Congressional Republicans in Washington are trapped. While privately many of them think Trump should concede he lost the election, they fear that crossing Trump and his base by publicly stating their beliefs will damage their political futures.[1] Such statements could also hurt Republican chances of maintaining control of the Senate by dampening GOP turnout in the January 5^th Georgia Senate runoff election.

Most Republicans don’t seem to have a problem with President Trump’s hell-bent efforts to undermine our democracy in order to stay in power.[2] In fact, some are actively assisting him while others are just silently acquiescing to his reckless disregard for the will of the voters.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, for instance, has taken the extremely unorthodox, and most likely unethical, step of calling election officials in several states regarding the legitimacy of certain ballots. Graham, a Trump ally, asked Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, “whether he had the power to throw out all mail ballots in counties where there were relatively high rates of rejection of mail ballots because their signatures did not match voters’ signatures on file.”[3]

Fortunately, Raffensperger resisted Graham’s overtures to manipulate the Georgia election results. While Graham denied it, Raffensperger felt the senator was pressuring him to throw out legally cast ballots.[4] After all, what legitimate business does a senator from another state have in scrutinizing the Georgia vote tally?

Meanwhile, Trump summoned Michigan Republican legislative leaders to Washington on Friday in an attempt to pressure them to nullify that state’s electoral college votes for President-elect Joe Biden. After the White House meeting, the GOP lawmakers who met with Trump “committed to letting that certification process play out and undercut the false claims of nationwide voter fraud that Trump and his allies have continued to peddle.” They stated that “we will follow the law and follow the normal process regarding Michigan’s electors, just as we have said throughout this election.”[5]

On Sunday, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, denounced Trump’s actions: “A pressure campaign on state legislators to influence the electoral outcome is not only unprecedented but inconsistent with our democratic process. It is time to begin the full and formal transition process.”[6]

Republican legislative leaders in other critical swing states Biden won are sticking by their election results as well. In addition to Michigan and Georgia, GOP lawmakers in Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have asserted that they would not intervene in the selection of electors to try to flip their state’s electoral votes to Trump. “Such a move would violate state law and a vote of the people, several noted.”[7]

While Mitch McConnell and most of his Republican Senate colleagues have supported Trump’s efforts to undermine the election, courts across the country in more than twenty cases have repeatedly found no merit in Trump’s challenges to the election. So, as Thanksgiving approaches, we can give thanks for the honest Republican state officials who have resisted pressure to interfere with the election results in their states.

Despite everything that Trump and his cohorts have done to subvert the election outcome, we can breathe a sigh of relief with the knowledge that he has failed. On January 20, 2021, Joe Biden will be sworn in as the 46^th president of the United States.

Bruce Berlin, J.D.

A retired, public sector ethics attorney, Berlin is the author of Breaking Big Money’s Grip on America (See breakingbigmoneysgrip.com.), the founder of New Mexicans for Money Out of Politics, a former U.S. Institute of Peace fellow, and the founder and former executive director of The Trinity Forum for International Security and Conflict Resolution. He can be reached at breakingbigmoneysgrip@gmail.com.

Subscribe to this blog at https://breakingbigmoneysgrip.com/my-blog-3/. Join the movement to revive our democracy. Together we can save the soul of America.

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[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-threats-cost-1.5810848

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/opinion/trump-election-lies.html

[3] https://www.vox.com/2020/11/18/21571684/lindsey-graham-brad-raffensperger-georgia-ballots

[4] https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/16/lindsey-graham-georgia-2020-election-436910

[5] https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/20/politics/michigan-house-speaker-will-meet-trump/index.html

[6] https://www.adn.com/politics/2020/11/22/murkowski-calls-for-presidential-transition-to-begin-saying-trumps-attempts-to-influence-electoral-results-are-unprecedented/

[7] https://apnews.com/article/election-2020-joe-biden-donald-trump-legislature-pennsylvania-b199b2debc87fbb20612a48835bc0dba