On Monday, the Electoral College voted to certify the results of the 2020 election. The vote secured President-elect Joe Biden's win over President Donald Trump. And that night, after the vote, Biden offered his strongest attack yet on Trump's and Republicans' efforts to delegitimize Biden's win. It's a position so extreme, we've never seen it before. A position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution. Since the Electoral College vote, some Republican lawmakers have acknowledged that Biden will be president, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. The Electoral College has spoken. So today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.
The president-elect is no stranger to the Senate. He's devoted himself to public service for many years. I also want to congratulate the vice president-elect, our colleague from California, Senator Harris. But Trump and many of his closest allies are still claiming election fraud and making promises to continue to fight the results. Trump and his allies are making these claims even after more than 50 court losses since the election. Those losses include a rejection last Friday by the Supreme Court. Trump and the state of Texas tried to sue to overturn the results in four states that Biden won. Trump had touted that case as his best chance to overturn the 2020 election results. That lawsuit was backed by 126 House Republicans. Evidence that Trump's hold on the Republican Party is still going strong.
This election has taught us a lot about parts of the electoral process that we never really had to notice before. The state certification process, recount laws, the electoral college vote. And with all of that behind us, there are yet more quirks in our voting system ahead. And we return one more time to this question of how Trump is seeking to exploit the system to overturn those results. So what other option does Trump have to change the results of the 2020 election? And how long will Trump have influence over Republican Party leaders and Republican voters in his fiercely loyal Trump base? This is Can He Do That, a podcast that explores the powers and limitations of the American presidency. I'm Alison Michaels.
So they basically have only one. forum left. And that is a joint session of Congress that is scheduled to take place on January 6th, where the electoral vote tally will be counted officially and officially accepted by Congress. This is really the last stand for anybody who wants to challenge the outcome of the presidential election. What would that challenge look like? What would have to happen? So all of this is set out in a federal law that is more than 100 years old. Basically, it says all members of Congress get in a room and...
The results are presented. And in the chair presiding over the proceeding is the vice president, the sitting vice president. It'll be Mike Pence on January 6th. And then anybody who has something to say is welcome to say it. But there are some catches. One of the catches is for there to be an actual debate on whether to actually accept the state's electoral votes, you need one senator and one House member at least to join together to lodge this complaint.
If you don't, if you only have House members, if you only have senators, then things are just stop there because you need to have both. So these two people would come together and challenge the results of a state's electoral votes. That's right. And basically they would rise and make the case that, you know, the body shouldn't accept these electors and that basically should be thrown back to the states to resolve any concerns. And what would happen once they raise this challenge? Well, if they raise the challenge, what happens is that the House and the Senate, then they break up the joint session. The House and the Senate go back to their individual chambers. They spend two hours debating.
these claims, and then they take a vote. If both the House and the Senate vote to accept the claims, then the challenge is sustained. And from there, it gets pretty murky. And no one's quite sure what happens after that, because it's never gotten that far in American history. So potentially, if it did get that far, we wouldn't know what would happen next? We don't. There's some legal scholars who believe that basically it would be in the hands of the governors. There is some thought that contradicts the Constitution, which places the selection of electors in the hands of state legislatures. So it's likely that would just kick off another round of litigation that the Supreme Court would possibly have to end up settling it.
Is there any appetite among Republicans to actually do this? There are a number of loyal supporters of President Trump in the House of Representatives who very much want to pursue this. Congressman Mo Brooks of Alabama has been the most open about it, but there are a number of other members of the House Freedom Caucus who are openly saying they want to stand up and challenge some of these votes. What about in the Senate? So far in the Senate, no one has specifically said that they're going to do that. You do have a number of senators who've said they're thinking about it. Rand Paul, Josh Hawley have both sort of acknowledged that they're looking at the issue. Josh Hawley said on Wednesday that he's studying the records of the past.
challenges to see what the situations were in the recent challenges. But none of them have said explicitly, I'm going to join with these House members and pursue this. So what's the likelihood this will actually happen? Well, right now, it's looking not especially great. On Tuesday, Mitch McConnell, shortly after he, for the first time, recognized Joe Biden as the president-elect, got on a conference call with his fellow Senate Republicans and urged them not to go down this road. He basically said in so many words that it would set Republicans against each other. It would basically turn into a referendum on President Trump and that it wouldn't be good for the party moving forward for there to be.
anything resembling a vote or any sort of further debate on this question. Is McConnell's argument working? Are Republicans on board with McConnell's perspective? We don't know. It only takes one senator to disagree. And there's certainly individual Republican senators who are willing to break with Mitch McConnell. Rand Paul certainly has from time to time shown himself to be certainly willing to break with the leadership and do his own thing. But him making that case is influential, and it sets the tone. And people are going to have to think long and hard if they want to actually pursue the show of fealty to a soon-to-be ex-president, even one who's as powerful and...
has the sort of following within their party that Donald Trump does. We may not know until the very last minute. So what do we know about why then McConnell finally decided to acknowledge Biden's win after five weeks of refusing to do so? Well, Mitch McConnell isn't someone who does a lot of explaining himself. I think that he's had a number of sort of cross currents that he's had to navigate. On one hand, obviously, I think that he's been around politics long enough and knows things well enough that he was under no real delusion that Donald Trump had any chance of coming back and winning this election. But I think he understands on a pretty visceral level that it's Donald Trump's party that...
Republican voters follow his lead, and he wasn't going to get across purposes with him in these immediate weeks after the election, especially with a number of pending issues that he needed to deal with, one of which is the two Senate runoffs in Georgia, where you need Republican voters to come out and keep the Senate in Republican hands, keep Mitch McConnell as majority leader. And there's really nothing that's more important to him than that. And then you also have just a whole slew of year-end business that we're dealing with right now, trying to close out a government spending bill, another round of coronavirus relief, and various other things that folks on Capitol Hill want to get done and want. President Trump to sign these bills. And I think there was no sense in antagonizing Trump before they absolutely had to. I think what Mitch McConnell and a lot of other Senate Republicans did was settle on this December 14th electoral college vote as sort of the natural point at which they were going to draw the line and say, you know, listen, Joe Biden is now the president-elect. There's no more realistic chances that this gets overturned. It's time to make our peace with this and move on. So senators have drawn that sort of December 14th line, but many House Republicans still haven't, right? They're still supporting the president's claims? Including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who still has not...
made any public recognition of Joe Biden's victory. So, I mean, the House is a different kind of place. It tends to be more partisan. I think there's just individual members who are just much more beholden to Trump personally and have really yoked themselves to his popularity and his way of doing business. And they're just not in a position even now to change course. And I don't think anyone is expecting.
Much to change, certainly not until January 6th, probably not even after January 20th when Joe Biden is in fact president. And just to sort of discuss how far Republicans in the House have kind of gone to support President Trump and his claims, 125 Republicans, including GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, supported this failed bid by several state attorneys general to convince the Supreme Court to overturn the results of the election in favor of Trump. And how did that play out in the House? How did that group decide to make this effort? Well, more than anything else, it just turned into a sort of loyalty test, for lack of a better word. The question wasn't for an individual House Republican. Do you agree with the?
arguments that we're presenting in this brief that we're filing with the Supreme Court. It was basically, do I want to be on record supporting Donald Trump or don't I? And I think the path of least resistance for Republican officeholders these days is just to support Trump whenever possible. And I think for the vast majority of those members, it simply was nothing more than that, than just standing and being counted with Trump, which if you sort of go in and examine the actual arguments here, they're pretty far-fetched. And the relief that this court case was seeking was absolutely radical. They're asking to overturn an election on very little.
grounds. But if you ask individual lawmakers, they would say, oh, well, that's not what we're doing. We just believe the president has the right to make his case in court. And is that morally or logically tenable? No. But I think as a matter of political expediency, it makes perfect sense for them. So how long does that last? How long is their judgment call that it is politically expedient to support the president's claims of election fraud? How long do they continue with that support? I think for some, obviously, it's going to be indefinitely. I think it's fair to say that there's going to be a lot of elected Republicans in the House that are never going to.
fully recognize Joe Biden as a legitimately elected president. But I think the vast majority of the 125 are on January 20th going to adapt themselves to the new reality, which is there's a Democratic president, they're in the minority in the House, and they're going to have to... figure out what their next move is. And I think that they're certainly gonna be watching to see what President Trump does after he leaves office and whether he makes good on these threats to run again, or if he continues to try to just be some sort of Republican kingmaker from the outside. But I think that the more time passes, the more that there's some feeling that that's going to recede at least somewhat. How unusual would it be for a former president to have influence over representatives in Congress after he's left office? Is that unusual? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly going to be unusual to have a president who's engaging in the day-to-day.
happenings of American politics almost certainly will be tweeting constantly about them and possibly attacking folks that he perceives to be his enemies and supporting those he perceives to be his loyal followers. We've never seen anything like that. Certainly, you've never seen George W. Bush or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton. None of them have ever behaved in that way. And even going back into American history, it's hard to draw any parallels. Obviously, you've had presidents try and make comebacks before. Grover Cleveland was elected to non-consecutive terms, and he certainly didn't disappear into the woodwork for those four years in between. But I don't think anybody is familiar with anything that's going to be like this.
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One early test of how much power the president will retain over his party is currently happening in Georgia, where Republican senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler are defending their seats in a pair of runoff races that could determine which party holds the majority in the Senate. Republicans are calling on their base to turn out for this Senate election, but Trump has consistently attacked the security of the state's election systems. And he's done this even after the state's Republican governor and Republican secretary of state reaffirmed Georgia's election for Biden. To learn more about how this complicated dynamic is playing out, I talked to the Post's voting reporter, who has had quite a year on this beat. Who knew that the voting beat would become like one of the central beats of the election cycle? Amy Gardner is a national political reporter for The Washington Post. I asked her to walk me through what Trump and his allies have been trying to do in Georgia.
So it started with rhetoric, you know, tweets and statements from President Trump and his allies that there's no way that Joe Biden could have won Georgia without cheating. It progressed to lawsuits that fraud had tainted the election, that felons had voted, that signatures were not matched on absentee ballots, as the law requires, that people living out of state had voted illegally. There was this bonkers theory that Dominion Voting Systems, the company that makes the voting machines used in Georgia, was controlled by communists who were linked to Venezuela and Hugo Chavez, who's been dead for seven years, and that they had programmed those machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden. All of that was... untrue, unproven, no evidence was ever submitted in any of those cases. All of the cases have been dismissed or tossed or rejected. To be clear, at this point, Georgia's electoral college votes have been certified. There's nothing more that can actually be done in Georgia to change those results at this point? That is correct, that there's nothing else that can happen in Georgia. The show is now in Congress on January 6th. So have election officials in Georgia, given Trump's claims of fraud, any merit? Have they made any public displays to affirm the integrity of the state's election? Many. So the secretary of state in Georgia is a conservative Republican named Brad Raffensperger. And the first thing that he did after we saw that...
Biden had crept ahead by a mere 12,000 votes a few days after the election on November 3rd was he declared that he was going to conduct an audit of the presidential. result. He's required to do an audit of a race in Georgia. And the size of the audit depends on the size of the margin of victory. The smaller the margin, the larger the number of ballots they have to audit to show that everything worked okay. And because he knew that the presidential election was so controversial and contested, he chose the presidential election to be the subject of the audit. And because the result was so narrow, the math on it required them to audit, you know, I forget, but like, let's say 3 million of the ballots. And since there were 5 million ballots cast, he said, let's just go ahead and do the whole thing. It would actually be easier for county officials to just audit everything. So basically they...
Hand recounted the paper ballots that are put into the scanners and determined that there was no... algorithm in those Dominion machines that flipped votes from Trump to Biden. It affirmed that the machines had counted the result accurately. There were a couple of glitches and irregularities found here and there, which is normal. Fraud and mistakes do happen in elections. They happen extremely rarely, and very rarely do they affect the outcome. And this audit affirmed that. So even though this audit affirmed that, Trump has still targeted a lot of his criticism on both Georgia's Republican Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger, and also Georgia's Republican Governor, Ryan Kemp, two members of his own party. Can you describe some of the ways the president has tried to pressure them, even despite this affirmation of the results? I mean, he called Brad Raffensperger an enemy of the people, and Raffensperger and his wife have...
have gotten death threats and they've got security and snipers on their private home in the suburbs of Atlanta. So that's one way. It's just intimidation through rhetoric. Probably the most notable example of this was when President Trump called Governor Kemp two Saturdays ago. It was the morning that he was headed to Georgia for a campaign event for the two Republican senators running in the runoff, Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue. And he bullied him and he yelled at him and he angrily asked him why he wasn't, you know, talking about the fraud publicly. He was angry at him for having certified the results. The governor has a small sort of ceremonial role of signing the certification. It's called a ministerial role, which means that he doesn't really have any choice. The statute says you will sign the certification.
once the Secretary of State issues it, and that's what he did. So he was mad about that, and he demanded that he call in the legislature into a special session in order to retroactively change the laws in Georgia so that the Republican legislate. could assign their own electors. And Kemp said he couldn't do those things. Like under the law, he was not allowed to do those things. And in the face of that, Trump's attacks have continued. Not only that, but he's threatening to support a primary opponent against Kemp if he runs for reelection in 2022, which he's widely expected to do. So how has all of that affected the standing of Raffensperger and Kemp among Republicans in Georgia? How do Republicans in Georgia now see these two men? Well, I think it's important to distinguish between what you see in public and what you see in private. So in public, you have two camps. One is very small. It's the camp of Republicans willing to say out loud.
that there wasn't enough fraud to affect the outcome, that Joe Biden is the legitimate winner, and that we need to focus on reelecting our two senators, Loeffler and Perdue. And then there's a much larger camp, which includes the chairman of the party, the two senators, and some congressional leaders and legislative leaders who are echoing President Trump's accusations. So it's ugly in public between those two camps, but there's evidence that it's public only. Ravensburger says, I'm going to vote for Loeffler and Perdue. I'm a conservative Republican. I don't want Joe Biden to have a Democratic Senate to work with. And there is this sense that some of these folks are doing this because they feel they have to for their own political fortunes, because if they don't, they're afraid that Trump will come in and attack them. And these two senators who are campaigning, I mean, that's an immediate consequence that they want to avoid. So there's a public...
And the question is whether that public division is harming the party and is harming those two candidates' prospects for winning on January 5th. I want to talk more about the Senate runoff race. But before that, are we seeing a division in the two camps that you've described in leadership? Are we seeing that reflected in the Republican voters? Do we know at this point if that division exists, where you have a group of voters loyal to Trump and a group of voters that lean toward the Republican establishment in Georgia? We don't know very much. There's not a lot of polling, and polling is a little suspect right now anyway, given what happened in the general election. And there's so much noise in Georgia right now.
that polling wouldn't be accurate. There's so much money in Georgia. There are so many voices on the airwaves and influencing going on. And that would make any poll sort of like a push polling kind of questionable, you know, because there's so much advocacy in the air. But what we do know is that all the Republicans that we have found say, heck, yes, I'm voting. I want to keep the Senate Republican. So there is this enthusiasm. For whatever reason, as dissonant as President Trump's message is, your machines are crooked. Please vote. People are buying it. On the other hand, there was an undervote.
in November, where more people voted, for instance, David Perdue, than voted for Donald Trump. So what does that mean? That means Republicans, perhaps more moderate Republicans, suburban women in the Atlanta area, voted for the Republican senators, but then voted for Biden. And there is a theory that I've heard relate to me by Republican strategists, that those suburban Republican voters are really turned off by how much Loeffler and Perdue are joining themselves at the hip to Trump, because that's what they were trying to get away from, right? So Loeffler and Perdue are in this real bind where they have to join themselves at the hip to Trump in order to avoid his wrath and yet risk alienating the Republicans in Georgia who don't like Trump. Right. And they're also in a bind because they're in this position of running for office in a state where many voters in their party don't believe in the integrity of the state's most recent election. Totally. Yeah, it's a total bind. And I just I have a hard time believing that that doesn't sow confusion that hurts the Republicans. So what have Loeffler and Perdue said about the president's claims of election fraud in the state? Have they spoken publicly about it? Yeah, it's really interesting. Kelly Loeffler voted early and was greeted by a throng of reporters and television cameras. And she was asked like eight ways to Sunday.
do you believe Joe Biden is the president-elect? And she dodged the question. She's like, well, we still have to get to January 6th. And President Trump has the right to pursue all legal options. I mean, she was like a walking, talking points memo of how to avoid answering the question. I mean, that tells you how dicey she views.
the situation that she's in. So is the general sense that the president then has been helpful to these Republican candidates in Georgia or that he has instead put them in a difficult position and not really been very helpful? I mean, it's really interesting. His voters are passionate. Those candidates were delighted that Trump came down for that rally in Valdosta a couple weekends ago. He rallies and motivates his base, and they need that base to turn out because there is this equal and opposite base on the Democratic side, largely built by the machinery of Stacey Abrams, the gubernatorial candidate from 2018. So they need that. But is there a but? Yeah, there's a but.
that he could also turn people away. So might what's playing out in Georgia be representative of what we'll see across the country in the future months or the future years where we have this battle between some Republicans and then Trump and the Republican voters are then basically forced to choose if they support Trump and the Trump version of Republicanism versus other Republican elected leaders? Is this going to continue to play out? I don't think we know the answer to that question yet. And here's why. The Loeffler and Perdue runoffs are unique. Just in the days and weeks after this immediate and contested controversial election result, they're thrown into campaign mode where they have to get right back out there and persuade people to turn out.
Trump is still president and powerful. And in fact, everything he's done these last several weeks since the election shows just how much power he holds over the Republican Party because everybody has basically, with these few exceptions that we've talked about, genuflected to his false and inaccurate claims of fraud. But I think once President Trump leaves office, it's impossible to know what happens. Typically, presidents lose influence rapidly when they leave office. Trump is not typical, and so I don't...
pretend to know whether that will happen with him. I also think that increasingly around the country, outside of the peculiar ecosystem of these runoffs in Georgia, where it's active political, you know, air stream, it's increasingly vanishingly small number of folks who are sticking with the president's rhetoric. So in all your reporting on elections around the country, have election officials that you've spoken with experienced elections like this before, where the system itself and its integrity has been under this much scrutiny, or where an elected official like the president has tried so heavily to undermine the process? Is this a new test that we're seeing to our system? 100% new, unprecedented, never before.
test of our system. I mean, there have been tests. Florida in 2000 was a test, but that was one state, right? This was a massive test of all states. And of course, ultimately of the six states that Trump tried to contest. And I mean, I really think that the takeaway from all of this is that some number of the 74 million people who voted for President Trump believe that this election was stolen. How can that not damage our system? And I think that what we're going to see is efforts on both sides of the aisle. Republicans, in good faith and in bad, will try to impose more sort of rules that, you know, secure the system, like tougher rules surrounding...
Voter ID related to absentee validing or even removing no excuse absentee validing as they're already talking about doing in Georgia. And when I say in good and bad faith, I mean there's going to be accusations that they're using the controversy of this cycle to impose restrictions that make it harder for particular groups to vote, particularly people who are poor, communities of color, communities that typically vote Democratic. So that's what I mean by that. But on the other side, I think you're going to see good government types, voter rights groups advocate. for ways to shore up public confidence. Like they'll support the idea of doing audits, of requiring more transparency, of shoring up some of the rules surrounding observers, because they want there to not be the opportunity to make the claims that were made this year, I think. The problem is that the evidence was already there that the claims were false. And yet still here we are with a third or half of the country believing that the election was stolen. And so that's permanent damage. And I'm not sure how long it'll take for that to go away. All right, Amy, on that note, thank you so much for your time.
This has been another episode of Can You Do That? I made this request last week and we got a ton of responses, so I would love to hear from more of you. Here at Can You Do That, we want to hear answers from you to one particular question. What are your biggest hopes and fears for the next administration? We might use your voice in a future episode of the show. Let us know by leaving a voicemail at 202-618-0715. That's 202-618-0715. Thanks so much. Can You Do That is a team effort here to post. It's produced by Arjun Singh with logo art from Loren Boglio and theme music by Ted Muldoon.
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