For the next two Fridays we will present our annual year-end awards, as usual. Last year, I opened the nomination field up to readers to see who you would consider for each award category, and I got some excellent suggestions, so I thought I'd do the same this time around, too.

It certainly has been an interesting year (in the "may you live in interesting times" curse sense of the word), so I'm sure everyone has their own ideas about who deserves an award this time around the sun. So think back over the last 12 months and let me know who you'd consider worthy of any of the following award categories. You can also look back to last year's columns (Part 1 and Part 2) to see who won the last time around.

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As we begin the final week of 2017's congressional calendar, it is worth noting how ridiculous the whole process has now become. This becomes painfully obvious when you compare what has been done versus what remains to be done. Because after the final votes on the GOP's Christmas gift to their wealthy donors (expected Tuesday and Wednesday), an entire year's worth of problems are supposedly going to be dealt with -- before the end of Friday. No wonder the public holds Congress in such low esteem.

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Democrats -- and not a few Republicans as well -- spent most of this week metaphorically dancing on Roy Moore's political grave. To the very end, Moore proved to be a rather cartoonish villain, riding up to the polls on a horse he couldn't even control (named -- you just can't make this stuff up -- "Sassy"). This led to much ribaldry at his expense, after he lost the election Tuesday night, most of which ended with the refrain: "...and the horse you rode in on!"

Doug Jones pulled off a spectacular upset in Alabama's special Senate election, one that will be long remembered by both parties (indeed, even as Scott Brown winning Ted Kennedy's old seat is now remembered... but more on that in a bit). In doing so, Jones placed Donald Trump in the category of "three-time loser," since the last three big races Trump inserted himself into all led to crushing defeats for his chosen candidates (Virginia governor, Alabama's GOP primary, and then Tuesday's general election). Say it loud, say it proud: "President LOSER! Sad!"

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Donald Trump's election spurred a political backlash. Diverse groups took it upon themselves to protest what had happened to their country, from the massive Women's March On Washington (held the day after Trump's swearing-in) to the "Indivisible" groups that soon spontaneously popped up across America. "Resist!" was the battle cry, leading some to name the entire movement "the resistance." Cynical observers of Washington politics (and yes, I was among them at times) wondered whether the whole thing would eventually peter out or whether it could continue long enough to be a factor in the 2018 midterm elections. After a year's time, though, there are no signs that it is waning. In fact, this resistance is showing a dramatic degree of persistence.

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Can Democrats retake control of not just the House of Representatives but also the Senate in 2018? Well, they'd pretty much have to run the tables to do so, but with last night's Alabama's upset victory by Doug Jones, what has changed is that it is now a distinct possibility. While many Democrats are giddily celebrating their surprise win, they should also take the time to examine the factors present not just in Alabama but also in the other races that have happened over the past year, to identify the key factors in winning. Because if they've got any chance at all of taking the Senate, they should work as hard as possible to maximize what has been going well for them.

Before I get to that, let's take a closer look at what happened last night in Alabama. The first and most obvious conclusion to draw is that Trump is now a three-time loser. He has blundered into three statewide races in the past two months, and he has wound up on the losing side in all three. First there was the governor's race in Virginia, then the Alabama primary (where Trump backed the wrong horse), and then last night's special Senate election where Trump actively campaigned for Roy Moore only to see him lose. That's 0-for-3, folks. This might lead many Republican candidates next year to quietly beg the White House for President Trump not to get involved with their races, but it's pretty early to predict that drastic a GOP move away from Trump. But there's no denying it -- of late, the Trump ballot box magic does not extend to anyone not named "Trump," it seems. This is no real surprise when his job approval ratings are so dismal (Monmouth just posted a poll where only 32 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump's doing -- less than one-third of the public, in other words).

Even in Alabama, Trump doesn't have the influence he once had. Last year, Trump won the state with 62 percent of the vote -- by a whopping 28 percent margin. In yesterday's exit polls, this lead had evaporated completely. When Alabama voters were asked whether they approved of the job Trump was doing, the results were tied at 48 percent approval and 48 percent disapproval. This means Trump support has eroded by the entirety of that 28 percent. In one year. In Alabama.

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Doug Jones will be the next senator from Alabama, according to all media sources. With over 90 percent of the votes counted, Jones snatched away the lead that Roy Moore had been holding for almost the entire night. Rural votes got counted first, but when the urban votes came in, they propelled Jones into the lead. Alabama has stunned the nation with this upset victory -- the first Democrat they'll have in the U.S. Senate in a quarter-century.

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I originally wrote "Trump Hits New Low" as this article's title, but then realized that it was far too generic a headline. After all, Trump hits new lows all the time, in many shocking and unusual ways. A sitting president endorsing an accused child molester to sit in the U.S. Senate, for instance. So I clarified it, since this is a more qualitative thing -- Trump has indeed hit a new all-time low in the polls. As of this writing, his daily job approval average (as calculated by Real Clear Politics) is a dismal 37.3 percent. Trump's job disapproval also hit a record high, to now stand at 57.9 percent. This is also (not surprisingly) the most he's ever been underwater in the polls -- a negative gap of 20.6 points.

To briefly put these numbers in some historical perspective, during Barack Obama's entire two terms in office, he only slipped below 40 percent for a single day. On December 13, 2013 -- when Obama was suffering from two simultaneous political blows (the government shutdown in October and the disastrous rollout of the new Obamacare website) -- Obama was only at 39.8 percent average job approval, while 55.9 percent of Americans disapproved of the way he was doing his job. That was Obama's worst day ever, since for the entire other eight years of his presidency, he stayed above 40 percent approval. Trump is now two or more points worse than that, in both directions.

George W. Bush didn't do so well, of course. But even Dubya stayed above 40 percent for his entire first term. It wasn't until November of 2005 that Bush sank down to 38 percent approval. Bush continued to slide downwards, hitting bottom the month before Obama was elected in 2008, when he only had 25.3 percent job approval, and 69.3 percent disapproval. So things could indeed be worse for Trump. He's still 12 whole points above Bush's worst showing.

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In the same week that Time magazine gave its "Person Of The Year" award to the #MeToo movement, three members of Congress resigned because of it. The last week anything similar happened, according to historians, was during the Civil War, over the issue of slavery. On a single day in January of 1861, five senators resigned (as their states seceded from the Union). One historian noted: "If you look over the history of the 20th century in Congress, there just is no comparable event."

John Conyers Jr., Al Franken, and Trent Franks all announced their resignations this week -- two Democrats and one Republican. There are several others under pressure to resign on both sides of the aisle as well, so this may only be the beginning and not the end of the trend.

Politically, so far, the Democrats are in the winning position of taking the moral high road. Democrats, on the whole, have reacted to these scandals by drumming the offenders out. Republicans don't have much of a moral leg to stand on, and are left with weak complaints that the Democrats didn't act fast enough. However, they are hamstrung both by Donald Trump being in the Oval Office and by the special election race in Alabama, where they truly are proving they want to win no matter what the political cost. And now they've even been denied the "whataboutism" argument.

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Today was a sad day for progressives, as Al Franken took to the floor of the Senate to announce he will be stepping down from his seat due to the multiple allegations of sexual misconduct which have been made against him. Franken was seen by many as one of the best newcomers to politics in the past decade, an intelligent and unrelenting voice strongly supporting a very progressive agenda. So his loss is felt more deeply than some other random Democratic senator (who was a lot less well-known) would have been. Franken was even being talked about as a possible presidential contender in 2020, but that now seems like an impossibility. However, even before the news broke yesterday that Franken was on the brink of resigning, I've been wondering about a larger argument being made -- that of whether the voters aren't the ultimate jury for such allegations against politicians. Which, today, brings me to the question of whether Al Franken might just redeem himself politically by running for the seat he will soon be vacating when it comes up again for election, in 2020.

At first glance, that seems pretty far-fetched, and it may seem overly partisan of me to even suggest such a thing. I'll address these in reverse order, since what made me consider the idea of what role the voters play in the outcome of these scandals is the upcoming Senate special election in Alabama, the election of Donald Trump, and even the original election of Bill Clinton back in 1992. So my thought processes haven't been as partisan as might originally be assumed.

At the heart of it is a very basic question: how much do scandals matter to the voters? Sometimes they matter a lot, and sometimes they don't. Whenever any supporter of Donald Trump is faced with the question of the accusations of Trump's sexual misconduct, they usually reply with some version of: "Well, the voters knew all about it, and he won anyway -- so it's not even worth discussing now." The voters have spoken, in other words, so who are we to second-guess their judgment?

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Republicans like to boast about how their current plan to reform the tax code is the biggest such effort since the 1980s. They especially like this line because it references Saint Ronald of Reagan [pause for GOP genuflections], whose irreproachable sanctity is about all the Republican Party can even agree upon, these days. But back in Reagan's day, Congress spent something like two years developing their tax code overhaul, with at least six months of that spent in committee hearings and bipartisan work toward a common goal. That common goal was to reduce taxes on individuals and increase them on corporations. None of that is true this time around, of course, as Republicans only even have a prayer of passing anything these days (despite controlling both houses of Congress) by rushing things so hastily that nobody has a chance to talk about what is in the massive bill. That two-year process will be smushed into a few paltry weeks, with a self-imposed Christmas deadline. Also, the end goal this time is exactly the opposite -- massively reduce the taxes corporations pay by increasing the share individuals pay.

All of this means that the American public has much less time to process what is happening, which is by design (of course). Republicans know that the longer people have to examine their tax plan, the more the public will learn about what it actually does. And, so far, the more the public learns about it the more they hate it. Overwhelming majorities see the GOP tax "reform" as nothing short of redistribution upwards -- which screws over the middle class (once again) in order to provide lavish goodies for those at the top of the income scale, and Wall Street. Since this is the actual bedrock upon which the GOP tax bill was constructed, it is impossible to hide its inherent nature for very long.

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