A crowd at the country’s largest right-wing summit applauded US Senator Josh Hawley when he announced that he opposed the results of the 2020 presidential election after a deadly Capitol insurrection among Donald Trump supporters fueled by his lie that the election was stolen them.
“On January 6, I opposed the Electoral College certification – you may have heard of it,” he said, standing up for a standing ovation at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, Florida, on Friday. “I got up and said, ‘We should have a debate on electoral integrity’.”
He said that “the left” tried to “cancel me, censor me, expel me, shut me out” by his decision to try to block the results of the Electoral College.
“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.
Several panel discussions and important comments at the CPAC 2021 sought to reenact or amplify lies about the 2020 presidential election, including speeches by high-level Republicans and right-wing figures raising questions about “electoral integrity” after the loss of the former president.
Matt Schlapp, president of the American Conservative Union, which hosts the CPAC, told CNN ahead of the conference that “we are going to spend a lot of time analyzing what happened in the states”.
“Just because you failed in court doesn’t mean you don’t have a good case,” he said.
Friday’s schedule also included comments from Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Florida Sen. Rick Scott, who also sought to reject Electoral College votes to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Hawley was the first senator to announce that he would reject election results by repeating the false claim that some states did not follow election laws in the 2020 election.