Good morning. 
Thursday in Whitewater will be partly cloudy with a high of seventy-six. Sunrise is 6:45 AM and sunset 6:46 PM, for 12h 00m 53s of daytime. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 54.4% of its visible disk illuminated.
Today is the one thousand four hundred sixteen day.
The Whitewater Unified School District’s Distinctions Committee meets via audiovisual conferencing at 2 PM, and the Community Development Authority meets via audiovisual conferencing at 5:30 PM.
On this day in 1789, Congress passes the Judiciary Act, creating the office of the Attorney General and federal judiciary system and ordering the composition of the Supreme Court.
Recommended for reading in full —
Colby Itkowitz reports Trump won’t commit to a ‘peaceful transfer of power’ if he loses:
“Well, we’re going to have to see what happens. You know that I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster —” Trump began when asked during a White House press briefing if he would ensure a peaceful transition.
“I understand that, but people are rioting; do you commit to making sure that there’s a peaceful transferral of power?” the reporter pressed, appearing to refer to incidents of violence that have broken out during some protests.
“Get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very — we’ll have a very peaceful, there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation,” Trump said.
See generally Parsing Trump’s ‘there won’t be a transfer’ comments.
Barton Gellman writes The Election That Could Break America (‘If the vote is close, Donald Trump could easily throw the election into chaos and subvert the result. Who will stop him?’):
Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.
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Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al?Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.
The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.