Trump invites Michigan GOP legislators to White House
Increases efforts to subvert Electoral College process, overturn results
After failing repeatedly in court to overturn election results, President Donald Trump is taking the extraordinary step of reaching out directly to Republican state legislators as he tries to subvert the Electoral College process, inviting Michigan lawmakers to meet with him at the White House on Friday.
Trump contacted the Republican majority leader in the Michigan State Senate to issue the invitation, according to a person briefed on the invitation. It is not clear how many Michigan lawmakers will be making the trip to Washington, nor precisely what Trump plans to say to the lawmakers.
The White House invitation to Republican lawmakers in a battleground state comes as the Trump campaign has been seeking to overturn the results of the election in multiple states through lawsuits and intrusions into the state vote certification process, and as Trump himself has reached out personally to at least one election official in Michigan, a Wayne County canvass board member, Monica Palmer.
Some members of Trump’s team have promoted the
legally dubious theory that friendly legislatures could under certain scenarios effectively subvert the popular vote and send their own, pro-Trump delegations to the Electoral College.
The Michigan Senate leader who received Trump’s invitation, Mike Shirkey, said in an interview earlier this week with Bridge Michigan, a local news outlet, that the Legislature would not move to appoint its own slate of electors, stating, “That’s not going to happen.”
The statewide canvassing board, a bipartisan four- member panel, is responsible for certifying Michigan’s election results by a Monday deadline, a step that must take place before any move could be made to change the electors.
One of the Republican members of the board, Norm Shinkle, said in an interview Thursday that he was coming under enormous pressure regarding his vote, which he said was complicated by a late night announcement from the two Republicans on the four- member canvassing board in Wayne County, which includes Detroit, that they wanted to “rescind” their votes to certify the county’s results.
Trump reached out Tuesday night to one of those Republicans, Palmer, to thank her for her support, according to two people briefed on the call. Palmer and the other Republican board member, William Hartmann, had initially refused to certify the election results, before relenting Tuesday night after a public outcry and accusations of that they were trying to disenfranchise voters in Detroit, which is more than three-quarters Black. Palmer and Hartmann are white.
On Tuesday, Shirkey condemned threats of violence received by members of the Wayne County board of electors, and he indicated that the legislature would conduct their own investigation, but that it was not their place to resolve questions about the election.
“Additional concerns have been brought before the courts, which is the proper place to resolve questions of legality surrounding the state elections process,” Shirkey said.
The moves are the latest — and the most brazen — salvos in a scattershot campaign-after-the-campaign waged by Trump and his allies to cast doubt about President-elect Joe Biden’s decisive victory by mounting quixotic legal challenges and by attempting to seize the mechanisms of certifying electoral outcomes. Undergirding it all is a political strategy that includes trafficking in racist insinuations about elections conducted in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee and Atlanta with large and politically powerful Black populations.
The Republicans sought to rescind the certification votes they had cast Tuesday night through affidavits released late Wednesday, roughly 24 hours after Trump had spoken with Palmer. But legally, functionally and practically, they cannot do so.
“There is no legal mechanism for them to rescind their vote,” Tracy Wimmer, a spokeswoman for Michigan’s top election official, Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, said Thursday. “Their job is done and the next step in the process is for the Board of State Canvassers to meet and certify.”
That meeting is scheduled for Monday.
The Trump campaign’s lead election lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, announced Thursday that the campaign was withdrawing a federal suit it had filed seeking to stop the certification of results in Wayne County. The campaign attached the affidavits to the dismissal notice.