Duncan: Does Rob Wittman Believe There Was Widespread Fraud?
By Emily Duncan
Rob Wittman announced Monday that he will be joining other Republicans in Congress in their last-ditch efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s win in last November’s election in order for Congress to overrule the voters and install Donald Trump as an unelected President.
What’s most notable about Wittman’s statement – aside from seeking to overturn an election and dismantling state control of elections – is what’s not mentioned. Wittman’s statement makes no mention of voter fraud.
This is an oddity, as the allegations are the focus of Trump’s obsession with his election loss, and the impetus for the challenge to the vote in the first place. Trump supporters in the 1st District who are pushing him to vote to overturn the election believe there was widespread voter fraud. They believe the election was “stolen.”
In his statement, Wittman doesn’t acknowledge the belief it was stolen, but going along with throwing out the results anyway.
It’s not the only thing not included in Wittman’s statement. There is no mention of Donald Trump or Joe Biden at all. There is scarcely any reference to the presidential election.
Instead, the focus is on the Elections Clause in the Constitution, and the failed Texas lawsuit to allow states to use the federal courts to overturn the laws in other states. The statement refers to “concerns” and “questions” that Wittman wants to see debated.
Wittman raises these as lingering questions to be resolved and Constitutional curiosities that need to be examined. Evidently, the only place to debate these matters is for a two-hour period in Congress during a pro forma joint session in Congress. Why would that be the case?
Because of the final thing Rob Wittman never mentions in his statement: what he actually intends to accomplish with his vote.
There’s a simple reason for this: the force of his vote, if successful, is to throw out the results of the election, end democracy, and have Congress pick the President instead of the voters. That is what Rob Wittman is trying to do.
One simple explanation is that Wittman knows the effort is doomed to fail. So why piss off the base by doing the right thing when you can indulge them with a vote that won’t matter?
To answer that, consider Yuval Levin put it in the National Review: (LINK: https://www.
To knowingly pretend a lie is true is, simply put, to lie. Doing that carefully enough to let you claim you’re only raising questions only makes it even clearer that you know you’re lying. Lying to people is no way to speak for them or represent them. It is a way of showing contempt for them, and of using them rather than being useful to them.
That Wittman would choose the cynical route would explain the above omissions from his statement. In order to preserve the air of “reasonableness,” Wittman hopes to minimize his actions as mere “raising concerns.”
That’s disgraceful and completely unacceptable.
There is no “reasonable” attempt to overthrow a democratic election.
There is no “moderate” opposition to consent of the governed.
This is an extreme act of anti-democracy radicalism. Either Rob Wittman is signing onto this because he believes there’s massive, widespread (but unproven) voter fraud and simply neglected to mention it in his statement, or he knows there’s no widespread fraud, but is voting to throw out the results of the election anyway.
And that would be worse.
