Electoral College challenge: Republican leaders can’t just sweep Trump loyalists under the rug

Analysis: Latest Trump loyalty test carries resonance into 2022 Senate election cycle

Donald Trump has continued driving a wedge in the Republican party even after his electoral defeat, with the outgoing president’s allegations of a stolen 2020 election getting a vote in Congress this week.

Republican congressional leaders have tried to downplay the impact of the vote, which represents the ultimate loyalty test to Mr Trump.

“The future will take care of itself,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has said several times in recent weeks, when asked by the Washington press corps about some Republicans’ attempts to toss the 2020 election results.

Mr McConnell and his top deputy, GOP Whip John Thune of South Dakota, had been urging GOP senators to remain united and not force a “terrible vote” on some House Republicans’ challenges to the electoral results. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley — widely speculated to be eyeing a presidential run in 2024 — announced last week he would take up those House Republicans’ concerns, forcing the new Congress to take a vote on Wednesday.

Eleven other GOP senators have since joined him, citing “unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law.” The conspiracy theories of widespread voter fraud to which those senators alluded in their letter over the weekend were mostly either debunked or not substantiated in the court system.

Publicly, GOP leaders, who oppose Mr Hawley and others’ efforts, are unfazed.

“Now that we're locked into doing it, we'll give air to the objections, and people can have their day in court, and we'll hear everybody out, and then we'll vote. In the end, I don't think it changes anything,” Mr Thune said over the weekend, The Washington Post reported.

Mr McConnell and Mr Thune have pointed out that the fringe GOP election challenge is doomed for a quick failure.

To succeed, it would require both chambers voting to overturn the Electoral College results in the five states Republicans have called into question — Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia, and Wisconsin.

Democrats, united against the electoral challenges, have a House majority. And several GOP lawmakers in both chambers — including most Republican senators — have indicated they will vote to certify Mr Biden’s victory.

Still, it’s a vote with weighty political implications for GOP senators up for re-election in 2022 and those mulling presidential bids in 2024.

Among the 12 GOP senators challenging Mr Biden’s victory this week are Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and James Lankford of Oklahoma.

Mr Lankford has not been shy over the last four years admitting to reporters when he has not seen eye to eye with Mr Trump on matters of policy and governance.

Granted, that has not been often: Mr Lankford, a religious conservative from ruby red Oklahoma, has been one of the most staunchly Trump-aligned senators since taking that office in 2015.

But with the specter of a potential primary challenge from the right in 2022, Mr Lankford appears to be covering all his bases to shore up support among Mr Trump’s base for his re-election bid.

Mr Johnson faces more difficult calculus as a GOP senator hailing from a state that just voted for a Democrat for president.

As chairman of the Senate Homeland Security Committee, Mr Johnson has been one of the chief peddlers of the Trump campaign’s various conspiracy theories, from the notion that it was Ukraine — and not Russia — that interfered in 2016 to unproven allegations of voter fraud in 2020.

On Sunday, Mr Johnson was dressed down by NBC’s Chuck Todd of “Meet the Press” for flip-flopping on the upcoming Electoral College vote.

Last month, Mr Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel he would not vote to overturn Mr Biden’s victory: “Unless something surfaced, there have been 57 cases filed by the president or his allies. Not a single court has found a single instance of fraud, or any of this evidence seen as legitimate.”

The senator said Mr Biden’s win was “legitimate,” despite some irregularities he hoped to probe in a committee hearing he had scheduled for the following week.

“I haven’t seen anything that would convince me that the results — the overall national result — would be overturned,” Mr Johnson said in that 15 December interview.

Two weeks later, the Wisconsin Republican had joined 11 of his colleagues to try to throw out the electoral results in states that have proven decisive in favour of Mr Biden.

Mr Todd on Sunday suggested Mr Johnson was simply trying to “curry favour” with Mr Trump’s base ahead of his 2022 re-election campaign.

“You made an allegation of widespread fraud, you've failed to offer specific evidence of that widespread fraud, but you're demanding an investigation on the grounds there's allegations of widespread fraud. Essentially, you're the arsonist here,” Mr Todd said, highlighting the circular logic of Republicans’ position on the election challenge.

Mr Johnson fired back with the usual GOP menu of accusations that the national media carried Democrats’ water on Russian election interference in 2016 — which actually happened, as outlined in the final report of former special counsel Robert Mueller — and is biased against conservative thinkers and figureheads.

Congress is scheduled to vote on the Electoral College results on Wednesday.

Mr Biden will be sworn in as president two weeks later, on 20 January.