11 Senate Republicans say they will oppose Electoral College results Wednesday
Eleven Senate Republicans on Saturday announced that they will vote for objections to the Electoral College results Wednesday, when Congress convenes in a joint session to formally count the vote.
GOP Sens. Ted Cruz (Texas), Ron Johnson (Wis.), James Lankford (Okla.), Steve Daines (Mont.), John Kennedy (La.), Marsha Blackburn (Tenn.) and Mike Braun (Ind.) and Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyo.), Roger Marshall (Kan.), Bill Hagerty (Tenn.) and Tommy Tuberville (Ala.) said in a joint statement that they will vote against accepting the election results until there is a 10-day audit.
“Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states,” they said. “Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.
“Accordingly, we intend to vote on Jan. 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ … unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed,” they added.
The senators didn’t say in their joint statement if they plan to object to the results from specific states, how they would divvy up those objections or if they would just vote in support of challenges to the Electoral College results if they reach the Senate.
The group’s announcement means that at least a dozen GOP senators, almost a quarter of the caucus, will challenge the election results Wednesday. GOP Sen. Josh Hawley (Mo.) was the first senator to announce he would be joining a band of House conservatives to force a debate and vote on the Electoral College results.
President Trump, who has endorsed efforts to challenge the election results in Congress, has claimed that the election was “rigged” or that there was widespread voter fraud. And the 11 senators, in their joint statement, alleged that the 2020 election included “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud.”
Dozens of attempts by Trump’s legal team to challenge the results in key states have been dismissed by the courts and election experts have repeatedly rejected claims of widespread voter fraud. Then-Attorney General William Barr also said last month that his department had found no widespread voter fraud that could change the outcome of the election.
The objection on Jan. 6 will not change President-elect Joe Biden’s win, but it is putting GOP incumbents up for reelection in 2022 in a political bind because they will have to pick between supporting claims of fraud, which many of them have spoken out against, or voting against the president and potentially fueling a primary challenge.
If an objection has the support of a member of the House and a member of the Senate, the two chambers separate and debate it for up to two hours. Both the House and Senate would then vote on whether to uphold the objection, which would require a majority in both chambers to be successful.
Wednesday’s objections will fail because Democrats control the House and several GOP senators have said they will oppose objections next week.
But Wednesday will mark only the third time since 1887 that Congress has had to debate and vote on an objection. The attempts to change the results in 1969 and 2005 were also unsuccessful.
“I don’t think anybody is anxious to do this, maybe with a few exceptions, obviously, but I think that, you know, now that we’re locked into doing it, we’ll give air to the objections, and people can have their day in court, and we’ll hear everybody out, and then we’ll vote,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), asked about frustration from GOP senators. “But like I said, in the end, I don’t think it changes anything.”
Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) added that objecting during the Wednesday joint session “continues to spread the false rumor that somehow the election was stolen.”
“He said it was the most consequential vote,” Romney recounted to reporters. “I see that as a statement that he believes … it’s a referendum on our democracy.”
“’I did sedition because I was up for re-election’ is a helluva thing to explain to your grandkid,” Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) tweeted.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the top Democrat on the Rules Committee and one of four lawmakers who will help read and count the votes Wednesday, said the call for an election commission “amounts to nothing more than an attempt to subvert the will of the voters.”
“It is undemocratic. It is un-American. And fortunately it will be unsuccessful. In the end, democracy will prevail,” she said in a statement.
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