GOP lawmaker who voted to overturn election launches 'election integrity' caucus

Reps. Mike Garcia (R-CA) and Claudia Tenney (R-NY) announced on Tuesday that they are launching the “Election Integrity Caucus” in Congress, a group the pair of lawmakers say intends to fight against election reform measures that Democrats are seeking to pass.

Garcia is one of the 147 Republicans who voted to block President Joe Biden’s victory from being certified, even after a mob of Donald Trump-supporting insurrectionists breached the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.

Tenney was not yet sworn in on the day of the insurrection, but she later told a New York news outlet she may have voted against certifying Biden’s win in Pennsylvania if given the chance, saying she would have been “torn” because we “didn’t really get to the bottom” of what happened in the 2020 election.

However, we do know what happened in the 2020 election: President Joe Biden won an election that multiple audits and recounts found was not tainted by fraud.

Dozens of courts — from the state level all the way up to the Supreme Court — threw out lawsuits from Trump and his allies that sought to overturn the results after they couldn’t provide evidence that fraud occurred.

But following months of lies about election fraud stemming from the GOP, a Reuters/Ipsos poll released on Monday shows half of all Republican voters believe the 2020 election was stolen.

And GOP state lawmakers across the country are now introducing voter suppression legislation that would make it harder to vote, also based on false accusations about fraud.

Now, Garcia and Tenney are launching a caucus on Capitol Hill dedicated to “election integrity” that they say will, “ensure Americans in every state and territory have confidence in free, fair, accurate, and transparent elections.”

Garcia went on to say that one of the key goals of the caucus will be to fight H.R. 1, also known as the For the People Act.

The For the People Act seeks to make it easier for qualified voters to cast ballots by requiring states have automatic voter registration, allowing anyone to wants to vote absentee to do so, creating a unified two-week early voting period in all 50 states, and limiting the use of restrictive voter ID.

Garcia said in the release that H.R. 1 would “model federal election law after California’s current system,” which he said “would devastate election integrity in America” — yet another hyperbolic lie Republicans are telling to try to sink the bill.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy praised Garcia and Tenney for the caucus.

“Congress has an obligation to protect election integrity at every level of government and help earn back Americans’ trust,” McCarthy said in the news release, even though he was one of the GOP lawmakers who lied about the election being stolen from Trump. “The Election Integrity Caucus, established today by Representatives Claudia Tenney and Mike Garcia, will do just that.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.