WASHINGTON – More than 100 Republican lawmakers in the U.S. House of Representatives and a dozen senators say they will join an almost certainly futile effort on Wednesday to try to block certification from the Electoral College vote, showing Democrat Joe Biden defeated President Donald Trump in the November elections.
The certification of the Electoral College’s vote 306-232 in favor of Biden, a constant presence on Washington’s political scene for almost half a century, is the last step before he is elected the 46th president of the country on January 20.
Both chambers of Congress would need to defend the challenges to Biden’s victory for the election result to be overturned. But Democrats closely control the House and will certainly certify Biden’s victory, while the Democratic minority in the Senate, along with some Republicans who recognized Biden’s victory, will likely do the same in the Senate.
Trump, who for weeks made baseless claims that he was defrauded in the election for a second four-year term, continues to root for protests against his defeat, a result that will make him the fifth U.S. president in 245 years of the country’s history. lose candidacy for re-election after a single term.
“An attempt to steal an overwhelming victory,” Trump said on Twitter over the weekend. “I can’t let that happen!”
He tweeted a video inviting his supporters to Mass in Washington on Wednesday to protest Biden’s certification as the winner of the election, saying it “could be the biggest event” in the city’s history.
Trump lost dozens of legal challenges to the election result, including twice in the Supreme Court. Ultimately, a federal appeals court on Saturday night maintained the rejection, by a Trump-appointed first instance judge, of a lawsuit aimed at giving Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, the power to reject electoral candidacies. Biden winners in several states and instead choose slates from Trump voters to overturn the election result and keep him in power.
Pence is due to chair on Wednesday what is, in most cases, a ceremonial role in a joint session of Congress on the counting of electoral votes that have already been certified by officials from the country’s 50 states and the national capital, Washington.
On Saturday night, Marc Short, Pence’s chief of staff, said in a statement that the vice president “shares the concerns of millions of Americans about electoral 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 their authority under the law to raise objections and present evidence before Congress and the American people on January 6. “.
But ultimately, as has happened several times in the history of the United States, Pence, as vice president and president of the Senate, will be tasked with announcing his own defeat for Vice President-elect Kamala Harris and Trump for Biden, once the electoral vote is counted and Republican disputes heard and presumably rejected.
Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri announced last week that he would challenge Biden’s victory, along with the House protest of dozens of lawmakers led by Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama. Hawley’s protest, specifically challenging Biden’s victory in the state of Pennsylvania with 20 electoral votes, was followed on Saturday by 11 other Republican senators led by Ted Cruz from Texas and included four senators elected in November who took office in the new Congressional session. on Sunday.
The 11 asked for a 10-day audit of election results in “disputed states”, saying they would vote to reject voters in those states until the audit was completed.
Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican, did not join the protest against voting in his state, saying that “a fundamental and defining characteristic of a democratic republic is the people’s right to elect their own leaders. The effort by Senators Hawley, Cruz and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in undecided states like Pennsylvania directly undermines that right. ”
One of Trump’s supporters, Wisconsin Senator Ron Johnson, told NBC’s “Meet the press” show on Sunday that he joined the protest against the result of the Electoral College because, “We have tens of millions of people who think that this election has been stolen.”
But another Trump supporter, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said that proposing a commission two weeks before his inauguration “is not an effective fight for President Trump. It appears to be more of a political escape than an effective remedy. “
In announcing their protest on Saturday, Cruz and the other senators acknowledged the supposed futility of their effort, saying: “We hope that the majority, if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, will vote otherwise” against the annulment of the Biden’s victory.
The Senate’s top Republican legislator, majority leader Mitch McConnell, after weeks of refusing to acknowledge Biden’s victory, congratulated Biden and Harris as election winners after the Electoral College votes were cast in mid-December. McConnell was unsuccessful in urging Republican lawmakers to give up on contesting the outcome.
Trump also tweeted on Sunday morning about the result in southern Georgia, where he lost to Biden by just under 12,000 votes out of 5 million votes.
“I spoke with Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton County and election fraud in Georgia,” said Trump. “He did not want or was unable to answer questions such as the ‘ballot under the table’ coup, destruction of ballots, out-of-state ‘voters’, dead voters and more. He has no idea! ”
Raffensperger, a Republican, replied: “Respectfully, President Trump: what you are saying is not true. The truth will come out. “
The vote in Georgia was initially counted, and then recounted twice, with Biden winning three times, the first time that a Democratic presidential candidate has conquered the state since 1992.
Jody Hice, a Republican congressman from Georgia sworn in for a fourth term on Sunday, was re-elected in the same vote that Trump lost in the state.
But Hice said in a tweet that his first concern at the new Congress would be “Fighting for fair elections, objecting to fraud on January 6! Freedom must be defended! ”