Vice President Mike Pence has welcomed a bid by 11 GOP senators and senators-elect to delay the certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump in the Electoral College during a formal joint session of Congress this week, CNBC informed.
The senators, led by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, cited allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election for which they provided no evidence and which have been rejected repeatedly by courts around the country.
The move has splintered the party’s Senate caucus, with some members of the leadership expressing opposition. It is expected to be rejected by both the GOP-controlled Senate and the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives.
Pence, as the president of the senate, will preside over the joint session of Congress on Wednesday, where he is supposed to announce the candidates who won the majority of Electoral College votes — President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
However, Pence’s chief of staff Marc Short said the vice president “shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election.”
“The Vice President welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on January 6th,” Short wrote in a statement Saturday.
The Department of Justice has said it did not find evidence of widespread fraud in the election.
If at least one senator and one member of the House of Representatives casts an objection to a state’s results, the joint session is suspended and the House and Senate meet separately for at most two hours to consider the objection. It requires a majority of both chambers of Congress to agree to the objection and reject the Electoral College votes.
In their statement, the senators said they will object to the certification of electors from “disputed states” unless Congress establishes a commission to examine those states’ elections. The commission would conduct an “emergency 10-day audit,” they wrote.
“Once completed, individual states would evaluate the Commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed,” the senators said in the statement.
The effort, the latest among dozens of Republican attempts to overturn Trump’s loss, is unlikely to alter the Electoral College tally, which Biden won 306-232. Biden is expected to be inaugurated on Jan. 20.
While Republicans control the 100-member Senate, Democrats hold a majority of the House of Representatives, making it all-but-impossible for an objection to have a realistic chance of succeeding. Moreover, enough Senate Republicans have come out against the plot to doom it even in that chamber.
Be the first to comment