Congress is set to certify the results of the 2020 presidential election on Wednesday, but the process is expected to be interrupted by unfounded objections by Republicans trying to curry favor with Donald Trump and the base of voters that support him.
Other Republicans have said they will not join efforts to overturn the election result after dozens of state and federal lawsuits, state legislative hearings and elections challenges at the local level have failed to produce a shred of evidence to support Trump’s wild and false claims of voter fraud.
From 1pm ET, Congress will begin certifying the presidential election result, state by state. But any state result is subject to objection by any member of Congress – and if both a senator and a member of the House of Representatives sign on to any one objection, the two chambers must retire for up to two hours to debate the objection.
Here is a short list of the key players to watch:
Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz
Hawley, from Missouri, and Cruz, from Texas, are leading a group of Republican senators who have said they will join objections to state results.
Each politician hopes to be the Republican presidential nominee in 2024, and their willingness to sign on to Trump’s baseless campaign is recognized as being a sign of their political ambitions.
Challenges in the House of Representatives to a state’s presidential election result are not uncommon. The House is four times as large as the Senate and, with every member coming up for election every two years, the chamber is subject to constant turnover and the attending ideological turbulence.
But the Senate has mostly sat out from past wild assaults on the valid results of presidential elections. Until now.
Senators Tom Cotton and Mike Lee
The softness of support among even very conservative-slash-ambitious senators for Trump’s attempt to overturn the election signals the basic weakness of the effort and the series of question marks that lay ahead for the Republican party.
Cotton, a blistering conservative from Arkansas, is also expected to run for president in 2024, while Lee is a conservative ally of Trump and a close ally of Cruz. But each senator has announced that he will not support objections to the state electoral tallies. There’s no telling what voters in a presidential primary three years hence will remember of the current episode, but Cotton for one has declined to join the Trump dead-enders.
Mitch McConnell
The Republican Senate majority leader asked his caucus not to join challenges to the election result, and he dispatched his top lieutenant on national TV to announce that any such challenge “would go down like a shot dog”.
And yet, about a quarter of McConnell’s caucus and a majority of newly elected Republican senators has signed on to Trump’s mission, in direct defiance of the party leader.
How will McConnell handle challenges that he does not support from his own party to election results? Some progressives have indulged fantasies of a catastrophic Republican rift playing out on cable TV.
In reality, most of America will not be watching and whatever rifts open are most likely to feed an internal party struggle such as it may develop.
Nancy Pelosi
The Democrat House speaker will be in charge of responding to objections raised in her chamber to state election results. Widely praised for her expedient and effective handling of the 2019 impeachment inquiry, Pelosi is thought to be organizing a united Democratic front with room for Republican recruits. In any case the battle is playing out on her turf of parliamentary procedure and coalition-building expertise.
The House Republicans
A number of House Republicans, led by some of the hottest firebrands on Capitol Hill such as Alabama’s Mo Brooks and Texas’ Louie Gohmert, have vowed to object to a number of state election results. Unlike their counterparts in the Senate, some of these House members would appear to be acting not out of a cynical political calculus but as true believers in the Trump cause. Many are return figures from the defense of Trump during his impeachment in the fall of 2019.
Mike Pence
As vice-president, Pence is the ceremonial president of the Senate, meaning he will serve as presiding officer for the announcement of Joe Biden’s election victory.
As vice president at the start of 2017, Biden filled a similar role for the announcement of Trump’s victory. But unlike Biden, Pence is serving under a president who wishes to overturn the election result, introducing complications for Pence, who would like to stay on Trump’s good side as another potential 2024 presidential candidate.
Speculative scenarios for an act of indecision or contravention by Pence abound – and seem largely overblown. Senator Chuck Grassley had suggested that Pence might absent himself from the proceedings, but it appears Pence will preside. Most analysts expect him to certify the presidential election result in accordance with the minor and ceremonial capacity allotted to him by the constitution.
Source: US Politics - theguardian.com
