During an appearance over the weekend on ABC’s This Week with host Jonathan Karl, high-ranking House Republican Steve Scalise (La.) refused to admit that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election. The level of delusion required to maintain this idea is staggering. Scalise did not directly allege that there was a nationwide fraud scheme that was responsible for Biden’s victory, which is what Trump has claimed, but he did insist that at least a few states broke the law with their handling of procedure surrounding the 2020 presidential election — but that’s simply not a substantiated claim!
Almost the entirety of the post-election court cases that Trump and his allies brought completely failed, and at no point did any court anywhere in the country accept the idea that misconduct was responsible for Biden’s victory.
Asked whether he would unequivocally state that Biden legitimately won the 2020 presidential election, Scalise said as follows:
‘Look, Joe Biden’s the president. There were a few states that did not follow their state laws. That’s really the dispute that you’ve seen continue on, and look, if you’re Joe Biden, then you probably want to keep talking about impeachment and anything other than the fact that he’s killed millions of American energy jobs. They just signed the Paris accord — it’s gonna kill manufacturing jobs in America. But at the end of the day, when you look at where we are in this country, either we’re gonna address the problems that happened with the election that millions of people are still concerned about — the Constitution says: state legislatures set the rules for elections. That didn’t happen in a few states.’
After Karl reiterated his questioning, Scalise called Biden the “legitimate president” — but he did not admit that the election was not “stolen,” and he did not acknowledge that the original election and Biden’s original victory were legitimate. Watch Scalise below:
Holy shit. Steve Scalise refuses to admit that Joe Biden legitimately won the election. pic.twitter.com/XHYJDay5RK
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 21, 2021
Again — Scalise is wrong. Republicans presented his exact argument in a post-election U.S. Supreme Court case, and the argument wasn’t even compelling enough for the court to take up the case in the first place. The would-be opponents against the Republicans in that case explained how the Constitution doesn’t demand that electoral policy-making be left to formal state legislative bodies alone — instead, the idea is simply that the authorities responsible for the law in respective states should handle electoral procedure.
In Wisconsin, the Trump campaign alleged in a lawsuit that authorities outside of the state legislature improperly intervened in the election administration process, but U.S. District Judge Brett Ludwig bluntly “concluded Wisconsin officials had followed state laws when they conducted the Nov. 3 election,” the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel summarized. Scalise’s claim that states didn’t follow their election laws isn’t meaningfully supported.
