Yes, it’s ridiculous to talk about the presidential race four years from now this early, but it was inextricably tied to what we saw transpire Wednesday. And the events only exacerbated a Trump-inspired chasm in the GOP that will need to be confronted in the weeks, months and years to come.
The unrest at the Capitol forced a choice for the group of Republican senators who had said they would object to the results between pressing forward, despite their effort being blamed for fomenting the unrest, or backing off a gambit that was already doomed to fail in the name of avoiding further incitement.
Some GOP senators did back off, including James Lankford (Okla.), Mike Braun (Ind.), Steve Daines (Mont.) and Kelly Loeffler (Ga.), who had lost a special election to retain her seat Tuesday.
But those mulligans only spotlighted how severe a decision the rest were making in pressing forward. Among them were Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), both of whom are thought to harbor ambitions to run for president in 2024.
Given those two had initially led the extraordinary and unprecedented effort to overturn the presidential election, it perhaps wasn’t surprising that they pressed forward. But the events did serve to embolden other ambitious Republicans in denouncing their effort — if not them personally.
After the unrest had died down, Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) released a remarkable statement. He had already come out forcefully against the effort, on both constitutional and politically pragmatic grounds. But in a statement, Cotton attacked both President Trump and his colleagues who had supported the effort.
“It’s past time for the president to accept the results of the election, quit misleading the American people, and repudiate mob violence,” Cotton wrote, speaking in unusually direct terms about a president, of whom he has regularly been one of the Senate’s top allies.
Then Cotton turned to the likes of Cruz and Hawley (without naming them): “And the senators and representatives who fanned the flames by encouraging the president and leading their supporters to believe that their objections could reverse the election results should withdraw those objections.”
That’s Cotton essentially blaming those members for what happened Wednesday — pretty strong language.
He then doubled down Thursday, more directly pointing the finger at Cruz and Hawley.
By Wednesday morning, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) joined in, albeit in a more characteristically muted way. Rubio has been rather quiet about this entire situation until now, but he took to Twitter to suggest supporters of the effort were not being honest and were focused more on their own political ambition.
“They knew the truth but thought it was a great way to get attention & raise money,” Rubio said — again, without directly naming his colleagues.
Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) was more oblique when it came to his colleagues. He said of some people pushing conspiracy theories about the election: “Don’t let nihilists become your drug-dealers. … Don’t let them become your prophets.”
But he also cemented his status as the Senate GOP’s second-most-outspoken critic of Trump, after Mitt Romney (Utah), issuing a statement directly tying Trump to the scenes of unrest:
Today, the United States Capitol — the world’s greatest symbol of self-government — was ransacked while the leader of the free world cowered behind his keyboard — tweeting against his Vice President for fulfilling the duties of his oath to the Constitution.Lies have consequences. This violence was the inevitable and ugly outcome of the President’s addiction to constantly stoking division.
While Hawley and Cruz did press forward, their movement clearly lost its momentum. Rather than challenging the three to six states’ electors that had been planned, they instead finished up business on Arizona and then only objected to Pennsylvania before Biden’s win became official (again) early Thursday morning.
The interruption of Congress’s business Wednesday came when they were supposed to be debating Arizona — something formally challenged by Cruz and an Arizona congressman. After Congress returned, though, members spent little time on the merits of the situation and instead focused on the dangerous scenes from earlier in the day.
Hawley changed that, somewhat, but while ostensibly debating Arizona, he focused instead on Pennsylvania. He cited an elections law that he argued hadn’t been given sufficient hearing in the courts, which have routinely and almost universally struck down the Trump team’s lawsuits.
“The merits of the case have never been heard,” Hawley said. “The constitutionality of the statute actually has never been defended.”
Left unsaid: The law, which is known as Act 77 and established universal mail-in voting, passed overwhelmingly more than a year before the 2020 election in a GOP-controlled state legislature. The state Supreme Court unanimously dismissed a case involving it after the election because, it noted, the time for challenging such things was before votes were actually cast under it. The newly conservative-dominated U.S. Supreme Court also declined to review the matter, issuing a curt dismissal.
(Philip Bump has more on all of this.)
Hawley is a lawyer — a former state attorney general, no less — who undoubtedly knows all of this. The fact that he made this the centerpiece of his objections would certainly seem instructive when it comes to his motivations.
Cruz, for his part, has been quieter since the scenes of Wednesday. But after his 2018 Senate opponent, former congressman Beto O’Rourke (D-Tex.), attacked him for a “self serving attempt at sedition” that he said incited the violence, Cruz shot back that it was actually O’Rourke who was stoking division and hatred.
In the end, Cruz’s and Hawley’s efforts turned out to be even more quixotic than it appeared at the outset. Only six senators voted against accepting Arizona’s electors, and only seven voted to reject Pennsylvania’s — despite there having been more than a dozen senators who had lined up to object before Wednesday.
But as Rubio and others noted, this was never really about winning. At best, it was about making a point. At worst, it was about raw politics.
And the thing is, those raw politics could still very possibly accrue to the benefit of Cruz and Hawley. When they launched this effort, it was broadly understood as an appeal to the Trump base that is likely to be a major force in GOP politics for years to come. They’re now pretty much alone among possible 2024 hopefuls in taking this one last stand against the results of an election that polls show a majority of the GOP base regards as illegitimate.
If there’s one surprising thing, it was in how forceful the likes of Cotton and other GOP Senate colleagues were in taking the other side — in denouncing the effort and tying it to the violent scenes that we saw Wednesday. Perhaps they realized they couldn’t split the baby after the situation devolved into literal chaos. But we now have ambitious Republicans — most of them, in fact — essentially saying that an effort led by Trump and these members was dangerous snake oil that led to something amounting to an insurrection against our government.
It’s a calculation that will surely be at issue as these members build toward possible efforts to run in 2024, as some of them clearly already are.