Republican Sen. Ted Cruz (TX) and a group of 10 GOP lawmakers on Saturday said they intend to object to votes from electors in certain states won by Joe Biden during a joint congressional session meant to certify the President-elect’s win next week.
“We intend to vote on January 6 to reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified,'” Cruz and a group of ten senators and senators-elect said in a statement.
The senators and senators-elect said that Congress should launch a probe to conduct a 10-day “emergency audit” of the election returns in states where the results are disputed. The call comes as President Trump and his allies have repeatedly dismissed a series of post-election audits that have shown little evidence of fraud.
“By any measure, the allegations of fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election exceed any in our lifetimes,” the lawmakers said, reigniting conspiracy theories of voter fraud that have been debunked many times over. Without the probe, the group said they will object to the certification of Biden’s win during a joint congressional session on Wednesday in an effort first reported by Fox News.
Joining Cruz’s desperate effort, include Republican Sens. Ron Johnson (WI), James Lankford (OK), Steve Daines (MT); John Kennedy (LA), Marsha Blackburn (TN), and Mike Braun (IN). A group of four incoming senators have also pledged to join the last-ditch move to overturn the election results. Among them, Sens.-elect Bill Hagerty (TN), Cynthia Lummis (WY), Roger Marshall (KS) and Tommy Tuberville (AL) who was praised by Trump in recent weeks for suggesting that he might back an objection to President-elect Biden’s win next week.
In a separate move earlier this week Republican Sen. Josh Hawley (MO) vowed to object to the certification of the Electoral College votes claiming without evidence that a handful of states lost by Trump including Pennsylvania had failed to follow their own election laws.
Dozens of legal challenges filed by the Trump campaign and its supporters have been tossed out by judges across the country, including Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-TX) recent lawsuit intended to hand Vice President Mike Pence the authority to effectively overturn the will of the people and decide who will be president.
“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,” the lawmakers said. “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.”
In the absence of an appointed commission that would effectively prepare findings that states could use to justify a change of their vote, group has said they will object to certifying Biden’s win.
“We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it,” the group claimed.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) has already cautioned members of his party against the doomed-to-fail move to object to Biden’s win. That call was echoed by Senate Majority Whip John Thune (R-SD) who said the move would “go down like a shot dog” in the Senate.
Earlier this week Sen. Ben Sasse (R-NE) also urged fellow Republican lawmakers to resist what he called a “dangerous ploy” to object to the election results which he said would be antithetical to democracy amid a lack of evidence.
