SHAKEN POLS
GOP, Dems unite to thwart rebellious Republicans
Members of Congress reconvened late e Wednesday to certify President-elect Joe e Biden’s election victory after their first t attempt was disrupted by a throng of f Trump-supporting rioters who stormed d the U.S. Capitol in a deadly and unprec- edented assault on American democracy.
After more than eight hours of shel- tering in place while law enforcement t officers cleared out the Capitol, members s of the House and Senate returned to their r respective chambers to pick up where e they had left off.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McCo- nnell (R-Ky.) said his aim was to certify y Biden’s victory “tonight,” a thinly-veiled d warning to his fellow Republicans to drop any additional challenges to the election results so that Congress can carry out its constitutional duty of counting the 538 electoral votes without any further interruption.
“The United States and the United d States Congress have faced down much h greater threats than the unhinged crowd d we saw today,” McConnell said on the e Senate floor. “We’ve never been deterred d before. We won’t be deterred today. They y tried to disrupt our democracy. They y failed.”
When the attackers swarmed the Cap- itol in the early afternoon, Vice President t Mike Pence had just ordered the House e and Senate to begin debating a Republi- can challenge seeking to invalidate Arizo- na’s 11 electoral votes.
The chaos that ensued left one woman n dead from gunshot wounds, as the rioters s broke their way into the congressional l chambers, forcing an armed standoff with h Capitol police in what marked one of the e darkest chapters in modern American n democracy.
President Trump, who’s refusing to acknowledge the reality of his election loss, in many ways fanned the flames of the violence, telling his supporters during a huge rally outside the White House earlier in the day to “fight harder” to overturn Biden’s election and march to the Capitol to protest.
Trump was cooped up at the White House as Congress reconvened, unable to post tweets and Facebook posts because both social-media platforms locked his accounts, citing violations against policies prohibiting the glorification of violence.
According to several reports, members of Trump’s Cabinet began discussions late Wednesday of the possibility of using the 25th Amendment to remove the president from office on the grounds that he’s a danger to the nation.
The House and Senate resumed debate on the Arizona challenge when they reconvened, as it was jointly signed by Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), meeting the requirement of support from at least one member of each chamber. Gosar and Cruz, staunch Trump allies, cited the president’s false and repeatedly debunked claim that the election was rigged against him in filing the challenge.
The Senate voted down the objection in an overwhelming 93-6 vote shortly after 10 p.m. The House followed suit shortly thereafter, voting to reject it by a similarly broad margin.
It was unclear shortly before midnight Wednesday if Republicans would attempt to file any more challenges to invalidate results in Biden-won states, or if Congress would be able to finally certify his 306-232 Electoral College victory.
As Congress worked through the night, Washington Mayor Muriel Bowser extended an emergency order for the city so that it spans until Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
In floor remarks, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) lambasted Trump for inciting the rioters with his false conspiracy theories about fraud.
“This will be a stain on our country not so easily washed away. The final, terrible, indelible legacy of the 45th president of the United States — undoubtedly our worst,” Schumer said.
Pence, Trump’s most consistently loyal aide, broke with the president at the outset of Wednesday’s session when he informed lawmakers he would not attempt to single-handedly throw out dozens of the electoral votes certified for Biden, saying the Constitution constrained him from doing so.
Trump, who had publicly pressured Pence to unilaterally toss out electoral votes, was enraged by his vice president’s refusal to violate the Constitution.
“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done,” he tweeted after his raucous rally.
McConnell (R-Ky.) — who’s about to lose control of his chamber in light of the Democratic sweep of Georgia’s runoff elections — opened up the debate by condemning Cruz, Gosar and a handful of other Trump-boosting Republicans who planned to join doomed challenges to election results in as many as six battleground states won by Biden.
“The voters, the courts and the states have all spoken. They’ve all spoken. If we overrule them, it would damage our Republic forever,” said McConnell, who told his caucus last month to accept Biden’s victory. “If this election were overturned by mere allegations from the losing side, our democracy would enter a death spiral. We’d never see the whole nation accept an election again.”
Cruz and the other die-hard Trump loyalists acknowledged the challenges they were pressing would ultimately fail.
That’s because a challenge can only be successful if majorities of both the House and Senate vote to sustain it, and there’s virtually no chance the
Democratic-controlled House would vote to invalidate a single slate of electoral votes. The Republican-controlled Senate likely wouldn’t do so, either, considering McConnell’s marching orders.
Still, many Republicans, including New York Reps. Nicole Malliotakis and Elise Stefanik, announced earlier this week that they planned to join in on the protest against Biden’s victory.
In a phone interview with the Daily News before the Capitol was sieged, Rep. Mondaire Jones, a freshman Democrat who represents a chunk of Westchester County, condemned his fellow New York lawmakers for joining what he called a bid for the “destruction of our democracy.”
“It is shameful behavior, and I think the electorate in the more moderate of the two districts is not going to react kindly to this blatant attempt to undermine our democracy,” Jones said, referring to Malliotakis, whose Staten Island-spanning district was until this year represented by Democrat Max Jones.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck
Schumer (D-N.Y.) echoed Jones’ sentiment.
“You all know that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are going to be sworn in as president and vice president of the United States on Jan. 20,” Schumer said on the Senate floor, turning to his GOP colleagues before the session was cut short by the rioters. “But they are going to object to the counting of the vote anyway, and in the process they will embarrass themselves, they will embarrass their party, and worst of all, they will embarrass their country.”