President-elect Joe Biden’s Transition: Live Updates

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn the state’s election results. The justices said they would not block a ruling from Pennsylvania’s highest court that had rejected a challenge to the use of mail ballots in the state. The Supreme Court’s order was all of one sentence, and there were no noted dissents.

The request that the Supreme Court intercede had faced substantial legal hurdles, as it was filed long after the enactment of the challenged statute that allowed mailed ballots and was based on questions of state rather than federal law.

In late November, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled against the plaintiffs, led by Representative Mike Kelly, a Republican, on the first ground, saying they could have challenged a 2019 law allowing vote by mail for any reason more than a year ago.

“At the time this action was filed on Nov. 21, 2020, millions of Pennsylvania voters had already expressed their will in both the June 2020 primary election and the November 2020 general election,” the court said. “Petitioners failed to act with due diligence in presenting the instant claim. Equally clear is the substantial prejudice arising from petitioners’ failure to institute promptly a facial challenge to the mail-in voting statutory scheme, as such inaction would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of Pennsylvania voters.”

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‘World-Class Experts’: Biden Introduces Health Team Nominees

On Tuesday, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced his nominees for his health team, which will play a defining role in curbing the spread of coronavirus.

“Health care is a right for all, not a privilege for a few. But as all of you know, I know that out of our collective pain, we’re going to find a collective purpose to control the pandemic, to save lives and to heal as a nation. Today, I’m pleased to announce a team that is going to do just that. It’s a team of world-class experts at the top of their fields, crisis-tested, defined by a deep sense of duty, honor and patriotism.” “No one, no one should ever have to die alone in a hospital bed, loved ones forced to stay away. That seems so contrary to the values of a great nation, the values that drew my parents, like generations before and after them, to come to America.” “I never dreamed I would have the opportunity to serve again. And in this moment of crisis, when so many Americans have fallen sick and lost loved ones, when people have lost their jobs and are struggling for child care, I feel grateful to be able to do everything I can to end this pandemic.” “I never anticipated I would take on a role helping lead our national response, and government service was never part of my plan. But every doctor knows that when a patient is coding, your plans don’t matter. You answer the code. And when the nation is coding, if you are called to serve, you serve.” “I’m proud to go to work with leaders who are deeply committed to science, and to centering equity in our response to this pandemic. And not as a secondary concern, not as a box to check, but as a shared value. It will get into all of the work that we do, and prioritized by every member of the Biden-Harris team.” “I believe, as you do, that in the fight against this pandemic, we must lead with science, and that a key piece of our ongoing work is communicating consistently with the American people.” “We will oversee the rollout of the vaccine, which as the president-elect said, will be one of the greatest operational challenges our country has ever faced.” “Thank you to these accomplished physicians, and experts and public servants, for answering the call to serve the American people in this critical hour of need.”

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., setting ambitious goals to change the course of the coronavirus pandemic, vowed on Tuesday to get “at least 100 million Covid vaccine shots into the arms of the American people” during his first 100 days in office. He also said he would make it a “national priority” to get children back to school during that time.

Appearing in Wilmington, Del., to introduce members of his health team, Mr. Biden pledged to run “the most efficient mass vaccination plan in U.S. history” but did not say how and through what companies his administration would purchase vaccine shots. Mr. Biden also implored Americans to wear masks during his first 100 days in office and said he would make doing so a requirement in federal buildings and on planes, trains and buses that cross state lines.

“My first 100 days won’t end the Covid-19 virus — I can’t promise that,” Mr. Biden said. But he added, “I’m absolutely convinced than in 100 days we can change the course of the disease and change life in America for the better.”

Mr. Biden’s announcement offered a telling split-screen counterpoint to an event being held at the same time at the White House: a vaccine summit where President Trump boasted about what he called a “monumental national achievement” by drug companies to develop a vaccine for the virus in about nine months. He did not address the growing death toll or the devastation across the country, but he used the occasion to suggest, yet again and without evidence, that people had tried to “steal” the election.

“Well, we’ll have to see who the next administration is,” the president said, “because we won.”

In Delaware, the next administration was clearly taking shape. The senior officials Mr. Biden will appoint — including Xavier Becerra, a former congressman who is now the California attorney general, as his nominee for secretary of health and human services — will face the immediate challenge of slowing the spread of the coronavirus, which has already killed more than 285,000 people in the United States and has taken a particularly devastating toll on people of color.

The event was the first time that Mr. Becerra and other cabinet candidates have spoken out in public. Some appeared in person and others appeared virtually, including Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, who will be Mr. Biden’s chief medical adviser in addition to continuing in his role as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.

Dr. Fauci said he could not be present in person because he was attending a ceremony for a close friend and colleague at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Harvey J. Alter, who had won the Nobel Prize in Medicine — “a reminder,” Dr. Fauci said, “of America’s place as a pioneer in science and medicine.”

Other members of the team — including Dr. Rochelle Walensky, who will lead the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Dr. Vivek Murthy, a former and now incoming surgeon general — focused largely on their personal stories.

Dr. Murthy, who like Mr. Becerra is a son of immigrants, volunteered greetings from his grandmother. Dr. Walensky, the chief of infectious diseases at Massachusetts General Hospital, has never served in government; she spoke about her early days in medicine working to fight the H.I.V. epidemic.

“Every doctor knows that when the patient is coding, your plans don’t matter — you answer the code,” she said. “And when the nation is coding, if you are called to serve, you serve.”

Other health officials included in the event were Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, who will lead a Covid-19 equity task force, and Jeffrey D. Zients, the incoming coordinator of the Covid-19 response. Mr. Biden has yet to name his candidates for other health posts, including the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and the director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is expected to nominate Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III, the retired former commander of the United States military effort in Iraq, to be the next secretary of defense, according to two people with knowledge of the selection.

If confirmed by the Senate, General Austin would make history as the first African-American to lead the country’s 1.3 million active-duty troops and the enormous bureaucracy that backs them up.

General Austin, 67, was a formidable figure at the Pentagon for years and is the only African-American to have headed U.S. Central Command, the military’s marquee combat command, with responsibility for Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen — most of the places where the United States is at war.

General Austin is known as a strong battlefield commander but less for his political instincts. He has sometimes stumbled in congressional hearings, including a session in 2015 when he acknowledged, under testy questioning, that the Defense Department’s $500 million program to raise an army of Syrian fighters had gone nowhere.

Still, General Austin, who retired in 2016 as a four-star general after 41 years in the military, is respected in the Army, especially among African-American officers and enlisted soldiers, as one of the rare Black men to crack the glass ceiling that has kept the upper ranks of the military largely the domain of white men.

Supporters of General Austin say he broke through that barrier because of his intellect, his command experience and the mentorship of a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen, who chose him to run the staff of the Joint Chiefs’ office.

In choosing General Austin, Mr. Biden bypassed Michèle A. Flournoy, a well-respected military policymaker who is now believed to have been a contender for the role three times. She would have been the first woman in the job.

Ms. Flournoy was known for seamlessly moving between the civilian and active-duty sides of the Pentagon, bridging the often impenetrable gap between those in uniform and those in suits — a skill that some fear may be lost with a retired general in the role. She did so, her supporters said, by translating the political imperatives of civilians to the active-duty military world and carefully helping the civilian side understand the military’s practical needs and limitations in seeing through the policy goals of elected officials.

Like Jim Mattis, who was President Trump’s first defense secretary, General Austin would have to get a congressional waiver to serve, since he has been out of the military for four years, and American law requires a seven-year period between active duty and becoming Pentagon chief.

General Austin is a graduate of the United States Military Academy. He and his wife, Charlene, have been married for 40 years.

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Senate Coronavirus Relief Negotiations Stall

Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, on Tuesday offered to drop his demand for liability protections if Democrats would forego aid to states and local governments. Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, rejected the offer.

“My view, and I think it’s a view shared by literally everybody on both sides of the aisle, is we can’t leave without doing a Covid bill. The country needs it. We have an agreement that we need to do this. We know the new administration is going to be asking for another package. What I recommend is we set aside liability and set aside state and local, and pass those things that we can agree on knowing full well we’ll be back at this after the first of the year.” “Now, Senator McConnell has put the jobs of firefighters, ambulance workers, sanitation officers, police officers in jeopardy. Every governor and mayor across the country has been fighting to keep these people working. And McConnell is pulling the rug out from under them. Leader McConnell has refused to be part of the bipartisan negotiations, and now he’s sabotaging good-faith bipartisan negotiations because his partisan ideological effort is not getting a good reception.”

Leaping back into negotiations over coronavirus relief, the White House presented Democrats on Tuesday with a $916 billion stimulus proposal that would meet their demand of sending money to state and local governments while also including liability protections for employers that are a top priority of Republicans.

The offer laid out by Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, was the first time since November’s election that the Trump administration has engaged directly in talks on Capitol Hill over how to prop up the nation’s flagging economy. But it was far from clear how it would be received as lawmakers continued to haggle over both the state and local aid and over the legal protections for businesses, universities and schools.

Mr. Mnuchin outlined his plan to Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California in a 5 p.m. call, and said he had also shared the proposal with the top Republicans, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader.

“I look forward to achieving bipartisan agreement so we can provide this critical economic relief to American workers, families and businesses,” Mr. Mnuchin said in a statement.

He shared few other details about the proposal, which was slightly larger than one developed by a bipartisan group of senators who helped jump-start stalled negotiations last week by presenting a $908 billion compromise. Mr. Mnuchin proposed using $140 billion in unused funds from the Paycheck Protection Program, a small business loan program, and another $429 billion in Treasury Department funds to offset the cost.

The offer came near the end of a whipsaw day of negotiations on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers were racing to reach an agreement before they left town for the holidays and adjourned for the year.

Just hours earlier, Mr. McConnell had signaled that he would be willing to drop his demand for the sweeping liability shield — which he has called a “red line” for a stimulus plan — provided that Democrats would abandon their insistence on including billions of dollars in aid for state, local and tribal governments.

Democrats immediately dismissed Mr. McConnell’s suggestion as a nonstarter, but it was the first offer of a major concession since congressional leaders agreed last week to renew their efforts to reach a deal on another round of coronavirus relief before they conclude this year’s session.

“We know the new administration is going to be asking for another package,” Mr. McConnell said on Tuesday, offering a tacit acknowledgment of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory. “What I recommend is we set aside liability, and set aside state and local, and pass those things that we agree on, knowing full well we’ll be back at this after the first of the year.”

Democrats panned the idea, after months of insisting that any stimulus agreement include funds to bolster state and local governments that have lost hundreds of billion of dollars during the pandemic and are facing devastating budget cuts. Republicans have branded the provision as a “blue-state bailout,” though state officials in both parties have lobbied for additional relief.

“He’s sabotaging good-faith bipartisan negotiations because his partisan ideological effort is not getting a good reception,” said Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, charging that “Senator McConnell is trying to pull the rug out from beneath” lawmakers working to hash out an agreement.

Mr. Schumer said Democrats’ proposals for funding state and local governments had “broad bipartisan support,” unlike Mr. McConnell’s liability proposal. But some liability protections are included in the negotiations among the bipartisan group of senators working on a compromise plan, which Democratic leaders said should be a starting point for negotiations.

WASHINGTON — The House overwhelmingly passed a $741 billion defense policy bill on Tuesday that would require that Confederate names be stripped from American military bases, defying President Trump’s veto threat and moving lawmakers one step closer to a potential showdown in his final weeks in office.

The 335-78 bipartisan vote to approve the legislation that authorizes pay raises for American troops reflected optimism among lawmakers in both parties that Congress would be able to force the enactment of the bill over Mr. Trump’s objections, in what would be the first veto override of his presidency. The margin surpassed the two-thirds majority both the House and Senate would need to muster to do so.

It also amounted to a remarkable, if narrow, break from the president by Republicans, who refused to defer to Mr. Trump’s desire to derail the critical bill as his time in the White House comes to a close.

“If we don’t pass this bill and exercise oversight, we are ceding authority to the executive branch, authority that is too great already,” said Representative Adam Smith, Democrat of Washington and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee. “Let’s not walk away from our biggest opportunity every year to exercise that legislative oversight. This is a good bill.”

Congress has succeeded in passing the military bill each year for 60 years, with lawmakers in both parties relishing the opportunity to project strength on national security issues and support for the military. But Mr. Trump’s objections have threatened to upend that tradition, as he has warned since the summer that he would veto the bill.

He did so at first over the mandate — broadly supported by lawmakers in both parties in both chambers, as well as at the Pentagon — that the Defense Department strip the names of Confederate figures from military bases. More recently, Mr. Trump has shifted the focus of his threat, demanding that the bill include an unrelated repeal of a legal shield for social media companies.

“I hope House Republicans will vote against the very weak National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which I will VETO,” Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday in the hours before the vote. “Must include a termination of Section 230 (for National Security purposes), preserve our National Monuments, & allow for 5G & troop reductions in foreign lands!”

Many of them disregarded that appeal. The legislation is slated to be considered this week in the Senate, where it is expected to pass overwhelmingly before it is sent to the president’s desk.

If Mr. Trump were to follow through with his threatened veto, the House would be the first to try at an override.

Joseph R. Biden Jr. has already won the presidential election, but on Tuesday he moved one step closer to the White House.

By the end of the day, the nation was set to reach the so-called safe harbor deadline, which is generally accepted as the date by which all state-level election challenges — such as recounts and audits — are supposed to be completed.

Broadly, that means that President Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election are nearing the end of the line. After Tuesday, state courts would most likely have to throw out any new lawsuit challenging the election.

That’s because election results that have been certified by the states are now considered conclusive, and by law those states’ Electoral College votes must be counted by Congress. By late Monday, every state but Hawaii had certified its results, and Mr. Biden had secured more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president. The Electoral College will cast its votes on Dec. 14.

WASHINGTON — Loyalists to President Trump have blocked transition meetings at some government agencies and are sitting in on discussions at other agencies between career civil servants and President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s transition teams, sometimes chilling conversations, several federal officials said.

At the Environmental Protection Agency, political appointees have joined virtually every discussion between career staff members and Mr. Biden’s team, monitoring conversations on climate change, scientific research and other topics. At the State Department, such drop-ins are happening on what Trump appointees define as an as-needed basis. On Tuesday, Mr. Biden’s transition team was allowed for the first time into the National Security Agency; but at the United States Agency for Global Media, the parent of Voice of America, the Trump-appointed leader is refusing to cooperate with the Biden transition team, two agency officials confirmed.

Presidential transition experts said the presence of political officials at agency handoff meetings was not unheard-of and could even be seen as helpful. President George W. Bush, for example, worked closely in late 2008 with Barack Obama’s incoming team to help calm volatile financial markets. But against a backdrop of Mr. Trump’s refusal to concede the election, the actions of Trump appointees appeared to be a pernicious effort to slow the transition, some experts said.

Michael E. Herz, a professor of administrative law at the Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, called the Trump administration’s apparent determination to micromanage the transition process by overseeing meetings as part of its broader plan to “milk their authority as long as they can and disrupt the new administration as much as they can.”

Under the Presidential Transition Act, career employees play the primary role in managing the agency transitions, largely because they bring an institutional knowledge about the government functions and have been viewed as unpolitical stewards of the agencies they serve. No clear rules or guidelines, however, detail how the process should unfold.

Reporting was contributed by Erica L. Green, Lara Jakes, Julian E. Barnes, Eric Schmitt, Michael D. Shear and Katie Benner.

WASHINGTON — Derrick Johnson, the president of the N.A.A.C.P., pressed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday to create a civil rights envoy position in the West Wing that would report directly to the president.

“He appointed John Kerry to be the climate envoy, reporting directly to him,” Mr. Johnson said in an interview before a meeting with Mr. Biden in Wilmington, Del., that included other prominent civil rights leaders like the Rev. Al Sharpton. “We believe a national adviser on racial justice should be something equivalent.”

After an election that unfolded amid nationwide protests against racial injustice and police violence, the civil rights leaders said they also planned to lean on Mr. Biden to fill more top-tier cabinet positions, including attorney general, with Black appointees.

While the attorney general oversees civil rights compliance and enforces federal statutes prohibiting discrimination based on race, Mr. Johnson said a new position focused solely on racial justice would have a broader mandate across government agencies. “This would be advancing equity in governance, in budgeting and resources,” he said.

Mr. Johnson said the meeting on Tuesday was his first conversation with Mr. Biden since the election. It was not clear before the meeting whether Mr. Biden would agree with the suggestion for addressing systemic racism in America.

But Mr. Johnson said he viewed the creation of an official post of a “national adviser on justice, equity and advancement,” complete with a fully staffed office, as a natural outcome of the promises Mr. Biden had made during his campaign. “He talked about racial justice equity,” Mr. Johnson said. “In order for his vision to come to fruition, there should be someone who reports to him with that sole responsibility.”

In an interview with CNN last week, Mr. Biden noted that “every advocacy group out there is pushing for more and more and more of what they want. That’s their job.” He defended his first eight picks as “the most diverse cabinet anyone in American history has ever announced.”

But the group of civil rights leaders he met with on Tuesday may be some of the most experienced when it comes to exerting pressure on public officials.

“He said if he won, he would do something about criminal justice, police reform and specifically mass incarceration,” Mr. Sharpton, the civil rights leader and talk show host, said in an interview before the meeting. “He flew to Houston to meet before I did the eulogy for George Floyd. He made specific commitments. I’m saying, promises made, let’s see if promises are kept.”

Among Mr. Sharpton’s questions for Mr. Biden: “What kind of attorney general are we going to have? How many Blacks are going to be in the cabinet?”

Mr. Sharpton called the appointment of Gen. Lloyd J. Austin III as defense secretary, the first African-American to be chosen for the position, “a step in a long walk.” But he said he still had concerns about whom Mr. Biden might choose to lead the Justice Department that he planned to voice in private, for now.

Patrick Gaspard, a former aide to President Barack Obama, U.S. ambassador to South Africa and executive director of the Democratic National Committee, has emerged as the leading candidate to be nominated as labor secretary under President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., according to people with knowledge of the discussions.

Mr. Gaspard announced last week that he would step down as the head of the Open Society Foundations, founded by the liberal megadonor George Soros, at the end of the year, fueling speculation in Washington that he was poised to join the incoming administration. He has a background in labor organizing, including a senior leadership position for the Service Employees International Union, which he held before joining the Obama administration.

His potential nomination would give Mr. Biden, who calls himself a “union guy,” a labor secretary with union roots. He would also add to the list of Black cabinet appointees, a key goal of Mr. Biden’s transition team as it seeks to fulfill Mr. Biden’s campaign promise of diversity in the top leadership of his administration.

Born in the Democratic Republic of Congo to Haitian parents, Mr. Gaspard immigrated to the United States in early childhood, grew up in New York and attended Columbia University before leaving to work on Jesse Jackson’s 1988 presidential campaign. He worked for years in New York City politics and on Howard Dean’s 2004 Democratic presidential bid, and he was an aide to former Mayor David Dinkins. After Mr. Dinkins died last month, Mr. Gaspard wrote on Twitter, “He taught me that you don’t need to be loud to be strong.”

Mr. Gaspard worked for years as an organizer and rose through the Service Employees International Union to become its national political director before joining Mr. Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. In the Obama White House, Mr. Gaspard served as director of political affairs, before helming the Democratic National Committee and being confirmed as Mr. Obama’s ambassador to South Africa.

Two other possible nominees appear to remain in contention for Labor secretary. One is Julie Su, a labor lawyer and MacArthur “genius” grant recipient who is the secretary of California’s Labor and Workforce Development Agency. The other is Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who has won support from some key labor unions.

Allies of Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont and Mr. Biden’s chief rival for the Democratic nomination this year, had pushed hard for Mr. Sanders to be selected as labor secretary. But Mr. Biden’s short list for the job does not appear to include Mr. Sanders.

President Trump may not think he lost the election, but he’s acting like a man on his way out, doling out plum spots on premier boards and commissions to his friends and supporters.

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump appointed Elaine Chao, the secretary of transportation and the wife of Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, to be a member of the board of trustees for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. Trustees serve six-year terms.

Kellyanne Conway, his onetime campaign manager and White House counselor, will help oversee the Air Force Academy as a member of the institution’s board of visitors. Ms. Conway will serve a three-year term.

And Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the American Conservative Union and the husband of Mercedes Schlapp, who served as the president’s director of communications, will sit on the trust fund board for the Library of Congress. He will be one of two presidential appointees, with a five-year term.

Will Ruger, a conservative scholar whom Mr. Trump nominated to be ambassador to Afghanistan, will be a member of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, joining Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former White House press secretary. Board members serve three-year terms.

Together, they are among the more than two dozen appointments that the president made on Tuesday, filling the coveted spots with supporters who will serve fixed terms even after Mr. Trump leaves office next month.

Making such appointments is a president’s prerogative. In 2019, Mr. Trump appointed Lee Greenwood, who sings “God Bless the U.S.A.,” the signature song of the president’s re-election campaign, to the Kennedy Center board.

Associates of previous presidents still sit on boards and commissions. Former President Barack Obama appointed Valerie Jarrett, a close friend and adviser, to the Kennedy Center board, a position she still holds. So does Alyssa Mastromonaco, who was one of Mr. Obama’s deputy chiefs of staff.

The state of Texas filed an audacious lawsuit in the Supreme Court on Tuesday against four other states, asking the justices to extend the Dec. 14 deadline for certification of presidential electors.

The suit, filed by the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, said Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin had engaged in election irregularities that require investigation, and it asked the court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the defendant states’ legislatures.”

Legal experts called the suit outlandish, and it comes at a time when Mr. Paxton is battling a scandal in his own state over whistle-blower allegations that he engaged in bribery and other wrongdoing to illegally help a wealthy Austin real estate developer and political donor.

“It looks like we have a new leader in the ‘craziest lawsuit filed to purportedly challenge the election’ category,” Stephen I. Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, wrote on Twitter.

The Constitution gives the Supreme Court “original jurisdiction” to hear disputes “in which a state shall be party.” In such cases, the Supreme Court acts much like a trial court, appointing a special master to hear evidence and issue recommendations. Though the Constitution seems to require the court to hear cases brought by states, the court has ruled that it has discretion to turn them down and often does.

When the court does exercise its original jurisdiction, it is usually to adjudicate disputes between two states over issues like water rights. In 2016, the justices turned down a request from Nebraska and Oklahoma to file a challenge to Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana. The states said the Colorado law had spillover effects, taxing neighboring states’ criminal justice systems and hurting the health of their residents.

Texas asked the justices to put its case on an exceptionally fast track, but the court has acted with measured deliberation in considering similar requests and may defer consideration of whether to hear the suit until it can have no practical impact. Indeed, the Dec. 8 safe harbor deadline, which largely insulates states that have certified their election results from legal challenges, is about to pass.

In a blog post, Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, called the Texas filing a “press release masquerading as a lawsuit.”

He listed what he said were its shortcomings: “Texas doesn’t have standing to raise these claims as it has no say over how other states choose electors; it could raise these issues in other cases and does not need to go straight to the Supreme Court; it waited too late to sue; the remedy Texas suggests of disenfranchising tens of millions of voters after the fact is unconstitutional; there’s no reason to believe the voting conducted in any of the states was done unconstitutionally; it’s too late for the Supreme Court to grant a remedy even if the claims were meritorious (they are not).”

The office of Attorney General Chris Carr of Georgia, a Republican, pushed back against Mr. Paxton’s lawsuit with the Supreme Court. In a prepared statement on Tuesday, Katie Byrd, a spokeswoman for Mr. Carr, said that Mr. Paxton was “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong about Georgia.”

But the Republican caucus in the Georgia State Senate appeared to approve of the filing. In a news release Tuesday, the Republican state senators argued that calling a special session to overturn Mr. Biden’s election — as Mr. Trump has demanded —was legally and practically impossible. “However,” they said, “an avenue to move this matter even quicker than special session now exists and is pending before the United States Supreme Court.”

David Montgomery and Richard Fausset contributed reporting.

In late November, one day after Christopher Krebs, the former head of the government’s cybersecurity agency, went on “60 Minutes” to dispute President Trump’s claims of fraud in the election, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers threatened him on television.

“He should be drawn and quartered,” the lawyer, Joseph diGenova, said of Mr. Krebs on the conservative TV outlet Newsmax. “Taken out at dawn and shot.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Krebs, who was fired by Mr. Trump last month, filed a lawsuit against Mr. diGenova accusing him and the Trump campaign of defamation and the infliction of emotional distress.

The lawsuit, which seeks monetary damages and the removal of the threatening video from the Newsmax archives, also made a far more extraordinary claim: that Mr. Trump, members of his legal team and Newsmax have been engaging in “a calculated and pernicious conspiracy” to defame and injure not just Mr. Krebs but other members of the Republican Party who have stood up against the president’s baseless claims of fraud.

“Newsmax, the campaign, and diGenova have a symbiotic relationship,” the lawsuit says. “Newsmax disseminates and amplifies the campaign’s and diGenova’s attacks on perceived political threats and allegations of election stealing, which pleases viewers, prompts endorsements from President Trump, increases ratings, supports the political goals of the campaign, and helps raise more money from duped supporters.”

Mr. diGenova, the Trump campaign and Newsmax did not respond immediately to requests for comment.

Mr. Krebs’s lawsuit was filed by the law firm Walden, Macht & Haran in Maryland, Mr. diGenova’s home state, at a moment when Mr. Trump and his allies have brought increasing pressure to bear on Republican officials around the country who have resisted the president’s efforts to tar the elections as compromised by fraud.

The suit notes, for example, that the president has attacked Governors Doug Ducey of Arizona and Brian Kemp of Georgia for failing to assist him in his attempts to overturn the vote counts in their states. It also points out that Mr. Trump and his legal team sought to persuade Republican leaders in states like Pennsylvania to go along with their scheme to “ignore certified election results” and instead have state lawmakers appoint delegates to the Electoral College.

Mr. Krebs, a lifelong Republican, said in a brief interview that he had filed the suit to encourage others from his party not to be “intimidated into silence.”

“We need to make it clear that these behaviors are not acceptable in a civil society,” he said.

Newsmax, which was accused in the suit of aiding and abetting by amplifying Mr. diGenova’s threat, has recently capitalized on Mr. Trump’s displeasure with Fox News and devoted itself to carrying the president’s unsupported claims of massive fraud in the elections. Its prime-time ratings have soared in the process. “People want something that tends to affirm their views and opinions,” Christopher Ruddy, its chief executive, told The New York Times last month.

In his suit, Mr. Krebs said that after Mr. diGenova attacked him on Newsmax, he received death threats in tweets and emails that labeled him a traitor. Because of the threats, Mr. Krebs said, he and his family were forced to leave their home and Mr. Krebs’s children were terrified.

Calling the Senate a “graveyard for progress,” Senator Tom Udall, Democrat of New Mexico, used his farewell address on Tuesday to urge his colleagues to fix a broken institution by gutting the legislative filibuster and changing a culture that he said values partisanship over the country’s best interests.

“I’m not the first to say this in a farewell address, and I won’t be the last, but the Senate is broken,” said Mr. Udall, who is retiring after 12 years. “The Senate is broken,” he repeated for emphasis.

A former attorney general and a member of a storied political family from the West, Mr. Udall has been trying to reform the filibuster almost since he arrived in the Senate in 2009 after five terms in the House. In an interview with The New York Times last week, he laid out why he saw the 60-vote threshold to advancing bills as an impediment to coming up with answers for the existential problems of the moment, such as climate change.

“The filibuster came to be through historical accident,” he said on the Senate floor on Tuesday. “The reality of the filibuster is paralysis — a deep paralysis.”

Mr. Udall also lamented the state of American politics, calling the country’s campaign finance system “out of control.”

“Secret money floods campaigns to buy influence, instead of letting the voters speak,” he said. “Voting rights are under attack. We can do our best to be good people in a system like that, but it’s no surprise that America’s faith in government is declining. These structures are antidemocratic. They reward extremism. They punish compromise.”

Mr. Udall is the second senator in as many weeks to use his farewell speech to lament the current state of the chamber under the leadership of Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky. Mr. McConnell’s friend, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, who is retiring after 18 years, described the Senate last week as “like joining the Grand Ole Opry and not being able to sing,” concluding, “It’s a real waste of talent.”

But Mr. Alexander — who is a former governor, cabinet secretary, presidential candidate and university president — concluded that senators would be making a fatal mistake if they eliminated the filibuster.

“It would basically destroy the Senate,” Mr. Alexander said. Instead, he argued that senators should rediscover the lost art of allowing debate on a variety of legislative changes rather than blocking them outright, to allow the chamber to return to a more bipartisan process.

Jenna Ellis, a senior legal adviser to President Trump, has tested positive for the coronavirus, according to a White House official familiar with the situation. She is the latest in a string of officials connected to Mr. Trump who have tested positive.

Ms. Ellis has appeared in recent weeks alongside Rudolph W. Giuliani and other Trump lawyers — a group Ms. Ellis has described as an “elite strike-force team” — at public hearings where she amplified the president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud.

Mr. Giuliani, the lead lawyer for the president’s efforts to overthrow the results of the election, confirmed over the weekend that he had tested positive for the virus, and a person who was aware of his condition but not authorized to speak publicly said then that he had been hospitalized at Georgetown University Medical. At age 76, Mr. Giuliani is in a high-risk category. Mr. Trump said on Monday that he had spoken to Mr. Giuliani and he was doing “very well.”

Ms. Ellis was photographed last week, on Wednesday, sitting next to Mr. Giuliani during a hearing before the Michigan House Oversight Committee. It was not immediately clear whether she had any symptoms, or what kind of test she had taken. Ms. Ellis continued to post to Twitter throughout the day on Tuesday, including sharing a statement attributed to her and Mr. Giuliani about their legal efforts. She did not respond to a message seeking comment.

Ms. Ellis has been a frequent guest on cable news, where she aggressively defended Mr. Trump as he faced investigation and impeachment. She presents herself as a constitutional law attorney, but has never appeared in federal district or circuit court, where most constitutional matters are considered, according to national databases of federal cases. She does not appear to have played a major role in any cases beyond criminal and civil work in Colorado.

Ms. Ellis’s most recent work appears to have been largely in a public-relations capacity. The Trump campaign and its supporters have so far filed about 50 election-related lawsuits. She has not signed her name or appeared in court to argue a single one.

More than 40 members of Mr. Trump’s administration, campaign and inner circle have contracted the virus since late September. In early October, Mr. Trump was hospitalized for a few days after testing positive and developing symptoms of Covid-19.