Tiffany, Fitzgerald would have voted against Wisconsin electors.
two newest congressmen, Republicans Tom Tiffany and Scott Fitzgerald, were the state’s only lawmakers to vote this week to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory in the key swing states of Arizona and Pennsylvania.
And Fitzgerald and Tiffany both said in interviews Thursday they would have voted to overturn Biden’s victory in Wisconsin as well, had it been subject to a vote.
There was no congressional debate on Wisconsin’s electoral votes because no senator lodged an objection against them in the early hours Thursday morning, only a House member, and it requires objections from each chamber to force a vote.
Both Republicans recently served in the Wisconsin state Senate and argued that the election in Wisconsin didn’t follow the laws written by the Legislature.
Biden’s victory in Wisconsin was upheld by a recount and numerous court decisions. Democrats and even some Republicans noted that Congress lacked the authority to override the presidential electors certified by the states.
Fitzgerald said he did not expect to change the election outcome and swing the presidency to Donald Trump by his votes but said, “I was trying to give my voice” to those upset about how the election was conducted.
The former majority leader of the state Senate, Fitzgerald said he was less focused on claims of fraudulent voting than on how the election was administered in the pandemic.
Wisconsin Republicans and the Trump campaign protested things like clerks filling in the addresses of witnesses on absentee ballot envelopes in cases where witnesses did not provide them, and the increase in the use of the indefinite confinement law, which allows those who have difficulty leaving their home to receive absentee ballots without having to provide a copy of an ID.
Courts rejected challenges based on those issues.
“Listen, there are legitimate concerns that could have had a direct effect, that I think did have a direct effect on the election in Wisconsin,” said Fitzgerald, claiming that there were “changes made systemically to the way the elections are delivered that was absolutely compromised in Wisconsin.”
In a statement before the vote, Tiffany accused the state Supreme Court in Wisconsin of failing to uphold the law and claimed without foundation that “unscrupulous” officials in Dane County and Milwaukee County allowed “hundreds of thousands of illegal votes to be cast and counted.”
On his votes to overturn the results in Pennsylvania and Arizona, Tiffany said in an interview Thursday:
“The election improprieties were significant in both of those states. Because of the narrowness of those races, it called into question those elections. So I did choose to vote for them, in particular Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania’s system is scrambled right now and they need to get that fixed.”
Had there been a vote on Wisconsin, Tiffany and Fitzgerald would have objected to the very election that gave them their first full terms in Congress.
Both chambers decisively rejected objections to Biden’s victories in Arizona and Pennsylvania, two of the swing states where President Trump baselessly claimed the election was stolen from him.
The push to overturn the election failed as the measures went down and President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory was confirmed, 306 to 232.
Every Democrat in both chambers voted against the objections, as did the vast majority of Republicans in the Senate. But a majority of House Republicans voted to overturn the popular vote in those two states.
While Tiffany and Fitzgerald supported the objections to Biden’s victory, Wisconsin Republicans Glenn Grothman, Bryan Steil and Mike Gallagher all voted to reject the objections and affirm Biden’s election.
Gallagher also accused those objecting to Biden’s victory of falsely encouraging Trump supporters to think the results could be overturned, culminating in the Capitol riot.
The state’s three Democratic representatives — Ron Kind, Gwen Moore and Mark Pocan — also voted against the motions. Kind said supporters of the effort to overturn the election perpetuated a narrative that pushed Trump supporters to overrun the Capitol.
Just before Biden’s victory was conWisconsin’s firmed, a House member raised a challenge against Wisconsin’s votes. But because no senator objected, there was no debate on Wisconsin and no roll call vote.
Fitzgerald said he was expecting Senate Republican Ron Johnson of Wisconsin to lodge an objection against their home state’s electors and was prepared for a vote on Wisconsin.
But Johnson, who had previously announced plans to object to the results in some swing states, ended up backing off his opposition after the Capitol was stormed by Trump supporters. He did, however, sign on to the formal objection of Arizona before the mob action, then in the evening voted in favor of accepting the Arizona slate.
“I thought the debate in the chamber was very good and solidified in my mind what our constitutional constraints are,” Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in explaining why he voted against the objection.
In an interview Wednesday, newly retired GOP Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner, a former chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, acknowledged the “practical politics” facing many GOP lawmakers in casting their votes.
“If you vote to uphold the certified result of all the states, you’re going to end up being in a world of very expensive political hurt” as a result, Sensenbrenner said of Republican members of Congress.