In the weeks before the 2016 Trump Electoral College victory, Trump was polling between 35 and 40 percent.
He would average only about 41 percent approval over his tumultuous four-year tenure.
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While there are a few close states not officially yet called, Trump is on his way to what we called several weeks ago, something close to a 312 – 226 Electoral College vote victory. He’s swept all seven swing states. He made New Hampshire and Virginia competitive, expanding his electoral map and forcing Democrats to spend resources in the race’s waning days. Best of all, he won a resounding popular vote victory, the final numbers of which will come in the days to come.
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Against all odds, former President Donald Trump was reelected on Nov. 5, ousting Vice President Kamala Harris, winning the popular vote for the GOP for the first time since 2004, decisively winning the Electoral College and reclaiming the U.S. Senate, all as only the second former president to win reelection after Grover Cleveland did it in 1892 with non-consecutive terms in what can only be described as the greatest political comeback in American history.
Trump dodged bullets, prosecutions, convictions, censorship and overcame the historic incumbency advantage — first term incumbent parties usually win about two-thirds of the time, but not this time — able to capitalize on inflation outpacing incomes, wages and earnings for too long during the Biden-Harris administration as Americans paid the price at the grocery store and gas pump, more than 8 million illegal border crossings by illegal aliens who Trump promised to deport and endless foreign wars that threaten to spark a wider conflict or even nuclear war.
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A shift in Hispanic American voters in key swing states helped reelect former Republican President Donald Trump to the White House over his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris, and that expansion was critical to his victory, according to several reports.
The Democrats spent much of their time building a campaign strategy that depicted the former Republican president as a dangerous threat to democracy while polls repeatedly reported that their key issues were inflation and the escalating cost of living.
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Fox News’ Karl Rove said Tuesday that Republican nominee Donald Trump only needs to win one state between Pennsylvania, Georgia or Michigan in order to become president-elect.
Trump would win 252 electoral votes if he wins the battleground state of Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina on Election Night, which would only require the former president to win either Pennsylvania, Michigan or Georgia in order to secure the 270 electoral votes needed to win, Fox News host Bill Hemmer pointed out. Rove said Trump can afford to lose some of the key battleground states and still come out “over the top” in such a close race.
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Over the span of 48 hours, national news outlets have reported that Democratic vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz went from declaring he’d like to see the Electoral College abolished in favor of a national popular vote to seemingly walking back that statement in a sit-down interview on ABC News.
But those who pay attention to not just what the Minnesota governor says on the national campaign trail, but what he has done in his capacity as governor, know better.
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Since the 2000 presidential election, the left has worked to undermine the legitimacy of the Electoral College, labeling it a relic of slavery. No doubt, if Donald Trump returns to the White House while again losing the popular vote, these attacks will be renewed with fervor. In fact, it has already begun as commentators denounce the undemocratic nature of the system. Just last month, the New York Times published a piece trashing the Constitution and asserting that the Electoral College’s only purpose was to protect slavery. These critiques are based on misconceptions and hostility toward the very structure of our Constitution.
The History
Our method of electing the president came about through compromise. The framers agreed upon a system that ensured the states had a say in choosing the president. The Constitution gives each state a share of electors, and the states decide for themselves how to select those electors.
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Former President Donald Trump is slightly ahead in the polls and, as in 2016 and 2020, he is drawing massive crowds at his rallies. Some knowledgeable observers have even speculated that Trump could be on the verge of a landslide electoral college victory.
But, while our attention is being drawn to the polls, the campaigning, and the strategies of the presidential candidates, what about the taxpayer-funded electoral apparatus that has been created over the past four years by the Biden-Harris regime?
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When Florida was hit with severe storms and Hurricane Ian in 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris demanded that “communities of color” must be first in line for aid and that assistance should be prioritized “in a way that is about giving resources based on equity.”
She has repeatedly made similar claims, differentiating “equity” from equality, stating that “not everyone starts in the same place.”
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After almost a month following former President Donald Trump’s conviction by a New York City jury on May 30, Missouri Republican Attorney General Andrew Bailey announced on June 20 that his state is suing New York for its “direct attack on our democratic process through unconstitutional lawfare against President Trump”.
That’s good — better late than never — as Bailey stands as the first Republican Attorney General to actually announce such a lawsuit, with not much time before Trump’s scheduled sentencing on July 11, which could imprison to presumptive Republican presidential nominee.
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The House of Representatives finally acted Wednesday to remedy an injustice that has been getting worse as the number of illegal aliens coming into the United States has skyrocketed: the distortion caused by including noncitizens when determining how many House members each state gets.
The House passed HR 7109, the Equal Representation Act, to mandate a citizenship question on the census form and use of only the citizen population in the apportionment formula for representation applied after every census.
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Michael Patrick Leahy, CEO and editor-in-chief of The Tennessee Star and The Star News Network, announced the launch of the Star News Electoral College Map for the 2024 presidential election.
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Maine’s Democratic governor Janet Mills announced on Monday that her state will become the latest to join an effort to elect the president through popular vote instead of the electoral college.
A coalition of 16 states and Washington D.C., have agreed to send all of their electoral college votes to the candidate that wins the popular vote nationwide as part of the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, according to the Associated Press, but the states will need to control 270 electoral college votes in order to implement the proposal. So far, with Maine, it has 209.
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The Nebraska Legislature on Wednesday voted against a proposal that would have changed the state’s allocation of presidential electors in the Electoral College, which is a setback for former President Donald Trump’s political interests.
Unlike all U.S. states except for Maine, Nebraska allocates three of its presidential electors based on the majority vote in each of its three congressional districts, while the remaining two electors — accounting for its two U.S. senators — are allocated based on the statewide tally. Republican state Sen. Julie Slama of Lincoln on Wednesday introduced a bill amendment that would change this system to a “winner-take-all” allocation — whereby all electoral votes would go to the candidate who wins statewide, purportedly benefitting the Republican nominee — though the measure failed to advance by a vote of 9 yeas to 36 nays.
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The U.S. Senate failed to pass an amendment introduced by U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) that would bar illegal immigrants from being factored into the count for congressional districts and the Electoral College map that determines presidential elections on Friday.
A total of 47 Democrats, three Independents, and one Republican senator voted against the amendment, which failed to pass by a 45-51 vote.
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Was Special Counsel Jack Smith illegally appointed by Attorney General Merrick Garland and is his prosecution of former Pres. Donald Trump unlawful? That is the intriguing issue raised in an amicus brief filed in the Supreme Court by Schaerr Jaffe, LLP, on behalf of former Attorney General Ed Meese and two law professors, Steven Calabresi and Gary Lawson, in the case of U.S. v. Trump.
We won’t get an immediate answer to this question because on the Friday before Christmas, the Supreme Court issued a one-line order refusing to take up Smith’s request that the court review Trump’s claim of presidential immunity, which was denied by the trial court, in the federal prosecution being pursued by Smith in the District of Columbia. The special counsel had petitioned the court to take the case on an expedited basis, urging the justices to bypass review by the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
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Tennessee U.S. Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) introduced a bill this week that would ensure only U.S. citizens are factored into the count for Congressional districts and the Electoral College map that determines presidential elections.
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Unlike in 2020, when then-candidate Joe Biden was leading almost all of the polls — out of 293 national polls taken during that cycle compiled by RealClearPolitics.com, Biden led 285 of them, or 97 percent of them — this time around, former President Donald Trump has an observable advantage in the polls, leading President Biden in 103 out of 214 polls taken, or 48 percent of them. Biden has only led 81, or just 38 percent, and 30 are tied, or 14 percent.
Since, given Democrats’ historical advantage in the popular vote — Republicans have not won the popular vote since 2004 but still managed to eke out Electoral College wins in 2000 and 2016 without it — any potential tie in the popular vote would still bode well for Trump and Republicans in 2024. So, really, about 62 percent of the polls (and rising) showing that at this point in the race, with less than a year to go until November, Trump definitely has an advantage.
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Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., warned states acting to bar former President Donald Trump from the ballot that the House of Representatives will decide whether to certify states’ electors.
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Don’t look now, but former President Donald Trump appears to be opening up a consistent lead in national polls against incumbent President Joe Biden, with Trump beating Biden 47.2 percent to 43.7 percent, according to the latest average of polls compiled by RealClearPolitics.com.
In fact, for more than a month, Trump has led Biden in 20 out of the last 26 national polls taken. Biden led four of them, and two were tied. The leads vary in the polls, anywhere from 10 points to 1 point, but begin to tell a very important story with little more than a week to go until the 2024 New Year begins: a larger plurality or maybe even a majority of Americans would rather see Donald Trump be president than Joe Biden beginning in 2025.
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Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is reportedly in possession of a meeting transcript that exonerates two defendants named in her August 14 indictment against former President Donald Trump, his former lawyers, and Georgians involved in his effort to contest the 2020 presidential election.
A transcript of a December 14, 2020 meeting of those involved in the effort to create alternative Trump delegates in Georgia for the 2020 election, reviewed by The Federalist, reveals that Shafer and former Trump attorney Ray Smith specifically planned to act as “Republican nominees for Presidential Elector,” and not “duly elected and qualified” electors, in what seems to be a direct contradiction to Willis’s indictment.
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A new political forecast released Thursday argues that the 2024 general election could come down to four states — Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The four “toss-ups” and their 56 Electoral College votes make for a “very narrow playing field” in 2024, which The Cook Political Report views as being another matchup between President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump, according to author Amy Walter. Whether a third-party ticket is present, as well as the sway of suburban, moderate and Latino voters, will be key in determining the outcome of these battleground states.
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The effort to change how the United States elects its presidents – from the existing Electoral College process to a national popular vote – is gaining momentum, but critics are questioning its legality and whether it improves the country’s election system.
Sixteen states and Washington, D.C., have joined the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, with Minnesota being the latest and Michigan and Nevada considering it.
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DFLers in the Minnesota House and Senate voted this month to transform American presidential elections by abandoning the Electoral College.
The Senate voted along party lines, 34-33, on Wednesday to pass an elections omnibus policy bill that includes a provision that would have Minnesota award its presidential electors to the candidate with the most votes nationwide. Republicans unsuccessfully tried to remove that language from the bill.
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An organization’s efforts to circumvent states’ rights are “getting desperate” as they try new ways to push their interstate compact through state legislatures, two pro-Electoral College advocacy groups told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
The National Popular Vote (NPV) is a group initiative to reform the U.S.’ two-step, Electoral College system by ensuring that the candidate with the most popular votes nationwide becomes the president. Now that NPV has enacted its interstate compact in all of the “easy,” bluer states as a standalone bill, it is getting creative to force the law through in swing states like Minnesota, Nevada, Michigan and Maine, Trent England of Save Our States and Jasper Hendricks of Democrats for the Electoral College told the DCNF.
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A right-leaning election reform outfit on Wednesday denounced the current version of legislation to reform the Electoral Count Act, particularly a provision urged by Democratic election attorney Marc Elias.
The original act was enacted in 1887 to prevent presidential election crises such as that of 1876, during which three states submitted competing groups of electors, forcing Congress to determine how to resolve the count. Ultimately Republican Rutherford B. Hayes emerged victorious over Democrat Samuel Tilden.
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Legislation offered by Senators Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) would repeal Sections 1 and 2 of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, and replace the appointment of electors by state legislatures in the event a state fails to make a choice in that election under current federal law to “the executive of each State”.
3 U.S.C. Section 2 currently states, “Whenever any State has held an election for the purpose of choosing electors, and has failed to make a choice on the day prescribed by law, the electors may be appointed on a subsequent day in such a manner as the legislature of such State may direct.”
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House and Senate committees starting this week will begin work on measures to change how U.S. presidential election votes are counted and certified – including possibly amending the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act and clarifying the vice president’s role in the process.
The House Rules Committee will take up a still-unseen, bipartisan bill Tuesday titled the Presidential Election Reform Act with a floor vote as early as Thursday, according to Roll Call.
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Modern progressives assume moral and intellectual authority.
Consequently, their supposedly superior ends naturally justify almost any means necessary to achieve them.
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Court packing—the attempt to enlarge the size of the Supreme Court for short-term political purposes—used to be a dirty word in the history of American jurisprudence.
The tradition of a nine-person Supreme Court is now 153 years old. The last attempt to expand it for political gain was President Franklin Roosevelt’s failed effort in 1937. FDR’s gambit was so blatantly political that even his overwhelming Democratic majority in Congress rebuffed him.
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Wednesday morning on The Tennessee Star Report, host Leahy welcomed TN5 Candidate Stewart Parks in studio to discuss his three-pronged agenda if elected in November.
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If we follow the conventional political thinking, Republicans can anticipate an electoral shift during the November midterm elections and appear likely to recapture the White House in 2024. A grassroots revolt is already showing signs that the Democrats should expect to be punished for politicizing education and mismanaging COVID policy.
If we follow the conventional thinking even further, this will spell success for a usual cast of Republican-leaning characters in leadership and consulting roles. Karl Rove is likely already updating his fee structure. Veterans of the two Bush Administrations will send their résumés east in hopes of retaining old posts so they can steer contracts and favors back to their allies and former employers.
Right, Left, Right, Left, the hypnotic rhythm drums on—briefly interrupted only by an aberrational Trump Administration or popular uprising—but it all returns to the statists’ status quo in the end. The uniparty simply shifts its weight from its left foot to its right while business proceeds as usual.
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Former President Donald Trump released a blistering attack Friday afternoon on former Vice President Mike Pence’s claims earlier in the day about the January 6, 2021 Joint Session of Congress over which Pence presided at which Electoral College votes submitted by the states were counted.
In a speech before the Florida Chapter of the Federalist Society in Orlando on Friday, Pence asserted, “There are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress, I possessed unilateral authority to reject Electoral College votes. And I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election.’ President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election.” (emphasis added)
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President Trump’s October 28 letter to the Wall Street Journal detailing some of his complaints about the 2020 election and the Journal’s editorial comment on it the following day clearly reveal the shortcomings of both sides of this argument. But the important thing to note is that there are two sides to the argument over the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election result.
The prolonged and intensive effort in which the Wall Street Journal has eagerly participated, to suppress and throttle the merest suggestion of illegitimacy surrounding the 2020 election result, has failed. It has always been understandable why there would be a great body of opinion that would wish to suppress any consideration of the question. It is a sobering and demoralizing thing to imagine that the vastly important process of choosing the president of the United States could possibly be an erroneous or even a fraudulent process.
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We are a year overdue for the true story of the 2020 elections. Mollie Hemingway has at last delivered it to us in one tidy volume.
It’s a complex story, which makes for a weighty book. The research is thorough, the writing is evidentiary, the style is clinical—like investigative journalism and social science used to be. The endnotes alone run nearly 100 pages.
Reading Rigged, one isn’t jarred by hyperbole, conjecture, or spin. Hemingway is unequivocal on progressive malice, yet she can be scathing of Republicans, too. She is particularly critical of Rudy Giuliani’s attempts to publicize fraud nationally, thereby undermining prior case-by-case efforts to get particular state courts to recognize particular violations of particular state laws.
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Many of our once revered and most hallowed institutions are failing us. To mention only the most significant ones: our top-ranking military echelon, the leadership of our federal investigatory and intelligence agencies, the government medical establishment—and of course the universities.
For too long American higher education’s reputation of global academic superiority has rested mostly on the sciences, mathematics, physics, technology, medicine, and engineering—in other words, not because of the humanities and social sciences, but despite them. The humanities have become too often anti-humanistic. And the social sciences are deductively anti-scientific. Both quasi-religious woke disciplines have eroded confidence in colleges and universities, infected even the STEM disciplines and professional schools, and torn apart the civic unity of the United States. Indeed, much of the current Jacobin revolution was birthed and fueled by American universities, despite their manifest hypocrisies and derelictions.
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A proposal to force Michigan’s presidential electors to cast ballots for the national popular vote winner — regardless of the results in the state — is meeting opposition from a majority of Republican legislators.
State Sen. Aric Nesbitt (R-Lawton) and state Rep. Matt Hall (R-Marshall) spearheaded the effort to collect 57 signatures from legislators opposed to the idea. According to the Detroit News, 17 of the 20 Republican senators and 40 of the 57 Republican representatives signed on in opposition.
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Senator Bill Hagerty (R-TN) called for security changes — recommended by a January 6th report — to be implemented in order to prevent a situation similar to that day.
“The committees have laid out what happened and what should be reformed or reconsidered. It is now time to implement appropriate changes to make sure all relevant agencies are prepared to prevent an event like January 6 from happening again,” Senator Hagerty said in a statement.
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Representative Steve Cohen’s (D-TN-09) initiative to abolish the electoral college hasn’t progressed much since it was introduced back in January. The last action on the resolution occurred early last month, when it was referred to the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. No dates are listed to consider the resolution, though Cohen is the subcommittee chairman.
Other members of that committee are Vice Chair Deborah Ross (D-NC-02), Jamie Raskin (D-MD-08), Henry “Hank” Johnson (D-GA-04), Sylvia Garcia (D-TX-29), Cori Bush (D-MO-01), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX-18), Mike Johnson (R-LA-04), Tom McClintock (D-CA-04), Chip Roy (D-TX-21), Michelle Fischbach (D-MN-07), and Burgess Owens (D-UT-04).
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In 2011, before serving for the House of Representatives’ 6th Congressional District, U.S. Rep. Tom Emmer (R-MN-06), current chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, was a national spokesperson for the National Popular Vote initiative, legislation that forms a state-to-state compact with other states agreeing to pledge their state’s electors in the Electoral College to the winner of the national popular vote once participating states reach 270 electoral votes.
This would effectively eliminate the current winner-take-all system in the Electoral College, which has been in place since the election of 1824, whereby whoever wins the popular vote in a state wins the state’s electoral votes.
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Sixteen Democrats in the Georgia State Senate have filed a bill calling on Georgia to enact the Agreement Among the States to Elect the President by National Popular Vote. According to the language of the bill, this agreement calls on states “to join together to establish an interstate compact to elect the president by national popular vote.”
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Democrats in the Virginia House of Delegates have introduced a bill that would allow presidential electors to be chosen based on the national popular vote, as part of a broader push among left-leaning activists to end states’ rights to choose their own electors.
“Every American citizen is created equal,” Del. Mark Levine (D-Arlington), who introduced HB 1933 told The Virginia Star. “We should all have an equal right to elect the President of the United States.”
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A Wyoming Republican state senator told the Star News Network why he is challenging his state’s only Member of Congress and the most senior House Republican, Rep. Elizabeth L. “Liz” Cheney in the 2022 GOP primary. “Liz Cheney’s long-time opposition to President Trump and her most recent vote for Impeachment shows just how out-of-touch she is with Wyoming,” said state Sen. Anthony Bouchard in his Jan. 20 announcement of his candidacy. “Wyoming taxpayers need a voice in Congress who will stand up to Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats, and not give them cover.” Bouchard’s 6th State Senate District is just east of Cheyenne, the state capital. The owner of a septic tank and system cleaning service, first won his seat in 2016, after his first two tries in 2012, 2014. The businessman, who founded Wyoming Gun Owners in 2010, said he has never met nor supported Cheney. “Before she entered into Wyoming politics, Liz Cheney founded and led a group called ‘Keep America Safe,’ an organization that peddled deep state misinformation,” he said. “I never supported her, nor did I vote for her.” The House hopeful said when elected, he would utilize the skills he learned as a gun…
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Washington, D.C. police announced Wednesday that four people died during riots following the Stop the Steal rally on Capitol Hill.
Rioters stormed the United States Capitol building Wednesday, committing acts of vandalism and postponing the certification process as members of Congress were forced to evacuate the building.
Between Wednesday night and Thursday morning, authorities have made at least 68 arrests, police announced Thursday. Five of these arrests were for illegal possession of firearms, and two people were arrested for other weapons, police said. Police also said they arrested 28 additional people for violating curfew.
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U.S Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty (both R-TN) reversed course late Wednesday night and allowed Arizona’s disputed electoral votes to be counted, WJHL reported.
Just last week, the duo had pledged to contest the Electoral College results, The Tennessee Star reported.
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Senator Kelly Loeffler reversed course following the riots at the Capitol, accepting rather than objecting as promised to the Electoral College certification. Her acceptance of the results also followed her projected loss to Democratic candidate Raphael Warnock in their runoff election.
Loeffler shared that the protestors who breached the barricaded Capitol grounds and infiltrated the Capitol itself were the reason why she changed her decision.
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Of the 147 Republicans that objected to certifying the results of the Electoral College on Wednesday, five of them were representatives from Ohio.
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Not long before the tallying of and objections to the Electoral College results were disrupted by the violent protest at the Capitol, U.S. Representative Mark Green (R-TN-07) had repeated his intention to contest the election results.
Green on Wednesday announced his intention to object to the slates of electors in “certain states.”
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President Trump on Wednesday thanked a large crowd of supporters gathered in Washington, D.C., for their support and encouraged Vice President Mike Pence to “do the right thing” by contesting the 2020 presidential results that Congress will attempt to certify later in the day.
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Predictably, after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and ten GOP Senators announced their intention to reject electors “not lawfully certified” but nonetheless included in the Electoral College results, many Democrats accused them of “sedition.” In reality, these Senators and their House counterparts are duty bound to object. The cowardice of Republican legislatures in disputed states, dereliction of duty by the courts and the dishonesty of the “news” media has forced them to take action. Congress has the final word on who won the presidential election when they convene Wednesday to certify the Electoral College results. That certification vote is the last opportunity for our elected representatives to resolve allegations of illegal election activity in November.
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