Since everyone is still talking about how successful of an evil genius henchman Bill Barr was, let's catalog all the times he corruptly tried to help Trump but fell flat on his face:

Barr tried to get the case against Michael Flynn thrown out, but this effort failed entirely. Trump ended up having to pardon Flynn, to clean up Barr's failure.

Barr tried to get Roger Stone's prison sentence reduced to the minimum, but Stone ended up getting the multi-year sentence he was always going to get. Trump had to commute Stone's sentence, to clean up Barr's failure.

After Michael Cohen was let out on house arrest due to the pandemic, Barr tried throwing him back in prison to prevent him from publishing his anti-Trump book. But a judge quickly freed Cohen, who succeeded in publishing his book.

Barr tried to install his own guy as head of the SDNY, presumably to stop the arrest of Steve Bannon. But Barr blew it, the SDNY remained in proper hands, and Bannon ended up getting arrested.

1) If you want a better understanding of how to fight and win on the left, look no further than Rep. Bill Pascrell. He knows Speaker Pelosi can't just magically refuse to seat 126 House Republicans and pull it off – but that's the entire point. This is all about leverage.

2) There are no magic wand solutions in politics. There just aren't. Pascrell is a fearless flame thrower, but he understands that. He's calling for Pelosi to refuse to seat these Republicans, because it gets the discussion going about what should be done to these Republicans.

3) By calling for an extreme and impossible action (the 14th Amendment isn't a magic wand the Speaker can just wave), Pascrell is laying the groundwork to give Pelosi cover to be able to take some kind of more realistic action against the 126 House Republicans.

4) By the time Pelosi ends up taking whatever realistic action she was planning to take against them, it ends up looking reasonable in the eyes of voters in the middle, in comparison to the more extreme (and again, impossible) course of action that Pascrell put on the table.

5) So the Democratic Party will get a savvy win out of this. They'll ding the 126 House Republicans in some way, and it'll resonate with voters in the middle. But most liberal activists will end up throwing a fit about it, because they didn't get the magic wand solution.

It's trendy to suggest that Trump's attempt at stealing the election has finished off what was left of our democracy. But after everything we've been through in the past four years, I just don't buy that his endgame has been any more harmful than the rest of what he's done to us.

First of all, Trump DID manage to rig the 2016 election. The media largely swept that inconvenient fact under the rug when the evidence started to emerge shortly after he "won" because they were too excited at the ratings that a Trump presidency would give them.

But the reality is that Trump's successful theft of the 2016 election was obviously more harmful to the sanctity of our democracy than his failed theft of the 2020 election. It's just that the media now wants to get ratings out of his failed 2020 attempt.

Trump has spent four years systematically chewing at the fabric of every aspect of our democracy. We don't even know what our democracy is going to look like after this. His tantrum about losing, and zero-chance attempt at overturning it, is just a footnote at the end.

We've all known for four years now that if Trump lost the 2020 election, he'd try to overturn it by any illegal means possible. If you were paying attention, you also knew that if he got blown out, he would have zero chance of overturning it. This isn't some gasp-worthy surprise.