Pelosi reelected House speaker; new Congress convenes amid surging pandemic

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.) objected to the swearing-in of House members from the six battleground states where Trump has falsely claimed that the vote was rigged, forcing the House to vote on whether the lawmakers who shared the ballot with the president and won their races should take the oath.

Roy, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, opposes efforts by several House Republicans to object to Biden’s win when Congress counts the electoral college vote on Wednesday. In a statement earlier Sunday, he and several other Republicans argued that states determine the results of their elections, not Congress.

Roy objected to seating the House delegations from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, leading to a vote on authorizing the speaker to swear in members.

“It would confound reason if the presidential results of these states were to face objection while the congressional results of the same process escaped public scrutiny,” Roy said in a statement.

With his move, Roy ensured that Republicans who vowed to challenge Biden’s win will be on record certifying the election results in their own races in the six states, an acknowledgment that the elections were legitimate along with Biden’s wins.

The vote to authorize the speaker to swear in new members was 371 to 2.

Trump on Monday is expected to award Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, according to someone familiar with the plans.

Nunes is a close ally of the president and one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in his quest to undermine the Justice Department’s investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

During an interview with “Fox & Friends” in October 2018, Trump criticized the investigation of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III and praised Nunes, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, who had repeatedly accused FBI and Justice Department investigators of bias against Trump. In the Fox News interview, Trump initially — and incorrectly — called for Nunes to receive the Medal of Honor, which is awarded for acts of military valor, before correcting himself and suggesting that Nunes receive the Medal of Freedom.

In her first floor speech after being reelected as House speaker, Pelosi struck a somber tone, focusing on the responsibility facing lawmakers amid a pandemic.

“Our most urgent priority will continue to be defeating the coronavirus. And defeat it, we will,” Pelosi, 80, told members of the House, calling the responsibility facing lawmakers “as daunting and demanding as any that previous generations of leadership have faced.”

She made note of the 20 million coronavirus infections and 350,000 deaths in the United States since the start of the pandemic, “each one a sadness that we carry in our hearts.”

“With President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris, the House will continue our work to save lives and livelihoods, to ‘Build Back Better’ in a way that advances justice in America,” she said.

Pelosi also hailed the diversity of the new House, pointing to the “record-shattering 122 women” who will be sworn in, “100 years after women won the right to vote.”

And she announced that she is establishing a bipartisan Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth, to address the country’s widening wealth gap.

Before swearing Pelosi into office, Rep. Don Young (R-Alaska), the dean of the House, made an appeal for bipartisanship, telling Pelosi, “You will be the speaker of the House, not of the party.”

“It’s time we hold hands and talk to one another,” said Young, who is known for his often physically combative style and once reportedly held a knife to the throat of then-Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio).

Young, who is also recovering from the virus, invited Pelosi to “sit down and have a drink” with lawmakers from across the aisle whenever negotiations get tough.

Pelosi replied that she doesn’t drink but would be glad to sit down for ice cream.

Bob Bauer, a senior adviser to Biden’s transition team, on Sunday denounced Trump’s efforts to pressure Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to overturn his defeat in an extraordinary one-hour phone call.

The Washington Post obtained a recording of the conversation, in which Trump threatened Raffensperger with vague criminal consequences and at one point warned the Georgia secretary of state that he was taking “a big risk” if he refused to comply.

“We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place,” Bauer said in a statement. “It captures the whole, disgraceful story about Donald Trump’s assault on American democracy.”

Sen. Richard J. Durbin, soon to be the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, also criticized Trump’s call with Raffensperger, calling it “more than a pathetic, rambling, delusional rant.”

“His disgraceful effort to intimidate an elected official into deliberately changing and misrepresenting the legally confirmed vote totals in his state strikes at the heart of our democracy and merits nothing less than a criminal investigation,” Durbin said in a statement. “The President is unhinged and dangerous.”

Durbin added that Senate Republicans and others who are supporting Trump’s actions “are putting the orderly and peaceful transition of power in our nation at risk.”

Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.), the No. 3 Republican leader in the House, circulated a 21-page memo Sunday directly rebutting the case made by the 11 senators a day earlier for an electoral commission to audit results in certain states won by Biden.

In the memo, Cheney also summarized court decisions in the six contested states rejecting the various claims of electoral malfeasance.

“Such objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the President and bestowing it instead on Congress,” Cheney said. “This is directly at odds with the Constitution’s clear text and our core beliefs as Republicans.”

Earlier Sunday, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) also criticized the idea of a commission, arguing that it has “zero chance of becoming reality” and noting that Republican senators would face a high bar for providing evidence to back up their allegations of fraud.

Ashton Carter, Dick Cheney, William Cohen, Mark Esper, Robert Gates, Chuck Hagel, James Mattis, Leon Panetta, William Perry and Donald Rumsfeld are the 10 living former U.S. secretaries of defense.

As former secretaries of defense, we hold a common view of the solemn obligations of the U.S. armed forces and the Defense Department. Each of us swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. We did not swear it to an individual or a party.

American elections and the peaceful transfers of power that result are hallmarks of our democracy. With one singular and tragic exception that cost the lives of more Americans than all of our other wars combined, the United States has had an unbroken record of such transitions since 1789, including in times of partisan strife, war, epidemics and economic depression. This year should be no exception.

Our elections have occurred. Recounts and audits have been conducted. Appropriate challenges have been addressed by the courts. Governors have certified the results. And the electoral college has voted. The time for questioning the results has passed; the time for the formal counting of the electoral college votes, as prescribed in the Constitution and statute, has arrived.

Read the opinion story here.

Pelosi was reelected speaker Sunday in a House contest marked by the absences of several lawmakers who have contracted the coronavirus.

The 80-year-old California Democrat, the only woman in history to serve as speaker, secured what might be her last two-year term in the top post. She won with 216 votes to 209 for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).

Pelosi will lead a razor-thin Democratic majority in the House, with Democrats controlling 222 seats to the GOP’s 211, with two vacancies.

A handful of Democratic lawmakers defected during Sunday’s vote. Rep. Jared Golden (Maine) voted for Sen. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.) to serve as speaker; Rep. Conor Lamb (Pa.) voted for Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.); and Reps. Abigail Spanberger (Va.), Elissa Slotkin (Mich.) and Mikie Sherrill (N.J.) voted present.

In the past 34 years, only two lawmakers — Pelosi and former congressman J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) — have won a fourth term as House speaker. Hastert’s four terms were consecutive; Pelosi’s are not.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a liberal who has been critical of Pelosi, said Sunday that she voted for the California Democrat because the alternative — a GOP speakership — would have been unacceptable.

“We are just an extremely slim amount of votes away from risking the speakership to the Republican Party, and this is — it’s bigger than any one of us, and that is consequential,” she said.

Ocasio-Cortez also sharply criticized Trump’s efforts in a Saturday phone call to pressure Raffensperger to overturn Biden’s election win in Georgia.

“I absolutely think it’s an impeachable offense, and if it was up to me, there would be articles on the floor quite quickly. … He is attacking our very election,” she said.

Former House speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) excoriated congressional efforts to challenge Biden’s win, warning that perpetuating the notion of an illegitimate result strikes “at the foundation of our republic.”

In a statement Sunday, Ryan said it was difficult to “to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans. The fact that this effort will fail does not mean it will not do significant damage to American democracy.”

Ryan, who has largely steered clear of the political fray since retiring at the end of his term in January 2019, said the Trump campaign has had many opportunities in the courts to challenge the election results and those cases have failed to produce evidence of voter fraud.

Ryan also highlighted that the Justice Department found nothing to warrant overturning the election results.

“If states wish to reform their processes for future elections, that is their prerogative. But Joe Biden’s victory is entirely legitimate,” Ryan said.