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(CNN) The scattershot efforts to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s election victory are coalescing into a movement led by top Republicans determined to exploit a manufactured crisis for broader political gains.
Nearly a dozen more GOP senators, a handful of whom will be sworn-in Sunday, have now announced they will challenge Biden’s clear Electoral College win over President Donald Trump next week during what has traditionally been a ceremonial exercise on Capitol Hill. Their gambit is doomed to fail — they have acknowledged as much — in its immediate objective, but likely to succeed in hardening the conspiracy theory-fueled, right-wing base in Trump’s thrall.
The President is, predictably, cheering on the charade. His chief of staff, Mark Meadows, encouraged his former House colleagues to “fight back” in a Saturday night tweet.
And Vice President Mike Pence — who has sought to keep a safe distance from the more inflammatory claims and behavior of fellow Republicans while subtly egging them on when it suits him — has welcomed congressional Republicans’ challenge. He encourages lawmakers to “bring forward evidence before the Congress,” his chief of staff said in part in a statement Saturday.
The push to cast doubt over the election result is now escalating beyond earlier bids by ambitious Republicans to curry favor with Trump by idly urging on his would-be power grab. The announcement Saturday from Republican senators and senators-elect cut deeper and, framed in a maddening circular logic, argued that Congress should commission an “emergency 10-day audit” of results from “disputed states” because of the volume of “allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”
Those charges, of course, are coming from the same cohort of lawmakers now trying to refashion them as evidence to support their actions. The group’s citation of a poll that underscores voters’ distrust in the election process ignores Trump’s role in ginning up an increasingly paranoiac strain of conservatism — one that is shape-shifting now, in the final days of his presidency, into what is likely to become an enduring and corrosive political faction. That their announcement came on the eve of a new Congress, and for some less than a day before they take their oaths on the Senate floor, provided an immediate preview of Trumpism’s sticking power and how it might manifest itself — with more diplomatic language, but no less authoritarian tendencies — in the coming years.
This newfangled GOP caucus counts a dozen members, including Trump loyalist Sens. Ted Cruz of Texas and Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, along with some new names, like Sen.-elect Roger Marshall of Kansas and former college football coach Tommy Tuberville, the incoming senator from Alabama. The group took shape after Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley announced last week he would contest the election results.
Notably, none of the officials who signed the Saturday statement, nor any of what could be as many as 140 allies in the House, have suggested that the election fraud that so concerns them might have also affected their own races. The fix, as they would have Americans believe, started and stopped at the top of the ticket.
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Article URL : https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/03/politics/trump-republicans-electoral-college-new-congress-democracy/index.html