Oaths questioned while Trump’s backers fight loss
As some Republicans in Congress continued to back President Donald Trump’s doomed effort to overturn the election, critics – including Presidentelect Joe Biden – alleged that they had violated their oaths to uphold the U.S. Constitution and instead pledged allegiance to Trump.
The oaths, which rarely attract much attention, have become a common subject in the final days of the Trump presidency, being invoked by members of both parties as they met Wednesday to affirm Biden’s win and a violent mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
The oaths vary slightly between government bodies, but elected officials generally swear to defend the Constitution. The Senate website says its current oath is linked to the 1860s, “drafted by Civil War-era members of Congress intent on ensnaring traitors.”
Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, vowed to honor the oath she took and affirm the results of the presidential election while urging colleagues to do the same. Republican Sen. Todd Young, of Indiana, was seen in a video posted to social media telling Trump supporters outside a Senate office building that he took an oath to the Constitution under God and asked, “Do we still take that seriously in this country?”
Corey Brettschneider, a political science professor at Brown University and author of “The Oath and the Office: A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents,” said the oath must be taken seriously and that Americans have to demand its enforcement or “the risk is to the entire system.” He said he would support censures, a formal statement of disapproval, for officials who clearly violate their oaths.
“The worst that could happen is that people roll their eyes at the oath and they say, ‘Oh, none of them mean it,’ and I think what we’ve got to do at a time of crisis is exactly the opposite – is to say, this does mean something,”
Brettschneider said. “When you break the law, you need to be held to account, and that’s what’s really up to the American people to be outraged when Trump does what he’s done.”
Republicans who have filed or supported lawsuits challenging Biden’s win in November have claimed, without evidence, that the election was rigged against Trump. Their cases have failed before courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The oaths were mentioned often Wednesday during a joint session of Congress meant to confirm Biden’s victory. Some Republicans who launched objections to the election results claimed their oaths required them to do so, while Democrats urged their counterparts to honor their oaths and affirm Biden as the next president.
As lawmakers met, protesters loyal to Trump stormed the Capitol in an attack intended to keep Biden from replacing Trump in the White House.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, a Democrat, said officials who continued to support Trump’s claims of fraud violated their oath, and their rhetoric emboldened the rioters.
“They have an allegiance that they have sworn – not to the Constitution and not the United States of America, but to one man, and that man is Donald Trump,” she said.