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Talks about implementing a federal licensing system gained some traction a couple years ago when New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker introduced the Federal Firearm Licensing Bill, which would have expanded the criteria used to screen prospective gun buyers. Under this plan, attorneys general would have more information about prospective gun owners and could deny licenses to people who violate stalking restraining orders, as well as gun traffickers and people with histories of making threats of violence. Even though the National Rifle Association might try to tell you differently, these are not controversial early steps in a massive gun grab. These are modest expansions of a failing background check system. Unfortunately, this bill died in the Senate.

Grace was reported missing Friday around 6:30 p.m. ET and was found deceased about two hours later in woods nearby, according to a news release from St. Joseph County Metro Homicide Unit Assistant Commander Dave Wells.

Ms Montgomery's motion to stay execution is granted to allow the court to conduct a hearing to determine Ms Montgomery's competence to be executed.

"Ms. Montgomery's current mental state is so divorced from reality that she cannot rationally understand the government's rationale for her execution.

"As the court found, Mrs Montgomery 'made a strong showing' of her current incompetence to be executed. "Mrs Montgomery has brain damage and severe mental illness that was exacerbated by the lifetime of sexual torture she suffered at the hands of caretakers," the attorney added.

It is the second time that Montgomery's execution has been postponed. Her execution date was originally set for last December - but a stay was put in place after her attorneys contracted Covid-19

The last woman to be executed by the US government was Bonnie Heady, who died in a gas chamber in Missouri in 1953, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.Federal executions had been on pause for 17 years before President Donald Trump ordered them to resume earlier last year.There are suggestions that Montgomery now may even escape the death penalty entirely, as President-elect Joe Biden - who is due to take office on 20 January - has said he will seek to end federal executions.

The rift between Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence has dominated their final days in office — not least because the vice president has the power under the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office with support of the cabinet. The House voted on Tuesday demanding that Mr. Pence take such action or else it would impeach Mr. Trump.

The clash is the third time in 20 years that a departing president and vice president came to conflict in their last days.

Mr. Pence ultimately discovered that loyalty to Mr. Trump only matters until it does not. Tension between the two had grown in recent months as the president railed privately about Mr. Pence.

When Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the election results were rejected at every turn by state officials and judges, Mr. Trump was told, incorrectly, that the vice president could stop the final validation of the election of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. in his role as president of the Senate presiding over the Electoral College count.

On Thursday, the day after the siege, Mr. Pence stayed away from the White House, avoiding Mr. Trump. The next day, he went in, but spent most of the day at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building next door, where he held a farewell party for his staff.

Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence plans to attend Mr. Biden’s inauguration, then expects to divide time between Washington and Indiana, possibly starting a leadership political committee, writing a book and campaigning for congressional Republicans.

School food programs have been working hard: offering groceries, pre-prepared meals and everything in between. But as we've reported, it often isn't enough.

Congress passed a law giving families the cash value of the meals they missed when schools were closed.

if your family didn't have food stamps already, you might get a debit card in the mail with hundreds of dollars on it to spend at any grocery store. Families were eligible for $117 per child per month.

all by itself, Pandemic EBT, as it was known, lifted between 2.7 million and 3.9 million children out of hunger.

Congress reauthorized the benefits for this current school year on Oct. 1. And the benefit was supposed to be extended to younger children as well. The potential value, estimates Bauer: $12 billion.

So far, so good. But the plan ran into a wall of bureaucracy. One complication was that this fall, not every school around the country was closed all month. Closures varied week to week, state to state, district to district, and even school to school.

States were supposed to calculate the number of missed meals and give the money out equitably.

And so as a result, everything has been in a holding pattern."

The U.S. Department of Agriculture didn't issue guidance to states on plans for how to do this for six weeks. So far, they have approved only the plans from Massachusetts, Indiana and Rhode Island. And they haven't yet touched the issue of how to give out the money to children under 6.

USDA remains committed to providing states with technical assistance that delivers benefits to eligible children and responds to changes in schools' instructional models and children's eligibility over the course of the school year. USDA will continue to actively partner with states to understand their concerns, streamline processes, and provide benefits in accordance with our authority."

"The long and short of it is for the past three-plus months, states should have been able to distribute more than $100 of food benefits per child [per month]," she says. "And USDA is not making it easy for any state to roll out this program."

“We’re not going to merge into some globalist, communist system, it will not happen. There will be a lot of bloodshed if it comes down to that, trust me.” The other members of Mr. Schaffer’s band have said they didn’t condone or support the riot.

Prosecutors say Mr. Betancur scaled scaffolding on the Capitol, posed in a photo with a Confederate battle flag, and “has voiced homicidal ideations, made comments about conducting a school shooting and researched mass shootings.”

The Jan. 7 post was copied and pasted on another social-media site, where it was viewed by others at least 54,000 times, prosecutors said.

The federal death chamber, at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., likely will be mothballed after Mr. Higgs’s execution. No further executions currently are scheduled, and Mr. Biden, who has called for the legal abolition of capital punishment, is unlikely to approve any others. With Mr. Higgs’s execution, 50 inmates will remain on the federal death row, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which is critical of capital punishment.

Mr. Higgs delivered a final statement before he was put to death. “The tone of his voice when he said his final words was calm but in substance Higgs was defiant,” according to an Associated Press pool report. “‘I’d like to say I am an innocent man,’ he said, mentioning the three women by name. ‘I did not order the murders.’”

Following the execution, the prison released a statement addressed to Mr. Higgs from Ms. Jackson’s younger sister, whom it did not identify by name. “When the day is over, your death will not bring my sister and the other victims back. This is not closure, this is the consequence of your actions,” it said.

The government, arguing that litigating the issue would needlessly delay Mr. Higgs’s execution, asked the Supreme Court to overrule the lower courts. Friday’s order did just that, directing “the prompt designation of Indiana” as the state whose death penalty procedures should be followed. The majority provided no legal explanation for the decision, but in prior cases some conservative justices have complained that condemned inmates game the system by filing last-minute appeals to prolong their lives.

As the members of Congress listened to a clerk read it, they often broke into applause, stunned that their new president had found a language so compelling.

"I don't want to waste a whole lot of time on this because this is what Donald Trump and maybe some of the media want," Sanders said. "But anybody who knows me, knows that it's incomprehensible that I would think that a woman could not be president to the United States. Go to YouTube today. They have some video of me 30 years ago talking about how a woman could become president of the United States."

Tuesday night brought the most substantive foreign policy debate of the Democratic race to date, with tensions flaring in the Middle East bringing the issue to the forefront.

A short, but direct, debate between Warren and Buttigieg on health care highlighted not only their key differences in the race, but how the two candidates are likely to go after each other in the coming months.

Klobuchar needed a star turn in Tuesday's debate to catapult her out of fifth place in Iowa -- the state on which her hopes for the nomination swing.

The former vice president has arguably the single most important asset of any Democratic 2020 candidate: Deep, consistent support from black voters -- the constituency that will decide the South Carolina primary and tip a large share of the delegates on Super Tuesday.

Buttigieg was asked directly about his struggle to win over black voters and said that "the black voters that know me best are supporting me," pointing to backers in South Bend.

"The biggest mistake we can make is take black votes for granted. I never will," he said.

If Buttigieg is the best of the debaters among the top six, then the former vice president is the worst.

Sanders' dismissiveness about Warren's statement that he had told her a woman couldn't win the White House in 2020 -- "I didn't say it," he claimed -- bothered me. Sanders tried to portray the issue as immaterial -- hatched by Republicans and the media to distract voters.

Simply put, the billionaire businessman looked badly out of his depth. He struggled badly to make the case that he was better equipped than his rivals to manage the country's foreign policy -- his answer amounted to the fact that he has traveled a lot internationally (and, no, I am not kidding) -- and things didn't get much better for him from there.

A letter from Giuliani to then-President-elect Zelensky requesting a meeting in his capacity as the President's personal attorney.Text messages that show Parnas' communications with Zelensky aides where he pursued a meeting between Zelensky and Giuliani and provided negative information about Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden.A previously undisclosed letter from Giuliani to Zelensky asking for a meeting in mid-May of last year.There are also cryptic text messages suggesting that Yovanovitch's movements were being tracked.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar called the impeachment hearings against Trump a "decency check" on American government.

After nearly a month of waiting, we appear to have a trial date. Several things still need to happen, but if the House transmits the articles of impeachment on Wednesday as expected, that kicks off a series of events that culminate in Trump's Senate impeachment trial beginning next Tuesday.

Asked if the trial will be over by the time Trump is slated to deliver his State of the Union address -- scheduled for February 4 -- Republican Sen. Kevin Cramer of North Dakota said, "I wouldn't bet on that myself." President Bill Clinton gave his 1999 State of the Union address in the midst of his own impeachment trial.

"I solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be) that in all things appertaining to the trial of the impeachment of Donald Trump, now pending, I will do impartial justice according to the Constitution and laws: so help me God."

The next step is a vote in the House to appoint impeachment managers. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says she'll announce their names Wednesday morning. That vote sets off choreographed steps that lead us to a trial.

While Trump on Monday pushed the idea of Republicans simply dismissing the charges, it is growing clear there will be a substantive trial and, depending on how the arguments go, there's a pretty good chance there will be witness testimony, too.

The question of whether to vote on dismissing the articles before the trial is clearly splitting the GOP. Sen. David Perdue, a Georgia Republican who talks to Trump and advises him regularly, said he is still interested in the motion to dismiss and hinted Republicans may need to step up and force a vote on it. But GOP Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, now a key Trump ally, said flat out that a motion to dismiss was not realistic and should not happen. Read more on the divide.

The Senate could vote on a resolution laying out parameters for the trial.

Who will the House managers be? It's not yet clear who Pelosi will pick to deliver arguments in the Senate on behalf of the House. Adam Schiff, the House Intelligence Committee chairman, is a good bet. Other than that? We will find out Wednesday.

One key Republican to watch in terms of votes on procedural matters during impeachment is Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah. He has expressed a desire to hear from witnesses.

Sen. Tim Kaine, the Virginia Democrat pushing the war powers resolution to limit Trump's military actions in Iran, tweaked it this week to gain some more Republican support. He told reporters Tuesday he has 51 votes to pass the resolution through the Senate. He said GOP Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Todd Young of Indiana and Susan Collins of Maine support the resolution.

"I've got 51 declared votes on version two, on the motion to discharge, and passage. So I've got a version on which I have 51 votes, but the timing on version two is different than version one," he told reporters.

Here's why. Sanders and Warren are two of the three or four Democrats with the best chance of winding up as the party's presidential nominee this November. There is an active disagreement between the two over whether, at a meeting in December 2018, Sanders told Warren that he did not believe a woman could be elected president. Warren says he did. Sanders says he didn't.

That's where I come down, too. If this was former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg calling each other liars over a disputed meeting, it's hard for me to believe supporters of Sanders and Warren would be similarly disinterested in pursuing who is right and who is lying. Or if you want to be charitable about it: Why there is such a clear misunderstanding of what happened in that meeting in December 2018?

The point here is that both of these people can't be telling the truth. And we still haven't gotten to the bottom of who is lying (or misunderstanding) and why. So whether or not the candidates want to move on, we shouldn't. Because if you want to be the Democratic nominee against the most truth-challenged President in American history, then your commitment to honestly -- no matter how uncomfortable -- is of the utmost importance.

Kuster is Buttigieg's sixth congressional endorsement. Rep. Dave Loebsack of Iowa backed the former mayor on Sunday. Earlier this month, Rep. Anthony Brown of Maryland became the first Congressional Black Caucus member to endorse Buttigieg. Retiring Rep. Pete Visclosky of Indiana, along with Rep. Kathleen Rice of New York, backed Buttigieg in November 2019. And Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia endorsed the former mayor in April 2019.

it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.

The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it.

In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

“In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”

He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo

Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition

Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net” to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are

Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.”

When a user uploads a photo of a face into Clearview’s system, it converts the face into a vector and then shows all the scraped photos stored in that vector’s neighborhood — along with the links to the sites from which those images came.

Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses, but the operation was bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on credit card debt,” Mr. Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had some of those.”

The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners

Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.

They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,”

The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he probably wouldn’t have been identified without the ability to search social media for his face. The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company

Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool

The company’s most effective sales technique was offering 30-day free trials to officers, who then encouraged their acquisition departments to sign up and praised the tool to officers from other police departments at conferences and online, according to the company and documents provided by police departments in response to public-record requests. Mr. Ton-That finally had his viral hit.

Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens and input into the software, without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the detective wrote in the email, provided to The Times by two researchers,

Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he said. Its nationwide database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES, Clearview’s algorithm doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the camera.

“With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.”

Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the photos in Clearview’s database are taken at eye level. Much of the material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on ceilings or high on walls.

Despite that, the company said, its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party

One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.

Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says its customer-support employees won’t look at the photos that the police upload.

Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them.

Because the police upload photos of people they’re trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability to manipulate the results that the police see.

After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a “software bug.”

“It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”

But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin

Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States.

We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”

“I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”

Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he said.

Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name

Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity.

Speaking to reporters in Conway, New Hampshire, on Sunday, Sanders said he was "very proud" to have Jayapal's endorsement while touting her advocacy of "Medicare for All."

The Sanders campaign also announced on Sunday that Jayapal will join the presidential hopeful in Des Moines, Iowa, on Monday for a campaign rally.

With an impeachment trial looming in the Senate, the presence of high-profile surrogates on the campaign trail has taken on an added importance to senators like Sanders, Warren, and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar

Meanwhile, primary rivals like former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg are free to campaign across Iowa.

"But he also wants to make clear his commitment to earning the support and trust of every voter in South Carolina

Buttigieg has struggled in the polls in South Carolina, especially with African American voters, despite polling at or near the top in several early primary states.

Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar were among just a few candidates not slated to attend the South Carolina event -- though Klobuchar communications director Tim Hogan said in a tweet that Klobuchar will attend the prayer service in Columbia ahead of an early speaking slot in Iowa at the Brown and Black forum.

"Amy is attending the prayer service on Monday in South Carolina and the Iowa Brown and Black Presidential Forum on the same day.

Former Vice President Joe Biden, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, businessman Tom Steyer and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren were all committed to the event when the South Carolina NAACP released the schedule of events last week. Former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's campaign sent out a statement on Saturday saying Patrick would participate as well.

Asked if he'd be disappointed if Klobuchar didn't attend the march to the state house after attending the prayer breakfast, Sellers said it'd be a partial effort.

Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina Democratic strategist who had also voiced frustration last week over the small field of candidates attending the King Day at the Dome events, said he was "very pleased" with Buttigieg's decision.

look forward to hearing from him like so many others in South Carolina," Seawright told CNN

the objection from President Donald Trump's Republican allies has virtually zero chance of changing the election outcome, only to delay for a few hours the inevitable affirmation of Biden's victory as the Electoral College winner and the next president.

On Wednesday, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley became the first senator to announce plans to object to the results -- a significant move since both a House member and senator are required to mount an objection when Congress counts the electoral votes. CNN previously reported that at least 140 House Republicans are expected to vote against counting the electoral votes in Congress, according to two GOP House members.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell -- who has said the vote would mark one of the most significant, perhaps the most significant, he'd ever cast

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, seemingly dismissed the announcement Saturday from the handful of Republicans, tweeting: "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will be President and Vice President of the United States in 18 days."

On Friday, a federal judge threw out a lawsuit from GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and several Arizona Republicans seeking to force Vice President Mike Pence to help throw the election to Trump.

They were joined by Sens.-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

"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," the statement goes on to say.

President Trump and his legal team have targeted several states, including Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, in their attempts to overturn the election. But their legal efforts all failed because they couldn't provide clear evidence of fraud or misconduct in the 2020 election.

Brooks has said that more than 30 members of Congress plan to challenge the results.

None of the lawmakers has provided evidence to back up their concerns.

"The courts and state legislatures have all honored their duty to hear legal allegations and have found nothing to warrant overturning the results," Murkowski said.

And on Saturday evening, Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah harshly condemned the effort of fellow Republicans, calling it an "egregious ploy" that "dangerously threatens our Democratic Republic."

The group is led by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and includes Senators 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 Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Roger Marshall of Kansas, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.

But as Mr. Trump continues to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud, a growing number of Republicans in Congress have been eager to challenge the results, either out of devotion to the president or out of fear of enraging the base of their party that still reveres him even in defeat.

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, on Thursday condemned the attempt, calling it a “dangerous ploy” intended to “disenfranchise millions of Americans.” He accused fellow Republicans of making a political calculation to try to further their careers at the expense of the truth by tapping into Mr. Trump’s “populist base.”

As Mr. Biden racked up victories in November, Mr. Trump indulged in increasingly outlandish fictions, spreading disinformation about the election’s results and encouraging his followers to challenge the vote at every step. In recent weeks, as his legal defeats have stacked up, the president has become more vitriolic in his condemnations of Republicans who fail to support his false claims of having been the true victor in the election, and has lavished praise on those who parrot his accusations.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah warned of the consequences of backing a bid to subvert the election’s outcome.“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world,” he said in a statement. “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”

Nevertheless, more than a month after Mr. Biden’s victory, with increasing numbers in their party marching in lock step with Mr. Trump, some Republicans felt the need on Saturday to explain why they planned to vote to uphold the results of a democratic election.

The vice president, the statement continued, “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 Jan. 6th.”

Representative Mo Brooks, Republican of Alabama, has said he will object to certifying the results, and with Mr. Hawley’s support, that challenge would hold weight, prompting senators and representatives to retreat to their chambers on opposite sides of the Capitol for a two-hour debate and then a vote on whether to disqualify a state’s votes. Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is not expected to this time.

“A fair and credible audit — conducted expeditiously and completed well before Jan. 20 — would dramatically improve Americans’ faith in our electoral process and would significantly enhance the legitimacy of whoever becomes our next president,” they wrote. “We are acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.”

Vice President Mike Pence signaled his support as 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory.

The senators’ opposition to certifying Mr. Biden’s election will not change the outcome. But it guarantees that what would normally be a perfunctory session on Capitol Hill on Wednesday to ratify the results of the presidential election will instead become a partisan brawl, in which Republicans amplify specious claims of widespread election rigging that have been debunked and dismissed for weeks even as Mr. Trump has stoked them.

“We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise,” the senators wrote.

Republican groups have invested millions in this cycle to win back seats they lost in 2018, forcing Democrats to spend significantly to defend these first-term lawmakers.

Polls show some races are tight in places that President Trump won in 2016. They include two open seats currently held by Republicans: Virginia’s Fifth District, where Democrat Cameron Webb is running against Republican Bob Good, in a mostly rural district currently held by Republican Rep.

In Arkansas, GOP Rep. French Hill is facing a tougher-than-expected race against state Sen. Joyce Elliott in a district that Mr. Trump won by 11 points in 2016.

There are 94 GOP women running in the general election, a record for the party, breaking its previous high mark of 53 GOP women who made it through the primary elections in 2018

Democrats have almost universally focused their messaging on health care and addressing the coronavirus pandemic, while Republicans have attacked Democrats for being socialists or espousing liberal ideas from the party’s far-left flank, such as defunding the police. The message that is most successful could help frame postelection priorities.

Democrats, meanwhile, have focused on Republicans’ efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act, arguing they could jeopardize protections for people with pre-existing conditions. Democrats are running ads focusing on this popular part of the ACA in districts such as GOP Rep. Chip Roy’s Texas district, where he is being challenged by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis.