The House committee investigating the Capitol riot is (publicly) back with another new subpoena, this time demanding testimony from Robin Vos, the Republican state legislator who leads the lower chamber of Wisconsin’s legislature and has done so for years.
Amid far-right anger over Vos’s refusal to pursue illegally undoing the 2020 presidential election results almost two years after the presidential race concluded, Trump supported an ultimately unsuccessful Republican primary challenger against Vos, who is the longest-serving Wisconsin state Assembly Speaker in the history of the state. Trump’s push for Vos to take action on the 2020 results in Wisconsin, where Biden won, came after a ruling from the state Supreme Court against the usage of most drop boxes for mail-in ballots in Wisconsin. (The court also banned assistance opportunities for disabled voters seeking to return their ballots in person, but a federal judge ruled in favor of disabled Wisconsin residents in a subsequent legal challenge.) The House panel wants testimony about Trump’s communications with Vos this July after the disputed ruling.
Vos filed a legal challenge to the subpoena on the basis of its short turnaround in demands for his testimony. (The date delineated for him to answer questions was Monday.) Vos also challenged the relevance of the committee’s interest in his communications with Trump after the Wisconsin Supreme Court’s controversial decision. He argued his interactions with the former president “do not pertain to the events of January 6th, or even (to construe the authorizing resolution broadly) the events leading up to it or its immediate aftermath.” Except that they do: the events of January 6 took place as a direct result of months of Trump and numerous allies of his trying to undo the presidential election outcome, and more broadly, the committee is investigating — and has for some time been investigating — these expansive attempts at undercutting basic democratic processes. It’s a continuing threat, and it’s relevant to legislative recommendations from the panel.
The riot panel is holding another public hearing this week. Recently, the House passed a series of reforms to the process for Congressionally certifying the presidential election outcome, including a change to the numbers of members of both chambers required to support an objection to certain electoral votes before that objection moves to debate and a vote. Previously, requirements demanded just a single member from each chamber, but under the legislation the House passed, that changes to one-third of both chambers — a much higher bar. The legislation also limits the grounds on which any member of Congress can present an objection to “the explicit constitutional requirements for candidate and elector eligibility and the 12th Amendment’s explicit requirements for elector balloting,” as Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) explained.
