7 of 8 NC GOP House members say they’ll object to Biden election results in Congress
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Seven of North Carolina’s eight Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives plan to object Wednesday to election results showing Joe Biden’s presidential victory.
Reps. Greg Murphy and Dan Bishop announced Tuesday, the day before the joint session in Congress to count the Electoral College votes, that they plan to join in objecting to certification of certain states. Rep. Virginia Foxx announced her decision Wednesday.
Four other members of the state’s House delegation — Reps. Madison Cawthorn, Ted Budd, Richard Hudson and David Rouzer — previously announced they would object to certification.
Rep. Patrick McHenry said late Wednesday night that he would not object to certification.
President Donald Trump has been calling for Republicans to overturn the election results, which have been certified in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232.
Murphy, of Greenville, said he will object to Pennsylvania and is still considering other states. Bishop, of Charlotte, said he will object to the certification of electors from Pennsylvania as well as Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin. Biden won all four states as well as Arizona and Nevada, which also may draw challenges Wednesday.
The last-ditch effort is unlikely to succeed in overturning the election results. Biden is almost certain to be certified as the winner after all the objections are heard and will be inaugurated on Jan. 20.
Trump and other Republicans have brought dozens of legal challenges with no success.
But Murphy, who said he is “a realist” about the likely outcome, said that several states disregarded the national and state constitutions in allowing people or bodies other than state legislatures to make election law.
“The crux of the matter is not the outcome of the election, but the process of the election,” Murphy said in a telephone interview Tuesday.
Bishop accused the “national Democratic party” of carrying “out a coordinated nationwide campaign to undermine the rule of law governing the election as structured in the Constitution” in an eight-page report he published Tuesday night.
North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr told Politico he would not join the effort to challenge the election outcome and a spokesperson confirmed to The News & Observer that the Republican will vote to certify the election results. Sen. Thom Tillis, a Republican who was sworn in for his second term Sunday, announced Wednesday he would not support the challenges, calling it “a precedent we should not set.”
Most of North Carolina’s Republican House members signed onto an amicus brief in support of a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate the election results in four states won by Biden. The Supreme Court dismissed the case.
All of those objecting won elections in November.
Complaints about process
In a statement Sunday, Hudson said “millions of people do not trust the outcome of this presidential election because there is incontrovertible evidence of voter irregularity — if not outright fraud — in multiple states.”
He did not provide details. Trump, before and after Election Day, has repeated false claims that the election was fraudulent and rigged to his more than 80 million Twitter followers.
Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press last month that, “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
About one-third of Americans do not believe the 2020 presidential election was legitimate, according to a December poll by Quinnipiac. The poll found 70% of Republicans believe the election was “not legitimate.”
Rouzer, in a statement, cited some of those figures and said, “When there are wide-spread and grave concerns, I do not believe our Founders intended Congress to be an automatic rubber stamp of approval of a state’s votes. Election integrity is a foundational matter that needs to be ensured.”
Hudson said he has concerns about changes made to election laws in various states, including extending the deadline for mail-in ballots. Hudson said he’s also concerned with the “impact big tech bias and censorship had on this election.”
“For these reasons, I believe it is my Constitutional duty to object to certifying the Electoral College votes of certain states that violated their own election laws,” Hudson said.
Murphy said his objections are not about a “certain person” — Trump — but about “upholding the Constitution.”
“Whether objecting would change the outcome is not the question that must be addressed. It is rather, did certain states follow their constitutional duties in how they chose electors? I believe the answer is ‘no’. Unless we solve this problem now by objecting and calling into question the irregularities in the process this year, it will call into question the integrity of every election this nation faces moving forward,” he said in a statement.
North Carolina extended its deadline for accepting mail-in ballots, a change that withstood challenges all the way to the Supreme Court before the election.
Trump won North Carolina’s 15 electoral votes by less than 75,000 votes, but its results have not been challenged.
Murphy said the changes in North Carolina were less “egregious” than those made in other states, in part because some changes agreed to by the State Board of Elections in a lawsuit settlement were rolled back by the courts.
“This has been a national, partisan attack on the Constitutional delegation of authority to regulate elections specifically to state legislatures,” Bishop said in a statement.
What will happen?
Democratic Rep. Kathy Manning, who won her Greensboro-area seat in November, said she would “absolutely vote to certify the election results.”
“It’s abundantly clear this was a fair election that Joe Biden won with an overwhelming majority. The president has brought 60 different lawsuits. Each one of which has been thrown out of court for lack of evidence,” Manning said in a telephone interview Monday. “I think that makes things perfectly clear.”
For an objection to be in order, it must be endorsed by at least one senator and one representative. At least 12 Republican senators and perhaps as many as 140 Republican House members plan to challenge the election results.
If objections are made, the House and the Senate must meet separately to debate the objection and vote whether to count the votes in question, according to the Congressional Research Service. Both chambers must agree by a simple majority to the objection in order to toss the votes.
Democrats have a slim majority in the House. And several Republicans in the Senate, where the GOP has a slim majority pending the outcome of Tuesday’s runoff elections in Georgia, have said they will vote to certify Biden’s victory.
The process could stretch long into the night.
“The antics taking place are damaging. The American people will see the transparency of what’s going to take place. I’m hoping there are Republicans who will put the good of the country ahead of their own personal ambitions,” Manning said.
For more North Carolina government and politics news, listen to the Domecast politics podcast from The News & Observer and the NC Insider. You can find it on Megaphone, Apple Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
This story was originally published January 4, 2021 at 8:23 AM.
