President Donald Trump on Monday issued a warning to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) hours after the Arkansas senator said he wouldn’t join an effort to object to electoral votes on Jan. 6.
“How can you certify an election when the numbers being certified are verifiably WRONG,” Trump asked on Twitter, suggesting that he will make assertions about “the real numbers tonight during my speech” in Georgia to support Sens. Kelly Loeffler (R-Ga.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) in their election fight.
The president then cautioned Cotton about his political future.
“Republicans have pluses & minuses, but one thing is sure, THEY NEVER FORGET!” he wrote to him on Twitter.
Trump was reacting to Cotton’s stance on not joining a growing group of Republican lawmakers who would oppose the electoral results during the Joint Session of Congress on Wednesday. About a dozen senators led by Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas), and over 40 House Republicans, are slated to lodge objections to key states’ electoral votes.
Senators opposing electoral votes would establish a poor precedent to follow in future elections, Cotton argued.
“Objecting to certified electoral votes won’t give him a second term—it will only embolden those Democrats who want to erode further our system of constitutional government,” Cotton wrote in a statement Sunday, although he said, “I share the concerns of many Arkansans about irregularities in the presidential election, especially in states that rushed through election-law changes to relax standards for voting-by-mail. I also share their disappointment with the election results.”
Trump and other Republicans have warned that due to alleged voter fraud, all future elections will be potentially compromised.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told The Hill on Sunday night that he supports their bid. However, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other members of the GOP leadership have said that supporting the electoral college challenge could be politically troublesome. Meanwhile, McConnell on Dec. 14 said Democrat Joe Biden was the winner of the presidential election after the Electoral College voted.
The challenge needs one senator and a representative to carry out, triggering a two-hour debate per state. Then the House and Senate will hold a majority vote on whether to certify a state’s electoral votes; the House has a slim Democratic majority, and the Senate has a slim Republican majority.
Top Democrats over the weekend have signaled that they will mount a defense against the electoral challenge.
“The tellers announce the results of each state, alphabetically. There is no other discussion in the Joint Session,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement on Sunday. “If a written objection is lodged by a member of the House and Senate, we then meet in our individual chambers for up to two hours of debate. Only then will members be recognized to speak on the floor. Unless both the House and Senate vote to reject the electoral count for the state in question, the objection is rejected.”
