Ted Cruz is spearheading a brand new Senate GOP effort to overturn the 2020 election outcomes

On Saturday, 11 present and incoming Republican senators introduced in a joint assertion that they’d object to the congressional certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral Faculty victory subsequent week in a futile effort at hand outgoing President Donald Trump an unelected second time period in workplace.

The assertion — led by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz — additionally requires the creation of an electoral fee modeled on the same committee assembled in 1877, saying the fee would conduct “an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns within the disputed states.”

Citing “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election regulation, and different voting irregularities,” the letter additionally argues that states needs to be allowed to “consider the Fee’s findings and will convene a particular legislative session to certify a change of their vote, if wanted.”

The times after the 2020 election have certainly seen unprecedented allegations of voter fraud — however all have been discovered to be with out benefit by the judicial system, state elected officers, nationwide safety officers, and elections officers. However, Cruz and the opposite members of the group — Sens. Ron Johnson, James Lankford, Steve Daines, John Kennedy, Marsha Blackburn, and Mike Braun, in addition to Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis, Roger Marshall, Invoice Hagerty, and Tommy Tuberville — keep in any other case.

Lummis, Marshall, Hagerty, and Tuberville have been elected in November and have but to be sworn in, however will likely be seated Sunday forward of a session of Congress devoted to the electoral vote certification on January 6.

Of their plans to object to the certification, the 11 lawmakers be a part of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who introduced his personal plan to object final week, and a large majority of the Home Republican Convention, led by Trump devotees like Rep. Louie Gohmert, who’ve mentioned they are going to do the identical.

“74 million Individuals should not going to be instructed their voices don’t matter,” Hawley mentioned of his effort on December 30, conveniently ignoring the very fact Biden received the election by a margin of greater than 7 million votes over Trump, and that, within the US system, their votes maintain equal weight.

Finally, the Republican plan to object will lead nowhere. Although a bicameral group of Republicans will be capable of efficiently object to the certification of outcomes, the Democratic majority within the Home signifies that the trouble will in the end fail there — and it could not stand a lot of an opportunity within the Senate both, the place the No. 1 and No. 2 Republicans within the chamber — Majority Chief Mitch McConnell and Majority Whip John Thune — have come out towards it.

“Within the Senate, it could go down like a shot canine,” Thune instructed reporters in December 2020. “I simply don’t assume it makes a number of sense to place everyone by means of this when what the final word end result goes to be.”

Different Republicans, together with Sens. Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse, have criticized Hawley’s plan. And In a press release Saturday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) got here out strongly towards the lawmakers’ plan to object.

“I swore an oath to help and defend the Structure of the USA,” she mentioned, “and that’s what I’ll do January 6 — simply as I attempt to do every single day as I serve the folks of Alaska. I’ll vote to affirm the 2020 presidential election.”

Ted Cruz’s “election fee” would examine fraud that’s been repeatedly confirmed nonexistent

Plan to object apart, the “electoral fee” plan backed by Cruz and 10 of his colleagues is nonsense. For one, the fee they demand has no precedent within the trendy period and no reasonable prospects of being convened. What’s extra, the assertion relies on a sequence of spurious claims by Cruz and his colleagues that echo comparable — and equally baseless — election fraud rhetoric to that heard repeatedly from Trump.

Election Day — November 3, 2020 — is now 60 days up to now. In that point, Trump and his Republican allies have filed and misplaced not less than 60 election-related lawsuits in any respect ranges of the state and federal court docket methods alleging voter fraud and different improprieties — and so they have didn’t show their case at each flip.

Recounts in battleground states like Georgia and Wisconsin — each received by Biden — have turned up no proof of large-scale fraud or irregularities that would have affected the outcomes of the election. And in all 50 states and Washington, DC, the election outcomes have been fastidiously reviewed by state officers and authorized as correct.

In brief, 60 days of intense scrutiny has turned up precisely zero causes to imagine the letter’s false declare that “the allegations of fraud and irregularities within the 2020 election” are worrying — and there’s no motive to imagine that an “electoral fee” would flip up a special consequence.

That there have been allegations of fraud as by no means earlier than is true, however as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes identified on Sunday, these have been deceptive efforts led by Trump, and bolstered by his allies, like Cruz, to overturn the election’s rightful outcomes.

Cruz and his allies cite the outcomes of this effort of their assertion Saturday that widespread perception within the existence of voter fraud — a form of warped “the place there’s smoke, there’s fireplace” argument — necessitates the creation of an election fee.

“Reuters/Ipsos polling, tragically, reveals that 39% of Individuals imagine ‘the election was rigged’,” the group mentioned Saturday. “That perception is held by Republicans (67%), Democrats (17%), and Independents (31%).”

That’s an correct reporting of the ballot’s outcomes — but it surely does conveniently pass over the probably motive for that widespread perception.

In actuality, the Republican base has been inundated with evidence-free voter fraud rhetoric from each nook of the right-wing universe — from Trump’s Twitter feed to Fox Information to stump speeches by Republican senators — nearly nonstop since Trump’s election defeat. There’s a direct line between Cruz’s rhetoric and the issue he diagnoses: As Hayes put it on Twitter, “They’ve spent months mendacity to folks, telling them the election was stolen and now flip round and cite the truth that many individuals imagine them as proof!”

Finally, Saturday’s assertion is simply the most recent foray in a flailing Republican effort to maintain Trump in workplace in opposition to the need of the folks. Provided that any problem to certification may be dissolved by a majority vote, and that there are greater than sufficient opponents to those challenges in each the Home and Senate, Cruz’s plan appears unlikely to work.

Biden is poised to once more be affirmed the following president on January 6 forward of his January 20 inauguration. But when Cruz and his colleagues are as genuinely involved a couple of “deep mistrust of our democratic processes” that “poses an ongoing menace to the legitimacy of any subsequent administrations” as they declare, their very own position in disrupting belief within the electoral course of deserves evaluate.