GOP officials trying to overturn election rewarded with White House lunch
Nine of the attendees support overturning the results in four states President-elect Joe Biden won.
Donald Trump is having lunch with 12 attorneys general on Thursday — nine of whom back a lawsuit seeking to overturn Trump’s landslide loss to President-elect Joe Biden, according to a guest list provided to Forbes.
The lunch comes one day after 17 GOP-run states sent a brief to the Supreme Court voicing support for the Texas attorney general’s lawsuit that asks the court to nullify the results in Michigan, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin over baseless allegations of voter fraud.
Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who filed the lawsuit, and eight of the 17 Republican attorneys general who support Paxton’s suit, will be at the lunch with Trump. The event is closed to the media, according to Trump’s daily schedule.
The Texas lawsuit is all but certain to fail, according to legal experts.
However, it shows just how far mainstream elected officials in the Republican Party are willing to go to back up Trump’s attempt to steal the election Biden handily won.
Not only did a large number of Republican controlled states voice support for an attempt to invalidate millions of votes in other states, simply because those states voted for the candidate of the opposing party, but Republican members of Congress are also propping up Trump’s coup effort.
The New York Times reported that Trump asked Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) to argue the case if the Supreme Court agrees to hear it, which Cruz said he’d do.
Ultimately, Biden won the popular vote by more than 7 million ballots, and secured 306 Electoral College votes — the same number of Electoral College votes Trump won in 2016.
Every state has now certified its results, and courts across the country — including the Supreme Court — have rejected Trump and his allies’ many lawsuits seeking to invalidate and overturn those results. And with the Supreme Court unlikely to rule in favor of Texas’ suit, Trump’s legal options are finished.
Trump’s only hope now is that Congress refuses to accept the Electoral College outcome. And the Washington Post reported that Trump is now pressuring GOP members of Congress to do just that.
It’s unlikely that effort would be successful, but it could cause chaos — a hallmark of the Trump era.
“It’s just simply madness,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah)— one of the few Republicans to call out Trump’s effort to steal the election, told the Washington Post. “The idea of supplanting the vote of the people with partisan legislators, is, is so completely out of our national character that it’s simply mad. Of course the president has the right to challenge results in court, to have recounts. But this effort to subvert the vote of the people is dangerous and destructive of the cause of democracy.”
Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.
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