. He recognizes there is no ground to stand on to say the election was stolen, but he also didn't want to acknowledge Biden's win. So he said this: The election "was indeed compromised." He added: "We don't know how much because investigations take time yet. As of January the 20th, 2021, Joe Biden was indeed inaugurated president. Listen good. On January 20, 2025, we're going to fix that. And Democrats will have an opportunity to deal with the real accurate and newly inaugurated President Donald Trump again." A few things about this. 1. Higgins throws out an evidence-free vaguery about the 2020 election results (results were "compromised") with just enough innuendo to please Trump and a large share of the Republican Party. But the congressman is no longer willing to declare that Trump would have won last November had it not been for the election being rigged, as he did back in December and January. 2. Notice how he only acknowledges that Biden is president with language that seems intended to undermine his win, by using words like "inaugurated" rather than, say, "elected." 3. And then he immediately pivots to championing Trump — whose win, he can already tell — will be "accurate." As we learn more and more about how Trump desperately tried to overthrow a free and fair election, Republicans like Higgins sound like they are increasingly contorting themselves to defend him. Your questions about this week, answered  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) helped Democrats avoid a debt ceiling catastrophe this week. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post) | Thanks for submitting political questions. Like: Why doesn't the media spend less time covering political infighting over the $3.5 trillion bill and more time explaining to the public exactly what is in the bill? We don't know what exactly is in it, because lawmakers haven't settled on that. They have a general idea of what they want to do — expand federal government benefits to everyone from little kids to seniors. But they're still debating what exactly should be in the bill and the difficult choice of what proposed benefits to cut to get enough votes to pass. The budget tool they're using to dodge a Republican filibuster required Democrats to vote this summer on the price tag first, where they agreed to a framework of up to $3.5 trillion. Since that's the only thing that's settled so far, the number is what the package has been most defined by. But Democrats are starting to recognize they need to be talking much more about what could be in this bill, since many of their ideas poll well (voters tend to like "free" stuff). That's why Biden went to Michigan this week and championed some of the most popular proposals: "We'll make four additional years of public education available to every person in America. Two years of high-quality preschool at the front end and investments in community colleges."  Biden in Michigan on Tuesday tried to sell Democrats' spending bill. (Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg) | What does it take to end the filibuster? A majority vote in the Senate. That's it. It seems counterintuitive — Republicans can't filibuster ending the filibuster. The rules are set up so it only takes a majority vote to override the Senate parliamentarian and change Senate precedent forever. Democrats are close to having enough votes to do this, especially when it comes to ending the filibuster for specific issues, like the debt ceiling or voting rights. Here's a look at what the filibuster is and its history. Why do the Democrats continually shoot themselves in the feet? Don't they understand if Biden wins, they win? This question made me think of what Rep. Emanuel Cleaver II (D-Mo.) said last week of all the infighting among his colleagues right now: "I don't think there was anybody in there who wants to sack our own quarterback." Biden had just come to Capitol Hill to try to settle down Democratic bickering between liberals and centrists over what's in their spending bill and when to vote on it versus a bipartisan infrastructure bill. Democrats ended up having to pull that infrastructure bill from a vote because it would have failed from within their own party, despite the prospect of giving Biden a major accomplishment to sign. There are a lot of differences within the Democratic Party on how to legislate while they're in power. And Cleaver was hoping to appeal to lawmakers' shared goal, as also stated by the questioner: Making Biden look good boosts their chances of retaining control of Congress. And right now Biden could use a win. His approval rating is among the lowest of his presidency so far, with 44 percent of people approving and 49 percent disapproving of the job he's doing, according to a Washington Post average of recent polls. | 
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