Let us pause for a moment on this Day of Days (For unto you on this day in the city of Worcester was born, a blogger. Also, some time earlier, on this same day, Galileo saw Neptune for the first time. I should start charging for this stuff.) and give great thanks to that lion of the Senate, George Norris of McCook. In 1932, Norris presented to the Congress and to the states the 20th Amendment to the Constitution, which changed the date of the presidential inauguration from the beginning of March to the end of January, thereby eliminating the ridiculous four-month gap between the election of a new president and the swearing in. Let us all praise Missouri, which was the state whose vote to ratify the 20th was the one that put it over the top.

Let us all praise them both and give them great thanks because, but for their work, we'd have another three-and-a-half months of this crapola.

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Doing my best to disregard the many inflammatory President O statements and roadblocks.Thought it was going to be a smooth transition - NOT! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016

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We cannot continue to let Israel be treated with such total disdain and disrespect. They used to have a great friend in the U.S., but....... — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016

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not anymore. The beginning of the end was the horrible Iran deal, and now this (U.N.)! Stay strong Israel, January 20th is fast approaching! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 28, 2016

Of course, conversely, if not for them we would have had three-and-a-half more months of being entertained by the spectacle of the current president driving the president-elect even further off his trolley, so old George Norris handed history a double-edged sword, I guess.

Man, enough of this guy, you know? We're all going to have to put up with him starting in less than three weeks. Now, he's screwing with things he doesn't understand—which is to say, everything in the world—and he's getting cheered on by his good pal in Moscow, and by the insufferable Bibi Netanyahu, who's moved on from being an international public nuisance in Congress to whispering about plots being concocted at the UN between the current president and his fellow Musli…er…the other nations in the Middle East. Which is just the kind of thing that El Caudillo del Mar-A-Lago likes to hear, because it's the only thing that gets the voices in his head singing in harmony.

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(By the way, Netanyahu is unfriending a lot of countries these days, according to CNN: "The officials said that business with the embassies of those countries—Britain, France, Russia, China, Japan, Ukraine, Angola, Egypt, Uruguay, Spain, Senegal and New Zealand—will be suspended." He's gotten particularly salty with New Zealand, for reasons that elude me. Of course, one thing all those countries have in common is that none of them sent Israel a couple billion worth of military hardware. But getting tough with Senegal is the important thing.)

I've been reading Harold Holzer's book about the four-month period between the election of Abraham Lincoln and his inauguration in 1861. On December 3, 1860, incumbent President James Buchanan sent his final State of the Union message to Congress; nobody could stop him and, besides, he was constitutionally required to do so. By then, of course, the country was falling apart. South Carolina already had committed itself to treason.

Buchanan, the Father of American Indecision, waved goodbye.

The Southern States, standing on the basis of the Constitution, have right to demand this act of justice from the States of the North. Should it be refused, then the Constitution, to which all the States are parties, will have been willfully violated by one portion of them in a provision essential to the domestic security and happiness of the remainder. In that event the injured States, after having first used all peaceful and constitutional means to obtain redress, would be justified in revolutionary resistance to the Government of the Union.

The victorious Republicans went up the wall. William Seward explained that Buchanan believed a state had no right to secede, unless it wanted to. Back in Illinois, president-elect Lincoln was fuming. Buchanan had handed him the beginnings of a civil war and seemingly had lined up on the other side. But he kept still. He was encouraged by one influential Republican congressman from Illinois to engage in "masterly inactivity," and he did. As Holzer writes:

If the sitting president's pandering valedictory message could arouse such indignation North as well as South, what chance did a minority president-elect have to mollify both regions with anything he might venture to say before his inauguration?

And this was at a moment in which the country actually was coming apart. Now, we're only battling our way through five years of job growth. But, for our current president-elect, there isn't a china shop on the planet that he won't bull his way through. He has calculated his intellect by his bank balance and found the rest of the silly world lacking by comparison. And he's not even president yet. What fresh hell will come with the turning of the year?

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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