The courage of Brad Raffensperger

I am generally very hard on Republicans, far too many of whom have jettisoned morality and decency and allegiance to the rule of law and constitutional government as they have embraced Donald Trump and/or put their party above the good of the nation.  While the sedition caucus - see yesterday's last post - continues it betrayal of the nation, some Republicans seemingly are realizing their errors and belatedly are refusing to bow to Trump's threats and the demands of the deplorables (e.g., white supremacists, would be fascists/neo-Nazis, and Christofascists) who now comprise the base of the Republican Party.  Perhaps most visible of this group - many of which still have many sins to atone for - is Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger who perhaps more than anyone has borne the brunt of Trump's threats and glaring demands that he be treated as an emperor.  Hopefully, tomorrow more in the GOP will find a spine and vote to certify Joe Biden's election and say "no more" to Trump and his morally hideous and toxic base.  A piece at CNN looks at Raffensberger's refusal to bow to Trump.  Here are excerpts:

The hour-long recording of [Trump] the President of the United States, defeated and desperate, begging Georgia's secretary of state over the phone to "find" him enough votes to overturn the election results there was appalling.

But surprising?  After four years of Donald Trump's blatant assault on democratic institutions rules, norms and laws, anyone who is shocked by this latest outrage simply hasn't been paying attention. It was only a year ago that Trump was impeached for a similar attempt to strong-arm the president of Ukraine. 

No, what was remarkable about the whole, surreal and sordid conversation was not Trump's recycling of debunked conspiracy theories nor his insistent claim, against all evidence, that he had won the state by "hundreds of thousands of votes."  It wasn't hearing [Trump] the President sounding like a mafia don. 

It was the calm and steadfast way Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and his attorney, Ryan Germany, firmly rebuffed him. 

After patiently listening to and rebutting each of Trump's bizarre diatribes about supposedly rigged machines, dead voters, shredded ballots and other social media-driven drivel, Raffensperger cut to the chase: "Well, Mr. President," he said, in even tones, "the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong." 

It's a safe bet that Raffensperger, a Republican who supported Trump, would have much preferred that Joe Biden had lost Georgia. Raffensperger might then have avoided Trump's wrath and the political and personal threats he has endured. 

Given the enormous sway Trump holds with Republican voters, Raffensperger knows that by placing his oath above [Trump's] the President's pleasure, he may well have doomed his own political future. And Trump was none too subtle in reminding him of that during their call on Saturday. . . . I will tell you that right now. The only people that like you are people that will never vote for you. You know that, Brad, right?" 

[T]he political threat is real, and Raffensperger knows that too, which is what has made his admirable stand so noteworthy. 

In his book "Profiles in Courage," former President John F. Kennedy described rare acts of political courage, in which politicians placed duty and conscience ahead of public opinion or their own political well-being. 

The essence of Trump is his belief that such courage is for suckers; that, regardless of duty, you do what is in your own best interest first, last and always -- even when it means undermining the most fundamental tenets of our democracy. It's been dismaying to see how many fearful Republican politicians have heeled to his craven view. 

Many of them will be on display in Congress on Wednesday, giving lift to Trump's well-litigated and thoroughly debunked charges of election fraud by challenging the vote of the Electoral College that will make Biden the 46th president.

By standing up for the integrity of the election despite Trump's shameless pressure, Raffensperger has proven himself, in America's moment of trial, to be an admirable exception. He has shown courage. 

Voters may not reward him for it, but history will.

More Monday Male Beauty

 

Republicans' Self-Prostitution to and Enabling of Trump Comes Home to Roost

In Donald Trump's mind loyalty is a one way street: he wants blind loyalty but gives nothing back in return and will stab a heretofore loyal supporter in the back the moment he or she fails to live up to Trump's always shifting loyalty test. With his insane hour long call on Saturday to Georgia's Secretary of State has shown that he expects election results to be overturned and votes discarded if he doesn't like the results.  The only election fraud in view is what Trump and those in the GOP who continue to prostitute themselves to Trump and his base of deplorables are demanding be done in violation of both state and federal election laws.  Meanwhile, big business has had enough of Trump and nearly 200 business leaders - typically allies of Republicans - have called on Congress to certify Joe Biden's victory and Trump's toadies in Congress are being accused of behavior worse than treason.  One can only hope the GOP implodes tomorrow in Georgia and the ruin for Republicans will be immense.  As noted in a piece here, when Senate Republicans wrongly acquitted Trump from impeachment, knowingly or not, they sent Trump a message that he could do whatever he wanted, the law, decency and morality be damned. Trump has rum with that message and it has come home to roost for Republicans.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at the calls of the business community to end Trump's lies and attempted election fraud.  Here are excerpts:

Almost 200 of the country’s top business leaders urged Congress to certify the electoral results for President-elect Joe Biden in a letter Monday, arguing that “attempts to thwart or delay this process run counter to the essential tenets of our democracy.”

The letter marked the business community’s most significant push yet to ensure President Trump’s efforts to overturn the November election are unsuccessful. Signers included a wide array of executives of Fortune 500 companies, from the leaders of banks, airlines, investment firms, pharmaceutical companies, professional sports leagues, real estate conglomerates, top law firms and media companies.

Many of the leaders have previously been wary of getting publicly involved in politics, and some have been supportive of [Trump] the president. . . . Among the signers included leaders of Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Pfizer, the National Basketball Association, Mastercard, Blackstone Group, BlackRock, Lyft, Deloitte, Warby Parker, Moody’s, WeWork, Ernst & Young, JetBlue, MetLife, Condé Nast, the Carlyle Group, Hearst, American Express, Saks Fifth Avenue, Price Waterhouse Cooper and Deutsche Bank, along with 150 more.

In addition to alienating would be donors Republicans - at least those still beholden to Trump and his deplorables are being accused of treason like behavior as noted in a scathing but highly accurate piece in The Atlantic:

“We are what we pretend to be,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote in the opening of his 1962 novel, Mother Night, “and so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” Republicans in Congress are pretending to be seditionists—and so they have become, in fact, seditionists.

Forget all the whispered denials and the off-the-record expressions of concern in private; ignore the knowing smirks on camera from GOP officials who are desperately trying to indicate that they’re in on the joke.

This is sedition, plain and simple. No amount of playacting and rationalizing can change the fact that the majority of the Republican Party and its apologists are advocating for the overthrow of an American election and the continued rule of a sociopathic autocrat.

This is not some handful of firebrands making a stand for the television cameras. . . . Today, the “sedition caucus” includes at least 140 members of the House—that is, some two-thirds of the House GOP membership—and at least 10 members of the Senate. Their challenge comes after weeks of insistence that the 2020 election was rigged, plagued by fraud, and even subverted by foreign powers. The president and his minions have filed, and lost, scores of lawsuits that ranged from minor disputes over process to childlike, error-filled briefs full of bizarre assertions.

Instead of threatening to gavel these objections into irrelevance, as Biden did four years ago, Vice President Mike Pence “welcomes” these challenges. Pence’s career is finished, but he could have stood for the Constitution he claims to love and which he swore to defend. However, cowardice is contagious, and no mask was thick enough to protect Pence from the pathogen of fear.

Perhaps the sedition caucus didn’t mean to go this far. . . . But for Trump, there is no such thing as too much humiliation. . . . And just as they have done for the past four years, elected Republicans tried to convince themselves that if they supported this outrage, it would be the last time they would be required to surrender their dignity; that this betrayal of the Constitution would be the last treachery demanded of them. That if they complied one more time, they would be allowed to go back to their privileged lives far from the districts they claim to represent—places few of them really want to live after tasting life in the Emerald City.

Engaging in sedition for insincere reasons does not make it less hideous. Arguing that you betrayed the Constitution only as theater is no defense.

Indeed, shredding the Constitution purely for personal gain is perhaps the worst of the sins of the sedition caucus. . . . But we are, in the main, dealing with people who are far worse than true believers. The Republican Party is infested with craven opportunists, the kind of people who will try to tell us later that they were “just asking questions,” that they were “defending the process,” and of course, that they were merely representing “the will of the people.” Senators Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz are not idiots. These are men who understand perfectly well what they are doing.

The members of the public and the institutions of American life should shroud these seditionists in silence and opprobrium in perpetuity: no television interviews, no sinecures at universities or think tanks, no rehabilitating book tours, no jokey late-night appearances, no self-serving op-eds.

The sedition caucus is worse than a treasonous conspiracy. At least real traitors believe in something. These people instead believe only in their own fortunes and thus will change flags and loyalties as circumstances require. They will always become what they pretend to be, and so they cannot—and must not—be trusted ever again with political power.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

Trump Has Crossed a Bright-Red Line

Throughout his business and political career Donald Trump has always behaved like a crime boss with no regard for the law.  Now, in an hour long phone call seeking to tamper with election results in Georgia - an act that appears to clearly violate both state and federal election laws, the latter imposing a five year prison term, Trump has again provided unequivocal evidence of his criminality. Some would like to simply turn the page once Joe Biden takes office and to move on - seemingly the course that presents the least risk of continued upheaval.  Yet, if Trump is not prosecuted and any attempt at self-pardon is not challenged, a dangerous precedent will have been established that bodes ill for the future.  Likewise, prosecution and a criminal conviction will help under cut the actions of seditious congressional Republicans and document for posterity their moral bankruptcy and unfitness for office. A piece in The Atlantic by a former Republican makes the case of why Trump cannot be given yet another pass.  Here are highlights: 

In a bombshell conversation with Georgia’s secretary of state yesterday, President Donald Trump made monkeys of every Republican official and every conservative talking head who professed to believe Trump’s allegations of voter fraud. The president himself made clear that he had only one end in view: overturning the 2020 election.

You knew this already, of course. Anyone connected to reality knew it. Even most of Trump’s political allies probably knew it. But important incentives induced people in the pro-Trump camp to pretend otherwise. And now, as so often happens, Trump has yanked away the protective deception to reveal the truth.

What Trump did on that call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, first reported by The Washington Post this afternoon, might well have been a crime. More than that cannot be said until and unless a jury is heard from. But Trump has reason to worry about new juries today, alongside all the other juries he was worrying about yesterday.

The Raffensperger tape shows Trump’s Plan A to stay ahead of the law: election tampering. That plan will reach its finale on January 6—the point of no return, the last minute for stunts and sabotage. A shameful number of Republican members of the House and Senate have signed up for the stunts and sabotage, but not enough to prevent the inevitable outcome of a Biden-Harris inauguration on January 20.

Trump’s thoughts now must turn to a Plan B. Plan B is to protect himself from juries even if he loses office. Plan B points to a self-pardon, and the huge crisis that must ensue.

[I]f Trump is unwilling to trust Biden’s forbearance, and chooses to attempt to pardon himself, it would be a direct attack on the whole structure of the rule of law. Nobody knows whether presidential self-pardons are valid. Scholars disagree; courts have never ruled on them, because no past president ever tried such a thing. But a president desperate enough to try to steal an election on a recorded line is desperate enough to try a self-pardon.

If a president can pardon himself as well as his or her subordinates, a president can order any crime, or commit it himself, with absolute impunity. The very notion of a self-pardon is radically inconsistent with democratic accountability. If Trump tries to pardon himself, his successors must fight his attempt all the way to the Supreme Court. And given the Raffensperger recording, who doubts that Trump will try it?

The sensible American majority surely wants an end to Trump controversies after Inauguration Day, a return to normal governance and the crucial work ahead: overcoming the pandemic, restoring the economy, and renewing U.S. leadership of the world. But Trump gets a say too, as he got a say in the impeachment crisis. Trump is abusing the power of the presidency until his last hour in office. And his nonstop abuse seems likely to force a reckoning even by those most eager to move on. Trump will not be ignored; he will not let the chapter quietly close. Show him a red line, and he will cross it. And if the country’s red lines are to be reestablished, Trump will have to face the law he violated and violated and violated again.

Trump Begs and Then Threatens Georgia Secretary of State

Some weeks ago in an MSNBC interview Donald Trump's niece, a PhD psychologist spoke about her uncle's mental illness and predicted that (i) his warped mind would not be able to deal with his electoral defeat, and (ii) there were few limits to what he might attempt.   In a leaked recording of a telephone conversation described as sometimes "incoherent " Trump both begged and then threatened the Georgia Secretary of State to "find" enough votes to overturn Joe Biden's victory in that state. To say that Trump is mentally unwell appears to be an understatement and one has to wonder when Mike Pence and a majority of the Cabinet will grow adequate balls to do what needs to be done: invoke the 25th Amendment and have Trump removed from office. I suspect a plethora of mental health experts would come forward to certify his mental illness and unfitness.  The Washington Post looks at the conversation and recording that someone thankfully leaked.  Here are highlights:

President Trump urged fellow Republican Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call Saturday that election experts said raised legal questions.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation in which Trump alternately berated Raffensperger, tried to flatter him, begged him to act and threatened him with vague criminal consequences if the secretary of state refused to pursue his false claims, at one point warning that Raffensperger was taking “a big risk.”

Throughout the call, Raffensperger and his office’s general counsel rejected his assertions, explaining that Trump is relying on debunked conspiracy theories and that President-elect Joe Biden’s 11,779-vote victory in Georgia was fair and accurate.

The rambling, at times incoherent conversation, offered a remarkable glimpse of how consumed and desperate [Trump] the president remains about his loss, unwilling or unable to let the matter go and still believing he can reverse the results in enough battleground states to remain in office.

“There’s no way I lost Georgia,” Trump said, a phrase he repeated again and again on the call. “There’s no way.

Several of his allies were on the line as he spoke, including White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and conservative lawyer Cleta Mitchell, a prominent GOP lawyer whose involvement with Trump’s efforts had not been previously known.

The White House, the Trump campaign and Meadows did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Raffensperger’s office declined to comment.

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he had spoken to Raffensperger, saying the secretary of state was “unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the “ballots under table” scam, ballot destruction, out of state “voters”, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”

Raffensperger responded with his own tweet: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.”

The pressure Trump put on Raffensperger is the latest example of his attempt to subvert the outcome of the Nov. 3 election through personal outreach to state Republican officials.

Republicans do not have the votes to successfully thwart Biden’s victory, but Trump has urged supporters to travel to Washington to protest the outcome, and state and federal officials are already bracing for clashes outside the Capitol.

Trump issued a vague threat to both Raffensperger and Ryan Germany, the secretary of state’s legal counsel, suggesting that if they don’t find that thousands of ballots in Fulton County have been illegally destroyed to block investigators — an allegation for which there is no evidence — they would be subject to criminal liability.

Trump also told Raffensperger that failure to act by Tuesday would jeopardize the political fortunes of David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler, Georgia’s two Republican senators whose fate in that day’s runoff elections will determine control of the U.S. Senate.

Trump said he plans to talk about the fraud on Monday, when he is scheduled to lead an election eve rally in Dalton, Ga. — a message that could further muddle the efforts of Republicans to get their voters out.

Trump’s conversation with Raffensperger put him in legally questionable territory, legal experts said. By exhorting the secretary of state to “find” votes and to deploy investigators who “want to find answers,” Trump appears to be encouraging him to doctor the election outcome in Georgia.

But experts said Trump’s clearer transgression is a moral one. Edward B. Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University, said that the legal questions are murky and would be subject to prosecutorial discretion. But he also emphasized that the call was “inappropriate and contemptible” and should prompt moral outrage.

Trump did most of the talking on the call. He was angry and impatient, calling Raffensperger a “child” and “either dishonest or incompetent” for not believing there was widespread ballot fraud in Atlanta — and twice calling himself a “schmuck” for endorsing Kemp, whom Trump holds in particular contempt for not embracing his claims of fraud.

Trump sounded at turns confused and meandering. At one point, he referred to Kemp as “George.” He tossed out several different figures for Biden’s margin of victory in Georgia and referred to the Senate runoff, which is Tuesday, as happening “tomorrow” and “Monday.”

His desperation was perhaps most pronounced during an exchange with Germany, Raffensperger’s general counsel, in which he openly begged for validation.

Sadly, within many Republican circles moral outrage is impossible since these Republicans abandoned morality when they embraced Trump and became his apologists and enablers. 

Still More Sunday Male Beauty

 

The Culture Wars Will Only Get Worse

The Commonwealth of Virginia may be finally making the transition to a "blue state," but there remain many batshit crazy Virginians as demonstrated by Virginia's 5th congressional district. What's disturbing is that the level of craziness and insanity in rural areas of the state are intensifying thanks to a Republican Party increasingly in the grip of Christofascists, white supremacist and conspiracy theory whack jobs. This is leading to not only sharper political divisions - with urban and suburban areas increasing able to out vote the bible thumping, knuckle dragging parts of the state - but also the cultural divide between the diverse educated regions of the state and the hinterland where ignorance is increasingly celebrated and hatred towards the so-called educated elites is growing. In this regard Virginia mirrors what's happening in states as varied as Georgia and Texas where in time the urban and suburban areas will be able to out vote the backward rural areas. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the phenomenon.  Many other sane Republicans will find the party leaving them. Here are article excerpts:

Denver Riggleman had a rough December. For one thing, he’s about to lose his job: Over the summer, members of the Virginia GOP voted to kick the freshman Republican out of Congress, largely because he publicly officiated a same-sex wedding. Riggleman’s cousin died of COVID-19 the week before Christmas, and his grandmother had to be hospitalized with the virus. Now, as his family gets sick all around him, Riggleman is about to be replaced in Congress by a coronavirus skeptic.

A few years ago, Republicans might have seen a guy like Riggleman as their future. He’s a small-business owner from the rural part of a purple-blue state who cares a lot about national security and keeping taxes low, and not much about policing people’s personal lives. In the infamous 2013 GOP autopsy report diagnosing why Republicans kept losing the popular vote and popular support, party leaders wrote that “young people and increasingly other voters will continue to tune us out” if the GOP does not become more inclusive. The culture wars were over, the report seemed to suggest—standing against same-sex marriage was a way to lose elections, not win them.

But as Riggleman’s saga makes clear, there are many places in the country where issues such as LGBTQ rights are not at all settled. As the 117th Congress convenes this month, voices from those places may be the loudest ones on the right. “I’ve been screaming, ‘We need to become a big-tent party!’ for some time,” Riggleman told me. “But I think they misunderstood me and thought I meant ‘carnival tent.’”

Riggleman has spent the past six months battling the more fringe parts of his party. Shortly after he was effectively fired, he started receiving hate mail, calling him a “fag lover,” a leader of “Bibi Netanyahu’s pedophile ring,” and a “tool of the anti-Christ.” One troll even called his wife “the spawn of Satan”—making the two of them a sort of underworld power couple, Riggleman joked.

The most conservative people within the Republican Party win power more easily when election rules work in their favor. Under Virginia law, party leaders can choose how they nominate candidates—no traditional primary elections required. Disgruntled GOP leaders in Riggleman’s district used that to their advantage, hosting a party convention in Good’s hometown in southern Virginia. This setup was designed to downplay moderate voices: The most active Republicans in the most conservative part of the state selected the candidate for a large and diverse district.

Since winning, Good has indicated that he does not accept the results of the presidential election. . . . Riggleman said he’s gotten frantic phone calls from Republicans in his district who didn’t quite realize who they were voting for. He sees Good as part of a new class of vocal conservative firebrands who just got elected to Congress: Lauren Boebert in Colorado, Madison Cawthorn in North Carolina, Georgia’s Greene. “You’re seeing this massive grift—this conspiratorial grift—that’s working,” Riggleman said.

Toward the end of his campaign, Webb [Good's Democrat opponent] stopped by Riggleman’s whiskey distillery, which has been manufacturing hand sanitizer during the pandemic. The two men chatted about the district, and how integrity is sometimes more important than winning. Webb bought a bottle of Riggleman’s honey rye, and the outgoing congressman wished him well. Although the two men have very different politics, they probably share more views than either does with Good. But this is not a season for moderation. “I didn’t leave the party. The party is leaving me,” Riggleman said.

Riggleman plans to spend his post-political career combatting the rise of conspiracy theories within the GOP. “I think disinformation could destroy our ability to have a working republic,” he said. For Christmas, he gave himself the gift of turning off social media and spending time with his family. He’s not concerned about the keyboard warriors who sit on beanbag chairs in their basement and yell at him online—“I care about as much about what people think on Twitter as I do about a Tupperware sale at Walmart,” he said. But he does worry that America’s culture wars have reached a new and dangerous level, inspiring confused vigilantism, such as the attempted storming of the Comet Ping Pong pizza shop in D.C. a few years ago. There are a lot of Rigglemans out there in America. But, for now, they are not the people shaping national politics. As Good heads to Washington, Riggleman will be sipping whiskey and watching the river on his 50-acre property, hoping that the country he loves doesn’t tear itself apart.

More Sunday Morning Male Beauty

 

Pence Confirms That He's a Spineless Bootlicker

Few in the Republican Party have more debased themselves and demonstrated that their feigned "Christian values" are meaningless when faced with an opportunity for perceived personal advancement and the chance for power.  Pence and "Mother", his wife, put on a great shown of wearing the religion on their selves, support anti-gay policies and would happily gut the promise of religious freedom for all in the First Amendment in order to give Christofascists special rights and privileges.  Yet when give the option to flee a losing gubernatorial reelection race, Pence signed on with the most morally bankrupt man to ever occupy the White House and has ever since shown that the main attribute of his form of Christianity is embracing lies and rank hypocrisy.  Nothing Trump has done is too low or too morally bankrupt to shake Pence out of his daily self-prostitution. Now, Pence is embracing the Trump cultist lie that the 2020 election was stolen from his malignant narcissist boss. A tawdry whore has more ethical standards than Pence it would seem.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Pence's latest self-prostitution.  Here are highlights:

Vice President Mike Pence signaled support on Saturday for a futile Republican bid to overturn the election in Congress next week, after 11 Republican senators and senators-elect said that they would vote to reject President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory when the House and Senate meet to formally certify it.

The announcement by the senators — and Mr. Pence’s move to endorse it — reflected a groundswell among Republicans to defy the unambiguous results of the election and indulge President Trump’s attempts to remain in power with false claims of voting fraud.

Every state in the country has certified the election results after verifying their accuracy, many following postelection audits or hand counts. Judges across the country, and a Supreme Court with a conservative majority, have rejected nearly 60 attempts by Mr. Trump and his allies to challenge the results.

And neither Mr. Pence nor any of the senators who said they would vote to invalidate the election has made a specific allegation of fraud, instead offering vague suggestions that some wrongdoing might have occurred and asserting that many of their supporters believe that it has.

The spectacle promises to set a caustic backdrop for Mr. Biden’s inauguration in the coming weeks and reflects the polarized politics on Capitol Hill that will be among his greatest challenges.

It will also pose a political dilemma for Republicans, forcing them to choose between accepting the results of a democratic election — even if it means angering supporters who dislike the outcome and could punish them at the polls — and joining their colleagues in displaying unflinching loyalty to Mr. Trump, who has demanded in increasingly angry fashion that they back his bid to cling to the presidency.

The conundrum is especially acute for Mr. Pence, who as president of the Senate has the task of presiding over Wednesday’s proceedings and declaring Mr. Biden the winner, but has his own future political aspirations to consider as well.

[N]early one-quarter the proportion of Senate Republicans who have broken with their leaders to join the effort to invalidate Mr. Biden’s victory. In the House, where a band of conservatives has been plotting the last-ditch election objection for weeks, more than half of Republicans joined a failed lawsuit seeking to overturn the will of the voters, and more are expected to support the effort to challenge the results in Congress next week.

Both the Democratic-controlled House and Republican-controlled Senate would have to agree to toss out a state’s electoral votes — something that has not happened since the 19th century and is not expected to this time.

In their statement, the Republicans cited poll results showing most members of their party believe the election was “rigged,” an assertion that Mr. Trump has made for months, and which has been repeated in the right-wing news media and by many Republican members of Congress.

They also acknowledged that their effort was likely to be unsuccessful, given that any such challenge must be sustained by both the House, where Democrats hold the majority, and the Senate, where top Republicans including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, have tried to shut it down.

“We fully expect most if not all Democrats, and perhaps more than a few Republicans, to vote otherwise,” the senators wrote.

“These baseless claims have already been examined and dismissed by Trump’s own attorney general, dozens of courts and election officials from both parties,” said Mike Gwin, a spokesman for Mr. Biden’s campaign.

But as Mr. Trump continues to perpetuate the myth of widespread voter fraud, a growing number of Republicans in Congress have been eager to challenge the results, either out of devotion to the president or out of fear of enraging the base of their party that still reveres him even in defeat.

That is the case even though the vast majority of them just won elections in the very same balloting they are now claiming was fraudulently administered.

Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist and Mr. McConnell’s former chief of staff, warned that those involved in the effort would come to regret their stance.

“Rarely can you predict with 100% assurance that years from now everyone who went down this road will wish they had a mulligan,” Mr. Holmes wrote on Twitter.

“I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States and that is what I will do Jan. 6,” Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said in a statement. She is to face voters next year.

Senator Mitt Romney of Utah warned of the consequences of backing a bid to subvert the election’s outcome.

“I could never have imagined seeing these things in the greatest democracy in the world,” he said in a statement. “Has ambition so eclipsed principle?”

When applied to Pence and the seditious Republicans, sadly the answer to this question is a resounding yes.