Chip Roy challenges seating of House members from six presidential battleground states

Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) on Sunday challenged the seating of lawmakers from Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

All are states where President-elect Joe Biden defeated President Trump in November and where Republicans have raised allegations of voter fraud or other irregularities. 

Roy — one of the few conservatives not backing the effort to challenge the results of the presidential election on Jan. 6 — argued that if there was widespread voter fraud to the level that it would change the presidential election results, as many of his colleagues claim, the legitimacy of results down ballot are also called into question.

“Such allegations – if true – raise significant doubts about the elections of at least some of the members of the United States House of Representatives that, if not formally addressed, could cast a dark cloud of suspicion over the validity of this body for the duration of the 117th Congress,” he said in a statement. “After all, those representatives were elected through the very same systems — with the same ballot procedures, with the same signature validations, with the same broadly applied decisions of executive and judicial branch officials — as were the electors chosen for the President of the United States under the laws of those states, which have become the subject of national controversy.”

“And while the legislatures of those states have sent us no formal indication that the results of these elections should not be honored by this body, it would confound basic human reason if the presidential results were to face objection while the congressional results of the same process escaped without public scrutiny,” he added.

Each of the six states in question has certified Biden as the winner of the election and said there was nothing improper about the election.

House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) quickly objected to Roy’s attempt, offering a resolution authorizing Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to administer the oath. That resolution easily passed.

Only two lawmakers voted against allowing Pelosi to administer the oath to House members: Reps. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.) and Andy Harris (R-Md.).

Updated at 7:45 p.m.