Republican efforts to undermine Biden victory expose growing anti-democratic streak - C... - 0 views
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The scattershot efforts to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's election victory are coalescing into a movement led by top Republicans determined to exploit a manufactured crisis for broader political gains.
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Nearly a dozen more GOP senators, a handful of whom will be sworn-in Sunday, have now announced they will challenge Biden's clear Electoral College win over President Donald Trump next week during what has traditionally been a ceremonial exercise on Capitol Hill.
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The President is, predictably, cheering on the charade. And in a taped phone conversation on Saturday, reported by The Washington Post, encouraged Georgia's top elections official to "find" enough votes to overturn Biden's victory in the state.
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Vice President Mike Pence -- who has sought to keep a safe distance from the more inflammatory claims and behavior of fellow Republicans while subtly egging them on when it suits him -- has also welcomed congressional Republicans' challenge
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"All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state."
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"There's nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you've recalculated," Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger
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The announcement Saturday from Republican senators and senators-elect cut deeper and, framed in a maddening circular logic, argued that Congress should commission an "emergency 10-day audit" of results from "disputed states" because of the volume of "allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities."
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The group's citation of a poll that underscores voters' distrust in the election process ignores Trump's role in ginning up an increasingly paranoiac strain of conservatism
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The process in his state, which the President won, had met a "high bar," he insisted, before suggesting that other states had a responsibility to "restore" the confidence that the leaders of his own party had spent so much time trying to break.
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Notably, none of the officials who signed the Saturday statement, nor any of what could be as many as 140 allies in the House, have suggested that the election fraud that so concerns them might have also affected their own races.
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Trump again attacked Raffensperger Sunday morning, before their phone call became public, complaining in a tweet that the Georgia Republican had not turned up evidence of nonexistent voter fraud.
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Trump has called on Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, also a Republican, to resign after repeated recounts of the presidential vote there confirmed Biden's narrow win.
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Kemp is one of a handful of Republicans to speak out against Trump's behavior. Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey, who is retiring in 2022, has also been critical of his GOP colleagues' rhetoric and, on Saturday, responded to the new announcement with a sharp rebuke of the senators involved.
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Biden's success in Pennsylvania, Toomey concluded, said little about the election process and could be "easily explained by the decline in suburban support for President Trump and the President's slightly smaller victory margins in most rural counties."
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The vice president, through Justice Department lawyers, pushed back against a lawsuit filed by Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert and Arizona Republicans that sought to give Pence the power to effectively dump the electoral college results and hand reelection to Trump. The suit was dismissed, for a lack of standing, by a federal judge on Friday night.
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"Vice President Pence shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election," Pence chief of staff Marc Short said in a statement. "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."
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"They could not and would not give credence to what they know is not true," Biden said. "They knew this election was overseen, it was honest, it was free and it was fair. They saw it with their own eyes, and they wouldn't be bullied into saying anything different."
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Sen. Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent who caucuses with the Democrats and was Biden's toughest competition in the 2020 party primary, called the effort "pathetic" and its aims "unconstitutional."
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"What all of this comes down to is that Donald Trump and right wing extremists are refusing to accept the will of the people and the fact that Trump lost the election," Sanders said in a statement. "In their contempt for democracy, they are using lies and conspiracy theories about 'voter fraud' in an attempt to overturn the election results."