It didn't take long for events to dictate that 2021 is going to be another bad year. As if the slowdown in distributing COVID vaccines (which wipes out the optimism their arrival heralded) and the prospect of war with Iran weren't enough, we now have to deal with something most of us - including Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell - had hoped to avoid.
U.S. Senator Joshua Hawley (R-MO), who celebrated his forty-first birthday on New Year's Eve, has announced that, on Wednesday, January 6, when a U.S. Representative objects to a state's electoral college results favoring President-elect Joe Biden when the votes are counted before a joint session of Congress, he, Hawley, will support the objection - which will force a two-hour debate on whether or not to accept the results from said state before the vote count can continue. Hawley has said that, so far, he plans to challenge Pennsylvania's results, but he's left open the possibility of endorsing as many as six challenges to a given state's Electoral College results, which would likely force Congress going into the wee small hours of Thursday, January 7. Eleven more Senate Republicans plan to join him.
Hawley says he's doing this to call to attention the widespread concerns of voter fraud and of the failure of states to follow their own election laws, but no one is buying it. The only widespread concerns of election integrity only exist in the minds of Donald Trump and all those, including Hawley, who curry favor with him. Hawley is either thinking of his re-election chances in 2024 or a possible presidential bid that year. He wants Trump to have his back. And Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who didn't want his caucus to endorse a challenge to Biden's win, has lost control of that caucus so much that he caved and told Republican senators to vote their own conscience.
This stunt will yet further undermine faith in electoral democracy among Americans and set a precedent for future attempts by the Republican Party to overturn the will of the voters. As for the chances of overturning the election to put Trump back in office . . . well, in the incoming 117th Congress, and each chamber has to decide individually the validity of a state's electoral vote result one way of the other. Both chambers have to agree to toss out challenged electoral ballots. With a Democratic majority in the House and 48 Democratic senators plus a few Republicans in both chambers who won't go along with Trump's or Hawley's charade, the Biden electoral votes should be accepted and that will be the end of it. But with so many Republicans forced to go on record as supporting or opposing Trump, it is possible, however unlikely, that every House and Senate Republican will vote to support Trump out of fear of being primaried in a future election by Trump supporters and fear of the power Trump may have within the GOP after he "retires" to Mar-a-Lago.
We can probably count on Mitch McConnell and less extreme GOP senators like Ben Sasse and Susan Collins to support the Biden electoral slates. After all, they just got re-elected, they won't be up again until 2026, and McConnell, who's beginning his seventh term in the Senate today, probably doesn't care about what happens to him anymore, just like he stopped caring about the country long ago. Add Mitt Romney to that corner, too. In the House, you can add Illinois' Republican House member Adam Kinzinger. But given all of the chaos and disorder Wednesday's electoral vote count in Congress is expected to generate (did I happen to mention the planned Trump rally for January 6 outside the Capitol?), it's likely that many members of Congress will be wearing masks not out of COVID concerns but because they're ashamed to show their faces in public.
As for me, I'll probably just sleep through it.
Well, maybe, but one thing could keep me up at night in the days leading up to Wednesday. The same people who assure us that Trump can't overturn the 2020 election are the same people who said that he couldn't win the 2016 election.
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