After riot, Hawley and Marshall maintain objections to Biden’s Electoral College win
Hours after a riot at the U.S. Capitol left four people dead, Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley and Kansas Republican Sen. Roger Marshall remained two of a handful of senators who continued to support challenges to President-elect Joe Biden’s electoral votes.
Hawley, who has faced a wave of criticism for his role in creating the political climate that led to the attack, began his speech on the Senate floor Wednesday evening by thanking law enforcement and decrying violence.
“We’ve seen a lot of violence against law enforcement, and today we saw it here in the Capitol of the United States. And in this country, in the United States of America, we cannot say emphatically enough, violence is not how you achieve change,” Hawley said.
The speech came after Hawley sent multiple fundraising pleas linked to his election objection. He was photographed pumping his fist in the air to a crowd of President Donald Trump’s supporters before the riot, which was an attempt to thwart Congress from counting Biden’s 306 electoral votes.
Trump, who has refused to concede, has spent weeks asserting widespread voter fraud in the November election. But Trump’s attorneys have offered scant evidence in court, and their arguments have repeatedly been rejected by state and federal judges, including Trump’s appointees.
Hawley has not offered evidence of voter fraud in Pennsylvania or even asserted it as his basis for disqualifying the sixth most populous state’s 20 electoral votes from being counted.
Instead, Hawley has argued that the decision of the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to expand mail-in voting in 2019 violates Pennsylvania’s constitution.
Pennsylvania has allowed absentee voting for decades. But it expanded the ability of residents to vote by mail for any reason — the same as in Kansas. The option was widely used in 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You have a state constitution that has been interpreted for over a century to say there is no mail-in balloting permitted except for in very narrow circumstances that’s also provided for in the law, and yet, last year, Pennsylvania elected officials passed a whole new law that allows universal mail-in balloting and did it regardless of what the constitution said,” Hawley said.
Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey rose to the floor to “defend the people of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, to defend the more than 6.9 million voters who voted in this election, and to condemn in the strongest possible terms this attempt to disenfranchise the voters of Pennsylvania based upon a lie, a falsehood.”
Casey called the 2019 law to expand mail-in voting plainly constitutional and said no questions about its legitimacy were raised until it was clear Biden won the state.
“There is no in-person requirement in our state’s constitution. The constitution sets a floor, not a ceiling,” Casey said, rejecting Hawley’s argument that the Pennsylvania Constitution required the bulk of the state’s voters to cast their ballots in-person during a pandemic.
Hawley made his argument during what was actually a debate about Arizona’s 11 electoral votes, following an objection raised earlier in the day by Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and 60 House Republicans.
But after the day of violence, Cruz lost some of his original Senate supporters, and the objection was voted down 93 to 6 in an overwhelming bipartisan majority. The House defeated the measure 303 to 121 roughly an hour later.
Two of the six senators to object to Arizona’s electors were Hawley and Marshall, a Kansas Republican who was sworn into the Senate Sunday after two terms in the U.S. House.
After the Arizona objection failed, Hawley and 80 House Republicans formally objected to Pennsylvania’s 20 electors. This set off a lengthy and contentious debate in the House, but the Senate quickly voted down the measure 92 to 7 without any speeches, including from Hawley, who had called for the debate.
The House voted it down hours later 282 to 138, paving the way for the final affirmation of Biden’s 306 electoral votes.
Marshall was one of a handful of senators to support both objections.
In his first floor speech as a U.S. senator, a Great Bend OB-GYN, said he had “given as much consideration and thought surrounding the issue objecting to a state’s Electoral College vote as I did considering the treatment plan for a serious health concern.”
Marshall asserted that state legislatures had seen their authority “usurped by governors, secretaries of state and activist courts.” But he did not elaborate on which of these took place in Arizona or why it justified discarding the state’s votes for Biden.
Eight GOP lawmakers from Kansas and Missouri supported the objections in the U.S. House: Kansas City area Reps. Sam Graves and Vicky Hartzler; eastern Missouri Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer; southern Missouri Reps. Billy Long and Jason Smith; Kansas Reps. Ron Estes, Jake LaTurner and Tracey Mann.
Hartzler compared the riot to “a Third World coup” and said “Trump’s unpresidential remarks” about the violence made it difficult to object, but she said the concerns about the swing states’ election processes were valid.
“The need to ensure election integrity has not changed, and the concerns regarding voter integrity are not washed away because protestors, many of whom supported President Trump, stormed the Capitol today,” Hartzler said in a statement a little before 1 a.m. Thursday.
The Wednesday night Senate debate featured bipartisan criticism of Hawley and Cruz, potential 2024 presidential contenders who have emerged as the faces of the challenge to Biden’s victory.
New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker criticized fundraising off of conspiracy theories. Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul admonished colleagues preparing to cast a protest vote against Biden’s victory.
“The vote today is not a protest. It’s literally a vote to overturn an election. … You can go outside if you want to protest,” said Paul, who noted that the objections undermined the bedrock conservative principle of states’ rights.
Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who grew up in the Kansas City area, said that blocking states’ electors from being counted would have amounted to one of the greatest acts of disenfranchisement in U.S. history.
Kaine invoked the memory of Georgia Congressman John Lewis, the civil rights icon who died last year.
“Our late friend John Lewis, congressman from Georgia, was savagely beaten on Bloody Sunday just for marching for voting rights. That act of violence inspired this body, the U.S. Senate, to come together in March of 1965 and work to pass in a bipartisan fashion the Voting Rights Act,” said Kaine, who like Hawley is a graduate of Rockhurst High School in Kansas City.
“We should be coming together after acts of violence as a United States Senate to affirm the votes of all who cast ballots in November.”
This story was originally published January 6, 2021 at 11:33 PM with the headline "After riot, Hawley and Marshall maintain objections to Biden’s Electoral College win."
