Senator Josh Hawley has tried to justify signing onto a written objection to the electoral college vote count by tweeting that it is just like what happened in 2004 and in 2016. I don’t believe that he is ignorant of the differences between those elections and this election in 2020. This means that he is lying, he is intentionally misleading the public.
The fact is that John Kerry conceded the 2004 election at 11 am EST on the morning of November 3 and Hillary Clinton conceded the previous election within an hour of the election being called by the AP.
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02:29: WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump wins Wisconsin.
02:29: WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump elected president of the United States. [Call based on AP’s determination that Trump had won Wisconsin, thereby exceeding the necessary 270 electoral votes. Separately, AP’s Wisconsin wire reported at 02:31 that Trump had defeated Clinton, snapping the Democratic winning streak in the state.]
02:50: NEW YORK (AP) — President-elect Donald Trump says Hillary Clinton congratulated him on his victory.
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Donald Trump has still as of December 30, a full seven weeks after the election, not conceded this election. These facts alone make this completely different because the context is radically different. It is one thing if the candidates had been still trying to win the election , an election won by three states, after sixty plus lawsuits and attempts to subvert our democracy and something else entirely when that is not the case.
Furthermore, the simple fact is that George W Bush won the 2004 election by one state, Ohio, not three states like Joe Biden did in 2020. Having conceded the elections, the campaigns for Kerry and Clinton declined to pursue lawsuits to alter the outcome of the election. John Kerry did not support Senator Boxer’s challenge.
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Defeated Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts said this week he did not support the effort to challenge the Ohio results. On Thursday, Kerry was traveling in the Middle East.
But Boxer and other Democrats, including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco), insisted they were questioning the process, not the outcome.
And ultimately, Pelosi and most other Democratic lawmakers joined Republicans to vote to confirm the Ohio results.
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.Repeated searches have only found written [note that the source quoted was written well after the 2016 election] objections for 2004 , not 2016.
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Have members of Congress ever objected to a result?
Yes. Since the 1887 passage of the Electoral Count Act, there have been two instances of Congressional objections. In 1969, an objection was raised against the North Carolina vote due to the instance of a faithless elector, which was rejected 58-33 in the Senate and 228-170 in the House. In 2005 an objection was raised to the Ohio vote due to reported voting irregularities. This objection was rejected 74-1 in the Senate and 267-31 in the House.[1]
In 2020, which Congress would conduct this process?
Since new members of Congress are sworn in on January 3, the newly elected Congress conducts this process.[2] Following the 2020 elections,
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.followed by :
.Disposing of Objections
These procedures have been invoked twice since enactment of the 1887 law
The second instance was related to reported voting irregularities in Ohio. In 2005, aRepresentative (Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio) and a Senator (Barbara Boxer of California)objected in writing to the Ohio electoral votes. The chambers withdrew from the joint session toconsider the objection, and the House and Senate each rejected the objection. When the Houseand Senate resumed the joint session, the electoral votes were counted as cast.13
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.Again, here’s what Senator Boxer said her intention was:
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.Boxer said her purpose was not to overturn Bush’s reelection but, rather, to focus new attention on flawed voting practices
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.Senator Boxer was simply trying to highlight voter suppression issues, not trying to overturn the results. Votersuppressionremains a serious issue as does gerrymandering. So, Senator Boxer was simply shining a light on an important issue, not trying to alter who won; on the other hand, these republicans backed by Trump are trying to alter who won the presidential election. However, more than 2/3 of House Republicans signed onto a lawsuit designed to overturn the results including the top two republicans in the US House of Representatives. Donald Trump has not conceded the election. Therefore, any senators signing onto a rejection by these House republicans are still actually trying to alter the election results, alter who won.
.Let’s suppose that there was a written objection by a US Senator who is a member of the Democratic Party in 2016. I can’t find an example, but let’s suppose that it happened. We can already see the differences between 2004 and 2020: (1) Kerry conceded the next morning (2) Kerry opposed challenging the electoral college vote (3) the 2004 election was determined by one state, Ohio (4) No lawsuits on behalf of the candidate’s campaign were filed (5) Senator Boxer stated that her purpose was not to overturn the results of the election, but rather highlight an important issue, voter suppression. So now let’s consider the differences between this election and 2016: (1) Hillary called to concede within an hour of the AP calling the election (2) Hillary did not file lawsuits to contest the election and made a speech to unify the country and support the peaceful transfer of power (3) the bulk of House Democrats did not back an effort to challenge the objection to the electoral college vote count (4) Biden shut it down, saying , “It is over !” and turning off the microphones of the objectors. (5) Hillary did not attempt to convince state legislatures in battleground states to select her slate of electors even if she lost the popular vote (6) there were numerous “irregularities” in the 2016 election (a) Trump publicly called on foreign governments to help him by providing opposition research (b) Donald Trump Jr. and others working with the Trump campaign including convicted and then pardoned Trump campaign lawyer Paul Manafort met with Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya for a quid pro quo in Trump Tower in order to gain opposition research which is a thing of value ( c ) Cohen , Trump’s personal fixer, acted on behalf on Donald Trump and his campaign [Trump paid him back] , by paying prostitutes three weeks before the election to be silent until after the election and by paying more than the legally allowed campaign contribution for any individual for a campaign violated campaign finance law (d) James Comey violated DOJ policy in his public comments and announcements within the last 90 days to the election which probably cost Hillary Clinton the election (7) There are differences between what Hillary did and what Trump did in the items listed here, one through six, which will be listed below
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Federal Election Commission (FEC) chief Ellen Weintraub on Friday stated firmly that accepting any kind of "opposition research" from a foreign national or government would be considered illegal under U.S. elections law.
In an appearance on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," Weintraub said that the law was clear on accepting aid from foreign governments during an election, comments which followed President Trump's public call for China and Ukraine to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden, one of the current front-runners for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination
"The law is pretty clear,” Weintraub said to co-host Willie Geist. “It is absolutely illegal for anyone to solicit, accept or receive anything of value from a foreign national in connection with any election in the United States."
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.and
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Cohen confirmed he put up the money to pay ex-porn star Stormy Daniels and buy her silence about a past dalliance with Trump right before the 2016 election.
The president reimbursed Cohen via monthly payments disguised as "legal fees," according to the book. The initial plan was to keep Trump's role in the payments secret, he said: "I wasn’t going to reveal the fact that I had been repaid the money by Trump, in the form of fake legal fees, or that I had done everything at the direction of the President of the United States, needless to say."
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.and we also have
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Cohen, 52, pleaded guilty in August 2018 to violating campaign finance law by directing the payment to Daniels as well as another payment of $150,000 to Playboy model Karen McDougal shortly before the election.
Both women have said they had sexual encounters with Trump more than a decade ago and that the money was meant to buy their silence.
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.and Comey’s actions hurt Hillary Clinton:
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"As we warned before the election, Director Comey had a double standard: He spoke publicly about the Clinton investigation while keeping secret from the American people the investigation of Donald Trump and Russia," said Judiciary Committee ranking member Jerry Nadler of New York and Oversight Committee ranking member Elijah Cummings of Maryland.
The Democrats also said they are angry that Comey talked so much, so often, about a case that he ultimately had concluded should not result in any prosecution.
"The FBI should not have spoken publicly about the case after recommending against criminal charges," Nadler and Cummings said. "They should not have revealed that they had reopened the case just days before the election. These actions violate long-standing guidelines designed to protect citizens from unfair attacks and avoid influencing elections."
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.including costing her the election :
.Hillary Clinton would probably be president if FBI Director James Comey had not sent a letter to Congress on Oct. 28. The letter, which said the FBI had “learned of the existence of emails that appear to be pertinent to the investigation” into the private email server that Clinton used as secretary of state, upended the news cycle and soon halved Clinton’s lead in the polls, imperiling her position in the Electoral College. Still, because Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 point, the letter was probably enough to change the outcome of the Electoral College.
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.The point, then, is that Hillary Clinton would had every reason in the world to object to the outcome, not concede, litigate it, and encourage Democratic Party senators and representatives to object to it. Yet, she did not. Biden did not give any reason for Trump to object to the outcome whereas Trump gave Hillary Clinton every reason in the world to.
Now, let’s look at the context of these objections to counting the electoral college votes. Trump and the republican state legislatures purposefully made the mail in votes be counted last. Since Democratic Party voters were encouraged to vote by mail and understood the danger posed by the pandemic whereas Trump discouraged republicans from voting by mail, then the mail in and early vote was going to heavily favor Joe Biden. Republicans knew this ahead of time and decided to use this to trick their own voters into believing that something nefarious had happened. Trump tried to get state legislatures to select his own slate of electors both before and after the election regardless of the outcome in the popular vote. Trump filed at least sixty lawsuits regarding the election. One must demonstrate that you had a legitimate primary stake and were harmed in order for you to proceed with your case and have it evaluated on the merits. When they were found to have standing, then they lost on the merits because they made vague, speculative and baseless accusations without evidence and demanded unprecedented remedies. Half of the cases were decided by Republican judges (38) and some were even Trump appointees. Trump even lost 9-0 in the Supreme Court despite three of the justices having been appointed by him. Republican leadership and the vast majority of republicans in Congress would not acknowledge that Biden won for a month after the election.Over 2/3 of republicans in the US House of Representatives signed onto a lawsuit which would have given the state of Texas authority to tell other states such as Pennsylvania how they must conduct their own elections in their own states. [I strongly suspect that the main reason (outside of simply believing what Trump told them) that Trump voters believe that the election results were fraudulent is because of the change in the results once the mail in votes were counted. They saw their guy ahead and they were told that mail in votes would be fraudulent and then when the mail in ballots came in, they saw the lead go from Trump to Biden. The republicans intended this to happen, knowing that it was likely that when the mail in ballot was counted Biden would take the lead. ]
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.The dog that did not bark throughout this interminable post-election period is that the judiciary, despite being controlled by Republicans at the federal level, left Biden’s victory untouched. According to Marc Elias, the Democratic superlawyer who oversaw much of his party’s efforts to preserve Biden’s win, Trump and his allies filed at least 60 post-election lawsuits. They’ve lost 59 of these cases, and their one victory involved such a minor matter that it had little impact on the final vote tallies.First, Trump and his allies just didn’t have very good legal arguments. In some cases, they brought penny-ante claims that couldn’t have changed the result of the election even if they prevailed. In others, they made factual claims that relied entirely on speculation — or even relied on conspiracy theories incubated on social media. In some cases, Trump or his allies made legal arguments that were the exact opposite of the arguments they made in other cases. There are no good legal arguments that could have justified tossing out the election results, and the clownishness of Trump’s legal strategy only drew attention to the weakness of his claims.
Second, Biden won a commanding victory over Trump. The president-elect won by a 4.5 percentage point margin, the largest victory since Barack Obama’s landslide in 2008, and the second-largest victory of the 21st century. Significantly, Biden won 306 electoral votes, meaning that partisan judges would have had to overturn the results in three states to steal the election for Trump.
In many of the pivotal states, Biden’s margins were harrowingly close — such as the tipping-point state of Wisconsin, which Biden won by only about 20,000 votes. But that’s many times more than the 537 votes that separated Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore when the Supreme Court threw the election to Bush in 2000.Trump’s legal arguments are abysmally weak
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.They continue :
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Consider, for example, Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar, the case for which Giuliani made his disastrous court appearance. The Trump campaign claimed that some Pennsylvania counties told voters who cast defective ballots how to fix them, while other counties did not. They also accused election officials of not giving the Trump campaign’s poll watchers sufficient access to the ballot-counting process.
For these minor alleged violations, the campaign sought what Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, described as “breathtaking relief: barring the Commonwealth from certifying its results or else declaring the election results defective and ordering the Pennsylvania General Assembly, not the voters, to choose Pennsylvania’s presidential electors.”
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.Standing is important according to very conservative republican Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. Here, Justice Scalia completely contradicts Trump when Trump claims that losses due to standing are not legitimate losses but rather losses based upon an unimportant arcane technicality.
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..But on the question of who should be able to argue before the courts, he did not. Article III’s use of the word “cases,” he argued, means a plaintiff must prove that he or she suffered a concrete injury to establish standing to sue; this imposed substantial restrictions on the power of Congress to permit individuals to sue in court.
Throughout his career, Scalia argued that limits on the right to sue were a core aspect of the separation of powers. He worried that without strict standing requirements, courts would intrude into the domain of the political branches. Scalia was particularly concerned that courts were making it too easy for individuals and advocacy groups—such as defenders of the environment, consumer groups, and others—to challenge administrative action. Scalia’s answer was to insist on concrete injury as the “indispensable prerequisite of standing.” Only that, Scalia insisted, would keep courts to what he saw as their properly limited role and prevent what he called “an overjudicialization of the processes of self-governance.”
Scalia’s views about standing—spelled out in a famous 1983 lecture—shaped the law even before he joined the Supreme Court.
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Right now, 70% to 80% of Trump voters believe the election results were fraudulent. Trump said,“We must get rid of the ballots!”. Now, add every one of the acts given in the paragraph above to Trump’s persistent claim starting from before the election that it would be “rigged” and add the written objections to the electoral college vote count and only then can you truly evaluate the danger of the objection. And the differences between this upcoming objection and the written objections in 2004 and 2016 (if there even was one which doesn’t appear to the case) have already been given in this essay.
Conclusion: The written objections to the electoral college vote count by republicans in the US Senate and the US House of Representatives are completely different. Senator Josh Hawley knows this and is lying because he is intentionally misleading the public. He knows better.