Pence Welcomes Futile Bid by G.O.P. Lawmakers to
Overturn Election
Vice President Mike Pence signaled his support as 11
Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.
The group, led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, brings to
nearly one-quarter the proportion of Senate Republicans who have broken with
their leaders to join the effort to invalidate the victory of Joseph R. Biden
Jr.
By Luke
Broadwater
Jan. 2,
2021
Updated
8:35 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON
— Vice President Mike Pence signaled support on Saturday for a futile
Republican bid to overturn the election in Congress next week, after 11
Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory when the House and Senate meet to
formally certify it.
The
announcement by the senators — and Mr. Pence’s move to endorse it — reflected a
groundswell among Republicans to defy the unambiguous results of the election
and indulge President Trump’s attempts to remain in power with false claims of
voting fraud.
Every state
in the country has certified the election results after verifying their
accuracy, many following postelection audits or hand counts. Judges across the
country, and a Supreme Court with a conservative majority, have rejected nearly
60 attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to challenge the results.
And neither
Mr. Pence nor any of the senators who said they would vote to invalidate the
election has made a specific allegation of fraud, instead offering vague
suggestions that some wrongdoing might have occurred and asserting that many of
their supporters believe that it has.
The
senators’ opposition to certifying Mr. Biden’s election will not change the
outcome. But it guarantees that what would normally be a perfunctory session on
Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ratify the results of the presidential election
will instead become a partisan brawl, in which Republicans amplify specious
claims of widespread election rigging that have been debunked and dismissed for
weeks even as Mr. Trump has stoked them.
The
spectacle promises to set a caustic backdrop for Mr. Biden’s inauguration in
the coming weeks and reflects the polarized politics on Capitol Hill that will
be among his greatest challenges.
It will
also pose a political dilemma for Republicans, forcing them to choose between
accepting the results of a democratic election — even if it means angering
supporters who dislike the outcome and could punish them at the polls — and
joining their colleagues in displaying unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump, who
has demanded in increasingly angry fashion that they back his bid to cling to
the presidency.
The
conundrum is especially acute for Mr. Pence, who as president of the Senate has
the task of presiding over Wednesday’s proceedings and declaring Mr. Biden the
winner, but has his own future political aspirations to consider as well. On
Friday, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit brought by House Republicans to
pressure Mr. Pence to do otherwise, and instead unilaterally overturn the
results.
But on
Saturday evening, Marc Short, his chief of staff, issued a statement saying
that Mr. Pence “shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud
and irregularities in the last election.”
The vice
president, the statement continued, “welcomes the efforts of members of the
House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise
objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American
people on Jan. 6th.”
In a joint
statement on Saturday, the Senate Republicans — including seven senators and
four who are to be sworn in on Sunday — called for a 10-day audit of election
returns in “disputed states,” and said they would vote to reject the electors
from those states until one was completed. They did not elaborate on which
states.
The group
is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and includes Senators Ron Johnson of
Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of
Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee and Mike Braun of Indiana, and
Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill
Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
Together
with Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who announced this week that he would
object to Congress’s certification of the election results, they bring to
nearly one-quarter the proportion of Senate Republicans who have broken with
their leaders to join the effort to invalidate Mr. Biden’s victory. In the
House, where a band of conservatives has been plotting the last-ditch election
objection for weeks, more than half of Republicans joined a failed lawsuit
seeking to overturn the will of the voters, and more are expected to support
the effort to challenge the results in Congress next week.
Representative
Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has said he will object to certifying the
results, and with Mr. Hawley’s support, that challenge would hold weight,
prompting senators and representatives to retreat to their chambers on opposite
sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to
disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and
Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s
electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is
not expected to this time.
In their
statement, the Republicans cited poll results showing most members of their
party believe the election was “rigged,” an assertion that Mr. Trump has made
for months, and which has been repeated in the right-wing news media and by
many Republican members of Congress.
“A fair and
credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 —
would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would
significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president,”
they wrote. “We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to
protect it.”
They also
acknowledged that their effort was likely to be unsuccessful, given that any
such challenge must be sustained by both the House, where Democrats hold the
majority, and the Senate, where top Republicans including Senator Mitch
McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, have tried to shut it down.
“We fully
expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to
vote otherwise,” the senators wrote.
Senator Amy
Klobuchar of Minnesota, the top Democrat on the Rules Committee with
jurisdiction over federal elections, called the Republican effort a “publicity
stunt” that would ultimately fail, but said it was dangerous nevertheless,
amounting to “an attempt to subvert the will of the voters.” She noted in an
interview that hundreds of millions of votes had already been “counted,
recounted, litigated and state-certified” across the country.
“These
baseless claims have already been examined and dismissed by Trump’s own
attorney general, dozens of courts and election officials from both parties,”
said Mike Gwin, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign.
While
lawmakers have sought to register their opposition to past presidential
election results by challenging Congress’s certification, the move has
generally been more symbolic than substantive, given that the loser had already
conceded and senators rarely joined with members of the House to force a vote.
But as Mr. Trump continues to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud, a
growing number of Republicans in Congress have been eager to challenge the
results, either out of devotion to the president or out of fear of enraging the
base of their party that still reveres him even in defeat.
That is the
case even though the vast majority of them just won elections in the very same
balloting they are now claiming was fraudulently administered.
Mr.
McConnell has discouraged senators from joining the House effort, and Senator
John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican, told reporters the challenge
to the election results would fail in the Senate “like a shot dog,” prompting a
Twitter rebuke from Mr. Trump.
Senator Ben
Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, on Thursday condemned the attempt, calling it a
“dangerous ploy” intended to “disenfranchise millions of Americans.” He accused
fellow Republicans of making a political calculation to try to further their
careers at the expense of the truth by tapping into Mr. Trump’s “populist
base.”
But Josh Holmes,
a Republican strategist and Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff, warned that
those involved in the effort would come to regret their stance.
“Rarely can
you predict with 100% assurance that years from now everyone who went down this
road will wish they had a mulligan,” Mr. Holmes wrote on Twitter.
Senator
Patrick J. Toomey, a Pennsylvania Republican who has announced that he will not
seek re-election in 2022, also blasted the effort, saying that Mr. Hawley, Mr.
Cruz and others were “directly” undermining the “right of the people to elect
their own leaders.”
For years,
Mr. Trump has railed against contests in which he lost, disliked the outcome or
feared he might be defeated. He objected to the results of the Emmys, falsely
claimed President Barack Obama did not win the popular vote, asserted that Mr.
Cruz “stole” a primary victory from him in Iowa in 2016 and predicted that the
election in which he defeated the Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton would be
“rigged.” In the months leading up to November’s election, he also warned that
he would be cheated out of a victory, and refused to commit to a peaceful
transfer of power.
As Mr.
Biden racked up victories in November, Mr. Trump indulged in increasingly
outlandish fictions, spreading disinformation about the election’s results and
encouraging his followers to challenge the vote at every step. In recent weeks,
as his legal defeats have stacked up, the president has become more vitriolic
in his condemnations of Republicans who fail to support his false claims of
having been the true victor in the election, and has lavished praise on those
who parrot his accusations.
On
Saturday, Mr. Trump cheered on the Republican senators who announced they would
object to certifying the election, writing on Twitter: “Our country will love
them for it!”
The vote
tally and procedures in every battleground state that Mr. Trump contests have
been affirmed through multiple postelection audits. Mr. Biden won the election
with over seven million more votes than Mr. Trump and with 306 Electoral
College votes, surpassing the threshold of 270 needed to win the presidency.
Nevertheless,
more than a month after Mr. Biden’s victory, with increasing numbers in their
party marching in lock step with Mr. Trump, some Republicans felt the need on
Saturday to explain why they planned to vote to uphold the results of a
democratic election.
“I swore an
oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and that is
what I will do Jan. 6,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said in a statement.
She is to face voters next November.
Senator
Mitt Romney of Utah warned of the consequences of backing a bid to subvert the
election’s outcome.
“I could
never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the
world,” he said in a statement. “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”
Maggie
Haberman contributed reporting from New York, and Thomas Kaplan from
Washington.
Luke Broadwater covers Congress. He was the lead reporter on a series of investigative articles at the Baltimore Sun that won a Pulitzer Prize and a George Polk Award in 2020. @luk
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