Declining to do so themselves, 75 state House Republicans asked Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation in Washington to block the awarding of its 20 electoral votes.
President Donald Trump at a campaign event in Newtown in October.Tim Tai / File Photograph
Jeremy Roebuck
Staff Writer
Updated 40 minutes ago
Just hours after GOP leadership in state House indicated they would not move to upend Pennsylvania’s election results in Harrisburg, Speaker Bryan Cutler and Majority Leader Kerry Benninghoff joined 73 Republican colleagues Friday in calling on members of Congress to do it instead.
In a letter Democrats dismissed as a stunt, the GOP lawmakers disavowed the election’s outcome — an 81,000-vote victory for President-elect Joe Biden — and accused Gov. Tom Wolf of “undermining the many protections” they had written into a law passed a year ago to expand widespread voting by mail in the state.
“For these reasons,” they wrote to the state’s Congressional delegation. “We the undersigned members of the Pennsylvania General Assembly urge you to object … to the Electoral College votes received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.”
The letter came as President Donald Trump continued his attempts to cast doubt on the integrity of the election despite a lack of evidence to support his claims of widespread fraud.
But the missive’s release Friday also capped off a dizzying few hours marked by intraparty Republican sniping and stinging accusations lobbed by the president’s closest allies
Just a day earlier, Cutler (R., Lancaster) and Benninghoff (R., Centre) had unequivocally stated — in a memo cosigned by Senate Majority Leader Kim Ward (R., Westmoreland) and President Pro Tempore Jake Corman (R., Centre) — that state legislators had no authority to ignore certified election results and appoint Pennsylvania’s delegates to the Electoral College themselves, despite repeated calls from the president and some within their own party ranks to do so.
Their statement drew a swift rebuke from some of Trump’s top advisers on Friday. Lawyer Rudy Giuliani accused them of in a tweet of “covering up for Dem[ocrat] crimes” and misleading the president. He said he was ashamed of them for “let[ting] America down.”
Trump legal adviser Jenna Ellis went further, retweeting a stinging rebuke from another Giuliani ally who called the GOP leadership team in Harrisburg “liars,” “cowards,” and “traitors.”
Within hours of those attacks, the state House Republicans issued their letter urging the congressional delegation to block the awarding of Pennsylvania’s Electoral College votes.
In it, they reiterated many of the complaints that have featured in the Trump campaign’s unsuccessful legal challenges, including disputes over the access partisan monitors had to vote counting and the fact that some counties had allowed voters to correct mail ballots that were in danger of being disqualified.
The letter’s signatories did not mention that the election they were disavowing also saw their party expand its majority in the state House this year.
Their Democratic counterparts quickly dismissed the letter’s request, noting that Wolf had signed off on the state’s certified results and appointed Biden’s slate of Electoral College delegates more than a week ago.
“The votes, fairly cast, have been accurately counted and reported,” Senate Minority Leader Jay Costa (D., Allegheny) and House Minority Leader Joanna McClinton (D., Philadelphia) said in a statement. “It is time to move on and focus on a peaceful transition — rather than partisan efforts to undermine the results they don’t like.”
Election law experts described the extreme remedy the state House Republicans proposed Friday — asking Congress to block the awarding of Pennsylvania’s 20 Electoral College votes — as exceedingly unlikely to succeed.
The proposal relies on a rarely used maneuver in an obscure federal law detailing how presidential election results are officially certified at the national level after the Dec. 14 Electoral College vote.
On Jan. 6, the U.S. House and Senate meet in a joint session to sign off on those results. Normally, this process plays out as a formality and the electors’ decision is accepted.
But all it takes is one member of the House and one senator to object to any state’s slate of presidential electors to potentially gum up the works.
If a challenge is filed to Pennsylvania’s electors, the full House and the full Senate would have to debate the issue and cast separate votes on whether to accept that objection. It would take a simple majority for both chambers to sustain it.
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