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Ted Cruz will object when Congress certifies Joe Biden’s election, as 11 GOP senators demand ‘audit’ and 10-day delay

The ‘Trump Eleven’ say the president’s loss in a handful of battlegrounds deserves an emergency inquiry before the Electoral College tally is ratified.

Updated Sunday at 11:40 am with Lindsey Graham critique

WASHINGTON — Sen. Ted Cruz and 10 other GOP senators announced Saturday that they would oppose certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory when Congress meets Wednesday to review the Electoral College outcome, demanding a 10-day delay to allow an emergency “audit” of results in battleground states where President Donald Trump disputes the outcome.

Such a delay would prolong the process until Jan. 16, just four days before the inauguration.

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But the gambit from Cruz and the others will not stop Congress from ratifying Biden’s Electoral College victory, because both the House and Senate would have to uphold objections, and Democrats control the House.

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Biden won a decisive 306-232 electoral vote victory and collected 7 million more votes nationwide than Trump.

“We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it,” Cruz and his colleagues wrote, an assertion his critics deemed Orwellian given that trying to prevent Biden from taking office would require ignoring the will of the electorate and explicitly nullifying tens of millions of votes in four states.

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Cruz led the effort, according to a Senate aide.

On Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., a top Trump ally and chairman of the Judiciary Committee, rejected the call for an emergency commission and audit.

“Proposing a commission at this late date – which has zero chance of becoming reality – is not effectively fighting for President Trump. It appears to be more of a political dodge than an effective remedy,” he said in a statement. “They will need to provide proof of the charges they are making.... They have a high bar to clear.”

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On Saturday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, called it a “pathetic” and “unconstitutional effort to overturn the will of voters.” Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., called it “absurd posturing” in “an attempt to disenfranchise more than 84 million Americans simply because some Republicans don’t like the outcome of a free and fair election.”

David Plouffe, campaign manager for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid, called Cruz and the others “the Trump Eleven.” “They think that’s a badge of honor now,” he said. “But it will be a shameful epitaph for them all.”

Efforts to nullify Biden’s victory have exposed a deep divide among Republicans, between holdouts and those who view such moves as politically unwise or outright anti-democratic.

Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, a Republican, chastised Cruz in no uncertain terms, along with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, who until Saturday was the only senator vowing to object to Biden’s win.

“The effort by Sens. Hawley, Cruz, and others to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in swing states like Pennsylvania directly undermines … the right of the people to elect their own leaders,” tweeted Toomey. “Allegations of fraud by a losing campaign cannot justify overturning an election. They fail to acknowledge that these allegations have been adjudicated in courtrooms across America and were found to be unsupported by evidence.”

Trump has objected to the outcomes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Overturning Biden’s victory would entail nullifying more than 20 million ballots cast in those states.

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“Ideally, the courts would have heard evidence and resolved these claims of serious election fraud,” Cruz and his allies — six senators and four others who will be sworn in as senators Sunday — noted in their demand for an emergency commission to investigate the election. “Twice, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to do so; twice, the Court declined.”

Trump approves

Trump tweeted his approval about Cruz’s move, writing, “An attempt to steal a landslide win. Can’t let it happen!”

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Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, told Axios on Saturday night that Pence shares concerns about irregularities and “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.”

Pence has kept his distance from Trump’s most outlandish claims while taking care not to contradict him.

In fact, 60 federal and state courts have rejected Trump’s allegations that fraud, ballot manipulation or constitutional violations occurred as states expanded mail-in voting during the COVID-19 pandemic —findings that Cruz glossed over in his demand for an audit.

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Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton tried unsuccessfully to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the will of the majorities in the four states where Trump refuses to accept the outcome. Biden’s combined victory margin in those states was 267,204 votes, according to tallies certified by each state ahead of the Dec. 14 Electoral College voting.

By comparison, Trump’s presidency hinged on just 79,646 combined votes in three 2016 battlegrounds: Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Biden’s margin this time around in Pennsylvania (80,555) was nearly double Trump’s four years earlier (46,765). In Michigan, Biden’s 154,188-vote cushion was nearly 15 times the size of Trump’s (10,704).

State election officials from both parties have rejected allegations of fraud. Shortly before resigning as U.S. attorney general, William Barr irked Trump by saying the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread fraud.

Biden’s transition office remained mum on the senators’ move. Mike Collier, a senior adviser to his campaign in Texas and former Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor, blasted Cruz and the others as “traitors” to democracy.

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“Americans will move heaven and earth to rid our Congress of traitors who would vote against the Electoral College and our sacred democracy,” he tweeted. “They are an embarrassment to our country and its values.”

Rep. Colin Allred, D-Dallas, called Cruz’s move an exercise in “cynical partisan politics.”

Rep. Will Hurd, a San Antonio Republican who leaves office Sunday after three terms, noted that as a CIA officer “I saw firsthand how our enemies steal elections and try to interfere in ours.” He warned that Cruz and the others are “playing into our enemies’ hands.... There is a clear winner. It’s not a conservative principle to deny a single American his or her voice.”

Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat, alluded to Cruz’s defense of Trump during his impeachment, quipping that “some of the same people who voted no on impeachment, saying that the remedy for malfeasance is an election, are now saying the remedy for the election is malfeasance.”

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McConnell had hoped to avert Trump loyalty vote

In the Senate, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and the rest of the GOP leadership have been trying to deter members of their caucus from objecting. They recognize that the effort has no chance of overturning Biden’s victory, and hoped to avert votes that will require senators to choose between loyalty to Trump and a commitment to the rule of law.

On Saturday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, reiterated her vow to uphold Biden’s Electoral College victory, saying, “I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, and that is what I will do January 6.”

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“Adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government,” Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican, wrote on Wednesday, blasting fellow Republicans who seek to derail Biden’s victory without evidence as “institutional arsonist members of Congress.”

By some accounts, as many as 140 House Republicans plan to object. Five Texans have announced their intentions to do so: Reps Louie Gohmert of Tyler, Lance Gooden of Terrell, Brian Babin of Woodville, Randy Weber of Friendswood and congressman-elect Ronny Jackson of Amarillo.

Both Hawley and Cruz are expected to seek the GOP nomination for president in 2024, and their moves at this stage are widely seen as efforts to ingratiate themselves with Trump and his supporters. Cruz was runner-up to Trump in 2016.

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Eyes had also been on Sen.-elect Tommy Tuberville of Alabama to join Hawley. Instead, he joined forces with Cruz in the statement issued Saturday, along with Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, James Lankford of Oklahoma, Steve Daines of Montana, John Kennedy of Louisiana, Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, and Mike Braun of Indiana, and Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee.

Texas’ senior senator, John Cornyn, a top adviser to McConnell, called the Electoral College outcome “decisive” last month and said recently that he viewed objections as both an “exercise in futility” and not the right thing to do.

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Polling driving effort

Cruz and his colleagues cite polling that shows that roughly 4 in 10 Americans believe “the election was rigged,” a belief held by two-thirds of Republicans and stoked by Trump’s own relentless — and baseless — allegations to that effect, before and after Election Day.

For Democrats, that amounts to a circular argument: Trump, Cruz and others peddle baseless allegations, which successfully sow doubts among gullible followers, whose opinions the pro-Trump group uses to justify challenging the election outcome.

Some Democrats also taunted Cruz for enabling a president who had leveled similar allegations of fraud against him during their spirited 2016 primary fight. After losing the Iowa caucuses, Trump demanded that result be “nullified … based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz.”

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The Texan and the president have long since reconciled.

“Congress should immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states,” Cruz and his collaborators 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.

“Accordingly, we intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed.

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“We are not naïve. We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise. But support of election integrity should not be a partisan issue. A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before January 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next President. We owe that to the People.”

Cruz and his allies defended their objection by noting that Democratic House members lodged objections in 1969, 2001, 2005, and 2017, joined in 1969 and 2005 by a Democratic senator and forcing votes in both houses.

Not mentioned is that in those episodes, those were fringe players whose efforts were shunned by their own party’s leaders.