1/ I want to briefly tease out Cruz's statement, which will help set expectations about what might happen January 6:

2/ At its heart, the presser states, "we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given' and ‘lawfully certified' (the statutory requisite), unless & until that emergency 10-day audit is completed."
3/ How does a10-day emergency audit happen? Congress would need to enact a statute to amend the Electoral Count Act before January 6, when it's compelled by law to meet. That seems unlikely.
4/ Cruz et al. seem to hold a "thick" view of the Electoral Count Act, adhering to the "statutory requisite," which means that Congress would need to amend or adhere to the statute.
5/ A 10-day audit is impossible under the current statute. Objections to a state are limited to 2 hours' debate. Adjournments are fixed in the statute, too--no recess if you've hit five days: https://t.co/uvgCoIGR6X
6/ Cruz et al. appear to seek to raise a compound objection: the electors' appointments were not "lawfully certified," & that their votes were not "regularly given." These are, I think, best understood as two separate questions.
7/ If objection is that the appointment was not "lawfully certified," then elector has not been appointed. That may take them out of the denominator of the 12th Amendment determining whether a candidate "majority of the whole number of electors appointed" https://t.co/NalCPhsJaa
8/ If the vote was not "regularly given" (as Boxer & Tubbs raised in 2005) then it may simply mean that the appointment is valid, but there is no vote for the candidate, & a candidate still needs 270 electoral votes to win.
9/ (I say "may," because these are all questions Congress has not had to answer in the past &, at times, steadfastly refused to answer.)
10/ In 1969, the objection was to a Nixon elector in North Carolina who cast a vote for Wallace--that his vote was not "regularly given," excluding that vote from the overall count. (I think this is the best way to way to understand the Greeley votes in 1873, too.)
11/ Of course, Cruz, Hawley, & everyone else recognizes this is performative. Congress will count 306 votes for Biden-Harris, & 232 votes for Trump-Pence. It's only a question of how Congress gets there, & what precedents it raises.
12/ One last detail, the presser is coy about "disputed states." Unclear if that's going to be 1, 7, 51, or whatever.

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I like this heuristic, and have a few which are similar in intent to it:


Hiring efficiency:

How long does it take, measured from initial expression of interest through offer of employment signed, for a typical candidate cold inbounding to the company?

What is the *theoretical minimum* for *any* candidate?

How long does it take, as a developer newly hired at the company:

* To get a fully credentialed machine issued to you
* To get a fully functional development environment on that machine which could push code to production immediately
* To solo ship one material quanta of work

How long does it take, from first idea floated to "It's on the Internet", to create a piece of marketing collateral.

(For bonus points: break down by ambitiousness / form factor.)

How many people have to say yes to do something which is clearly worth doing which costs $5,000 / $15,000 / $250,000 and has never been done before.
https://t.co/6cRR2B3jBE
Viruses and other pathogens are often studied as stand-alone entities, despite that, in nature, they mostly live in multispecies associations called biofilms—both externally and within the host.

https://t.co/FBfXhUrH5d


Microorganisms in biofilms are enclosed by an extracellular matrix that confers protection and improves survival. Previous studies have shown that viruses can secondarily colonize preexisting biofilms, and viral biofilms have also been described.


...we raise the perspective that CoVs can persistently infect bats due to their association with biofilm structures. This phenomenon potentially provides an optimal environment for nonpathogenic & well-adapted viruses to interact with the host, as well as for viral recombination.


Biofilms can also enhance virion viability in extracellular environments, such as on fomites and in aquatic sediments, allowing viral persistence and dissemination.