CNN anchor Jake Tapper said on Wednesday’s broadcast of his show “The Lead” that President Donald Trump, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) and other House Republicans who signed onto a Texas lawsuit were “fighting facts, fighting truth, fighting standards, fighting democracy” by continuing to question the validity of President-elect Joe Biden’s win.
Discussing Hawley’s plan to object to the certification of Biden’s electoral college win, Tapper said, “So McConnell has been working behind the scenes to avoid this exact scenario, but now if Hawley goes through with this announcement it appears every Republican senator will have no choice but to publicly take a side with President Trump, lying and making crazy allegations, or siding with reality, which could cost them with Republican voters in a potential primary.”
Reporter Nia-Malika Henderson said, “In a potential primary, and a lot of these folks, of course, not only looking at maybe Senate races coming up but 2024 as well. There is kind of a primary for who can be the biggest Trump fanboy.”
Tapper said, “This gets to a bigger question, Nia-Malika, about the rot in the Republican Party right now. I don’t know how widespread it is. Certainly, there are a number of local and state Republican officials in Georgia and Arizona and Michigan and Pennsylvania who are standing up for reality. You have others, such as Senators Pat Toomey and Mitt Romney, and Adam Kinzinger, who are standing up for reality. But you have two-thirds of the House Republicans siding with that deranged Texas lawsuit. Now you have that Kraken Caucus opening up in the Senate with Hawley. If Republicans held the House of Representatives right now, right, if Kevin Mccarthy was the incoming speaker, how sanguine would any of us be about whether or not this democracy was going to be overturned?”
Henderson said, “Not at all because you’re right, they have sided with this idea that it is okay to throw out the votes of millions and millions and millions of people. And let’s be real here, the folks that they are looking at are in big cities, places like Philadelphia, places like Detroit, Atlanta. Those are the voters and the votes they have been calling into question. This has been a Republican Party project for decades, making it harder to vote, questioning the votes of other people, suggesting there was widespread voter fraud and then putting in laws to make it harder for certain people to vote.”
She added, “I think, even given all that we’ve seen from this party and this president, it is a surprise that this is where many of them have landed, not only in the House but now we see it happening in the Senate as well. They think this is the ticket to fame and fortune in the Republican Party and to electoral success.”
Tapper concluded, “Fighting facts, fighting truth, fighting standards, fighting democracy.”
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