Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-California) has named the five members of his party who will serve on the House Ethics Committee, three of whom have denied or questioned the outcome of the 2020 presidential election.
McCarthy named as chair of the committee Michael Guest, a congressman from the state of Mississippi. He also appointed Reps. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), John Rutherford (R-Florida), Andrew Garbarino (R-New York) and Michelle Fischbach (R-Minnesota) to serve on the panel.
Guest, Rutherford and Fischbach have repeatedly indicated that they believe President Joe Biden’s defeat of former President Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate. There is no evidence suggesting that the race was tainted by election fraud, however, and claims saying otherwise have been thoroughly debunked.
All three lawmakers voted against certifying several states’ Electoral College electors on January 6, 2021. Both Rutherford and Fischbach also voted against establishing a commission to investigate the Capitol attack that took place that day, and both Guest and Rutherford signed an amicus brief to a lawsuit from the state of Texas that sought to discount the votes of millions of residents from other states in the presidential election.
After the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear that case, legal experts said the lawsuit never should have been brought forward in the first place.
“The highest court in the land rightfully put an end to a lawsuit that constituted a desperate attempt to discount ballots cast by millions of American voters. Any other outcome would have signaled the death of core principles that lie at the heart of American democracy,” Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said at the time.
Despite the fact that claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race have repeatedly been debunked, election deniers now have considerable influence in the House of Representatives, especially those who were recently appointed to the House Ethics Committee.
“With the committee now being run by election deniers, it is unlikely that any members of the House will be taken to task for their efforts to subvert the democratic process,” noted Rolling Stone politics reporter Nikki Mccann Ramírez.
Unlike most Republicans on the Ethics Committee, a majority of Americans rightly believe that Biden legitimately won the 2020 election, with 63 percent saying as such in a recent Economist/YouGov poll. Only 37 percent of respondents disagreed.
In that poll, which was published on Wednesday, 93 percent of self-identified liberals and 75 percent of moderates said they believed that the election outcome was correct, while 71 percent of conservatives said they thought it was illegitimate.
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