This is a bizarro-world version of the point righties used to make about left-wing 9/11 Truth cranks during the Bush administration. If you *really* believed that the Bush administration masterminded a terrorist plot that killed thousands of Americans, your response wouldn’t be limited to leaving “Bush knew” comments on YouTube videos like “Loose Change.” You’d be in open insurrection against the government that perpetrated the atrocity.

By the same token, if you *really* believe that Sidney Powell has uncovered a massive plot to rig the presidential election against Trump and that Georgia played a key role in it, you’d have to be an idiot to march down to the polls on January 5 and vote for David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Your vote wasn’t counted on November 3 so there’s no reason to believe it’ll be counted this time. Whether Loeffler and Perdue “win” or “lose” should depend entirely on which side is willing to offer a juicier bribe to Georgia election officials to fix the vote for their side this time.

So let’s stop playing games. The idiots on Parler who are vowing to write-in Trump instead of voting for Perdue and Loeffler are at least consistent in their beliefs. Georgia’s elections are either a charade or they aren’t. If they aren’t, vote. If they are, don’t.

Tucker Carlson lays out the stakes in Georgia:

"If Democrats win the Senate seats in Georgia, there is no limit to what they can do. You may be angry at the Republican Party – you have every right to be – but do you want to live in that country? You should think about that." pic.twitter.com/l6hkosUQFF

— Scott Morefield (@SKMorefield) November 25, 2020

Because the Senate will be 50/50 at worst, every policy that Carlson lists in that segment is subject to a veto by red-state Dems like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. That doesn’t mean they’ll issue those vetoes in every case — Manchin and Sinema will need to vote with their party more often than not — but progressive excesses will be hard to get through Congress in an evenly divided Senate and a House with a narrow Democratic majority. There’s also the small matter of the filibuster, with Schumer needing 60 votes, not 50, to get most types of legislation to Biden’s desk. Manchin and Sinema have already vowed that they won’t support ending the filibuster for legislation; I believe Manchin, as he’d be run out of deep red West Virginia on a rail if he changed his mind.

I’ll defer to my betters on Senate procedure in terms of which types of bills might be exempt from the filibuster (e.g., bills subject to budget reconciliation), but if I’m not mistaken literally everything Carlson mentions in the clip would require 60 votes to pass. Schumer won’t get within a country mile of that for any of it. Tucker even goes so far as to ponder the possibility of court-packing, another move that Manchin has already ruled out and for which he’d be obliterated in his next election if he reversed himself. It’s not until the final 30 seconds of the video that Carlson arrives at a legitimate concern, the fact that Democrats would be able to fill cabinet and judicial posts in a 50/50 Senate over Republican objections. Although, again, only if the red-state members of their own caucus play ball with them.

If you want to worry about Democrats passing crazy bills, the savvier take is that the better they do this year in the Senate, the better positioned they’ll be in a few years to nuke the filibuster if they manage to add to their majority in 2022. But even that argument is complicated: Thanks to its strong showing on election night in House races, the GOP is well positioned to take back control of the lower chamber in the midterms. What good would it do Schumer to end the filibuster in 2023 if he’d still have to negotiate with Kevin McCarthy on legislation?

There’s one good near-term argument for making sure Loeffler and Perdue win in January: Appointments. If you want to make sure Biden’s nominees have to earn the Mitch McConnell seal of approval then one or both of Georgia’s open Senate seats need to stay red. According to a new national poll from Harris/Harvard, that’s what Americans want to see too:

Fifty-six percent of voters said they want a divided government with Republicans in control of the upper chamber, according to data released exclusively to The Hill.

Forty-four percent of voters said they wanted Democrats to control the Senate.

“As of now, the voters want divided government and their votes for the Senate and House indicate that as well,” said Harvard CAPS-Harris polling director Mark Penn. “This is a strong headwind for Democrats in the special election though [President] Trump’s continued failure to concede could muddy the waters here.”

Even the threat from Biden’s nominations is underwhelming in the context of the Georgia runoffs, though. Collins, Murkowski, and Romney will be able to give Schumer the votes he needs to move nominations through the Senate whether Loeffler and Perdue win or not. And Tucker’s ominous warnings about Attorney General Stacey Abrams and HHS chief Andrew Cuomo just don’t match the reality of what Biden’s doing with his initial cabinet picks. He’s nominating center-leftists, not progressives. He favors low-key bureaucrats like Tony Blinken and Lisa Monaco, not loudmouths like Cuomo who are going to make trouble for him. Again, it’d be more accurate to say that Republicans need to hold on in Georgia in order to make Democrats’ task of capturing a majority in 2022 harder, as the replacements whom Biden chooses for his initial cabinet members later in his term could be more radical. But “win now to make 2022 harder!” is a much lamer rallying cry than “win now or the country is lost!” even if it happens to be true.

Anyway, Carlson’s game here is clear. After infuriating viewers last week by questioning Sidney Powell’s evidence, he’s been working to reestablish himself as a team player. Two days ago he insisted that the election *was* rigged against Trump, albeit via legal means like media bias. Last night he tried to be a good soldier for the party by rallying righties to turn out in Georgia even though that makes no sense in no light of their belief that an election held there just three weeks ago was a sham. Good luck to him as he tries to navigate the post-election conservative media landscape in which people need to simultaneously believe that Trump lost the election but also somehow didn’t lose.