Via the Inky:
Sen. Pat Toomey said Tuesday that it’s “completely unacceptable” for President Donald Trump to pressure state lawmakers to overturn Pennsylvania’s election result, a rare rebuke from an elected Republican as Trump continues his effort to subvert the will of the voters.
“It’s completely unacceptable and it’s not going to work and the president should give up trying to get legislatures to overturn the results of the elections in their respective states,” Toomey, Pennsylvania’s most prominent elected Republican, said in a phone interview. His comments came a day after it emerged that Trump called the Republican state House Speaker to seek help in undoing the outcome.
And yes, Toomey is retiring, so not exactly a Profile in Courage here. Still, those are pretty unambiguous words. And, as Greg Sargent points out:
But the more important point — and this is almost never conveyed with clarity — is this. While it’s good that some state-level Republicans have rebuffed these efforts, a great many other elected Republicans have refrained from declaring them wholly intolerable, which would demonstrate that they must be unequivocally condemned as existentially destructive to democracy.
By doing exactly this, Toomey has exposed this deficit.
It’s also rarely conveyed with clarity that some Republican senators actually do tacitly support efforts to overturn the election results. This includes Loeffler and Perdue. Loeffler has suggested that by trying to get rogue electors appointed, Trump is merely exercising his “right” to take “legal recourse,” which is nonsense, because that tactic lies outside what the law allows.
TL;DR — Bullshit is bullshit. Time for the GOP to be called out, loudly and repetitively. And that gives me an excuse to post this: