WATCH LIVE: Sarah Huckabee Sanders holds White House press briefing

We did it. We took control of the Senate from Mitch McConnell. Even so, Republicans may still be able to block key parts of Joe Biden's agenda. But there are plenty of critical policies he can and must enact without them.

Biden's first task is to undo Trump's litany of cruel and disastrous executive orders. He has already announced he'll rejoin the Paris Climate Accord, re-enter the World Health Organization, and repeal Trump's discriminatory Muslim travel ban. And there are at least 48 other Trump policies that he can reverse on day one.

One of the challenges in trying to understand what has happened to a conservative movement that has clearly become detached from reality, is that for decades we've heard that some conservatives needed to be taken seriously as intellectuals. These chosen conservatives are often anointed as "serious" due their academic pedigree (usually Ivy Leaguers). But the equating of impressive degrees with intellectual seriousness has an especially bad track record for conservatives. Time and again when it comes to the integrity, honest analysis, and basic grasp of facts that are the basic standards of any "serious" scholar, they have failed.

Let's make a list of today's conservatives who currently get the "serious" designation by virtue of their elite education and for not being Louis Gohmert. In light of last week's conspiracy-driven, right-wing attack on Congress, Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz stand out for their unrelenting intellectual dishonesty. Both Hawley (Yale, JD) and Cruz (Princeton BA, Harvard JD) took to the floor of the Senate just hours after right-wing collaborators had vandalized the Capitol and threatened their colleagues out of an unmoored conviction that the 2020 election had been stolen. Multiple recounts, election certifications, and dozens of court cases later, these two Ivy Leaguers shamelessly continued to raise "concerns" about the election's basic fairness. Yet, when Hawley lost his book contract on the dangers of "big tech" with Simon & Schuster over the weekend, the Washington Post's Fred Hiatt expressed a hesitant reservation at a publisher deciding it didn't like the author instead of the manuscript.

On Wednesday, as President Donald Trump prepared to leave office, a Tennessee Republican state lawmaker stood to request a moment of silence for the outgoing president in his "retirement from public service."

State Rep. Susan Lynn made the request after GOP caucus chairman Jeremy Faison led the House in a prayer for President-elect Joe Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.