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Trump Loses Congressional Vote but Will Not Lose the Republican Party
Forty-eight hours after the AP projected Joe Biden as president-elect, Donald Trump established a Save America PAC to secure his takeover of the Republican Party.
Two developments that will occur before Biden is sworn-in as our 46th president will shape our country for the next four years. First, Trump will fail to stop any of Biden’s electoral votes from being overturned when Congress counts them on Jan. 6, 2021. Second, Trump will move to dominate the future of the Republican Party more than any other person.
January 6 will mark Trump’s Waterloo
The final step in certifying that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election occurs on Jan. 6. On the date, the new Congress’s two chambers meet in a joint session to count the electoral votes. It is usually a mere formality, which occurs in every presidential election. However, the Electoral Count Act of 1877 requires only one representative and one senator to object to a state’s slate of electors, temporaily stopping the count.
The objection requires the two chambers to convene separately for a two-hour meeting to debate the objection. Each body then votes whether to accept or reject a state’s slate of electors. Every member of Congress has one vote. The members then reconvene the joint session to report whether their house accepts the electors from the state that has been challenged.
Rep. Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama has become the first member of Congress to publicly announce that he will object to the slate of presidential electors from several states, because he believes there may have been massive fraud. He would need to have just one senator join him to disrupt the joint session. Finding just one Republican senator should be easy, given the responses to a recent Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate.
The newspaper found that fewer than one-quarter of Senate Republicans acknowledge Biden’s victory, and a small number still claim Trump won the election. However, as of Dec. 5, no senators have publicly said they would join Brooks’ objections.
Challenging the certification of the electoral slates will not reverse Biden’s win. It is evident that there is not a majority of…
