GOP lawmakers demand Trump deploy military to stop Biden from taking office

North Carolina Republican state Sen. Bob Steinburg on Tuesday said Donald Trump should “invoke the Insurrection Act” to stop President-elect Joe Biden from being inaugurated, citing baseless allegations of voter fraud.

“He must suspend Habeas Corpus as Lincoln and FDR have both done in times of war,” Steinburg wrote in a since-deleted Facebook post, according to the North Carolina outlet WRAL.

Steinburg is the latest GOP state lawmaker to call for the suspension of civil liberties in the United States to overturn Biden’s decisive victory over lies about fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. Trump and his allies have been pushing those lies for weeks, but have provided not a shred of evidence to back them up.

On Tuesday, Virginia state Sen. Amanda Chase, who is running for governor in Virginia in 2021, also called on Trump to invoke martial law to block a peaceful transition of power.

It’s an idea that’s been circulating among the QAnon conspiracy theory community, and has been pushed by high-profile Trump supporters like former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who Trump recently pardoned after he pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI as part of the Russia probe.

Though he deleted his Facebook post demanding Trump invoke the Insurrection Act, Steinburg gave an interview with WRAL where he defended his position, even offering to undergo a psychiatric evaluation as he told the outlet that he believes both the CIA and FBI know there’s a “coup d’etat going on in the country but won’t do anything about it.”

“There’s something going on here bigger than what anybody is willing to talk about,” Steinburg told WRAL. “I’m not nuts. … I’m not a conspiracy theory person. I don’t like them. I don’t like conspiracy theories at all. But something is going on here that’s bigger than meets the eye.”

Of course, what Steinburg was describing is a baseless conspiracy theory.

There was no voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trump and his allies attempted to argue as such in court, but judges at all levels threw out dozens of legal challenges because they could provide no actual evidence that fraud or irregularities occurred.

Meanwhile, congressional Republicans and other GOP elected officials allowed Trump to push these baseless lies and legitimized his quest to steal the election through the courts for more than a month, despite the fact that it’s been crystal clear Biden won.

In fact, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell only admitted on Tuesday — after the Electoral College sealed Biden’s 306 to 232 victory — that Biden will be president.

McConnell now fears that an effort from Trump to enlist congressional Republicans to try to block Congress from accepting the Electoral College results could damage GOP senators politically.

Other damage has already been done, with Trump supporters making threats of violence as they protest against the election results.

Violent threats led Michigan to close its capitol buildings to the public on the day of the Electoral College vote, while other state capitols stepped up security over fears of violence.

Some Trump supporters have even tried to act on those threats.

On Tuesday, a former Houston Police Department captain was arrested after he allegedly ran a man off the road and pointed a gun at the man’s head as he tried to prove that there was a voter fraud scheme in Harris County — the Texas county where Houston is located.

“He crossed the line from dirty politics to commission of a violent crime, and we are lucky no one was killed,” Harris County District Attorney Kim Ogg said of the former officer, 63-year-old Mark Anthony Aguirre, according to a local Houston television station. “His alleged investigation was backward from the start — first alleging a crime had occurred and then trying to prove it happened.”

The man Aguirre accused of being behind the fake voter fraud scheme was merely an “innocent air conditioner repairman,” according to the report.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.