Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks, R-Huntsville, has been making national headlines with his claims that the 2020 election was marred by fraud and his citing of an 1880’s law that allows Congress to reject the Electoral College results and refuse to certify election results.
The joint session to certify the results would then be suspended and each House would go back into their own session to debate and vote on the objection. In theory, the election would then be voted on in the House of Representatives on a state-by-state basis with Alaska and Wyoming each having one vote just like the much more populous California and Texas. That seems very doubtful that this would ever get that far. To advance such a plan however requires that a member of both Houses. To this point GOP Senators have been dismissive of Brooks’ plan.
Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said that the January meeting of Congress is “really a formality.”
“Nobody likes to lose, but we have to respect the judgment of the American people, the voters,” Cornyn said. “So I don’t support, I don’t endorse, I don’t really like just making a show just to make a show.”
“I think that Dec. 14 is a critical date,” Sen. Mike Braun, R-Indiana, said. “if there’s not enough other stuff in place I doubt that would be a maneuver that would seem to work.”
This is not unprecedented. A few House Democrats attempted to do the same thing in 2017 and in 2001, but both times, no Senate Democrat would go along. This did advance to debate in both 1969 and 2005, but both times the objections were rejected.
“You have to have senators join them, and we saw House members object four years ago, and no senator stood up and objected,” said Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Missouri.
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, told ABC News that Congress needed to “wait for the pending litigation to be concluded.”
“I doubt that goes anywhere,” said Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota. “This is a process that’s well established.”
Brooks has accused Democrats of election fraud and more recently has accused undocumented immigrants and other non-citizens of voting.
“No one knows how massive the illegal alien voting block is or how many voted in 2020. Hundreds of thousands? Almost certainly. Millions? Very likely,” Brooks said in a speech on the floor of Congress. His claims are unsubstantiated. “But what we do know for sure is that the illegal alien voting block was large enough, and critical enough, to winning the presidential race that, at the October 22 Presidential Debate, Joe Biden openly and publicly solicited their illegal votes by promising, ‘Within 100 days, I’m going to send to the United States Congress a pathway to citizenship for over 11 million undocumented people.””
To this point Trump’s legal team has not been able to produce evidence that there were sufficient voting irregularities that could have impacted the results of the election in any state.
Trump tweeted his thanks to Brooks.
The president’s election team has filed over 28 suits and motions claiming election fraud, and most of them have been rejected by the courts. At this point, it seems like none of the swing states where the Trump team is challenging the results are going overturn the election results. It is almost certain that Biden will be officially declared the President-elect by the Electoral College next week.
Senator-elect Tommy Tuberville, R-Alabama, has not said his position on decertifying the election results.
The very popular Mo Brooks represents Alabama’s 5th Congressional District and was just re-elected to a sixth term.
