Why are Cruz, Paxton cynically propping up Trump’s desperate effort to steal election?

Each day seems to bring another Texan saying or doing something absurd in the service of helping Donald Trump steal a second term.

First, it was Attorney General Ken Paxton suing other states over the outcome of their elections. Then, it was Rep. Louie Gohmert’s laughable lawsuit trying to force Vice President Mike Pence to override votes from several states as he presides in the Senate’s count of the Electoral College.

Over the weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz announced that he would ask the Senate on Wednesday to halt its certification of the Electoral College results for a federal investigation of six states where Joe Biden won narrowly. And Paxton plans to take one more bite of the conspiracy apple Wednesday, appearing at a White House rally.

It’s all a disgraceful sop to some Republican voters who are gobbling up thoroughly debunked theories of fraud and overinflated claims of unconstitutional changes to voting in states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania.

Thankfully, some of their fellow Texas GOP officeholders are more level-headed, such as Rep. Chip Roy of Austin. More on him in a moment.

Cruz’s move, joined by 11 other senators, is particularly sly. He suggests he’s merely responding to “unprecedented” allegations of fraud. Cruz should have learned from the 2016 Republican presidential contest that Trump is a fount of unprecedented allegations — because he makes them up, such as when he accused Cruz’s father of being connected to the Kennedy assassination.

The voter fraud allegations have gone nowhere in any court. Trump’s lawyers, curiously, have backed away from actually airing them before judges. Cruz notes the Supreme Court has twice declined to hear cases on the matter. As a former clerk there and a lawyer who argued before the court numerous times as Texas solicitor general, he undoubtedly knows that’s because the justices — most of them conservative, three of them Trump appointees — saw the claims for the ridiculous long shots they were.

Plus, what exactly is a hastily thrown together commission supposed to accomplish in 10 days? And what happens when its work is done with just days until inauguration? Cruz doesn’t say.

Unfortunately for Cruz and his colleagues, the same day they announced their intention, the president revealed the real story. In a recorded phone call, he pressured Georgia’s top elections officials to “find” the precise number of votes he would need to overturn Biden’s victory there.

When Paxton filed his suit against four other states, we noted that conservative Republicans would scream if another state tried to move against, say, Texas’ voter ID laws. Similarly, if one of Cruz’s Senate colleagues tried to launch an investigation of our elections, he’d be the first to shout: “Don’t Mess With Texas.” Speaking of Paxton, he’ll be front and center Wednesday at a Trump rally at a park near the White House. It’s another sign of his poor judgment — shameful, but not surprising.

When Paxton filed the lawsuit, his political adversaries speculated that it was an attempt to win a pre-emptive pardon from Trump in case of potential federal bribery charges. He’s doing nothing to prove them wrong.

Paxton should have resigned already, but if he’s going to spend his days supporting the usurpation of a legitimate national election, he should definitely do so on his own time.

Thankfully, some Texas Republicans, even staunch conservatives, have displayed more sense. Roy, an Austin congressman, distinguished himself by opposing Paxton, his former boss, on the issue of the election. On Sunday, he pointed out the folly of the electoral challenges to come. When the House convened for its new term, Roy objected to the seating of representatives from the six states that will be the subject of the Senate challenges.

It was trolling, but it was effective in pointing out that if the election results are tainted, even Republicans elected in those states must face objections, right?

Roy, who also worked for Cruz, signed on to a statement offered by several House Republicans, all firmly on the right, that laid out plainly the constitutional and political problems of the election challenges.

“The text of the United States Constitution, and the Twelfth Amendment in particular, is clear,” they said. “With respect to presidential elections, there is no authority for Congress to make value judgments” over states’ election laws. “Nor does Congress have discretion to disqualify electors based on its own finding that fraud occurred in that state’s election.”

Other Texans are also doing the right thing. Sen. John Cornyn announced Tuesday that he will not support an “unproven” fraud allegation, and he expressed skepticism about Cruz’s idea of an election commission. Rep. Kay Granger, too, has affirmed that the election is over.

This split forecasts battles to come among Republicans once Trump is out of office. Republicans should note the Senate runoffs Tuesday in Georgia, once a solidly red state. Two months of Trump spreading lies and conspiracy theories about his loss there surely dampened GOP turnout, and as a result, Democrats appear likely to control all of Congress and the presidency for the first time in a decade.

Much of the GOP infighting is positioning for the 2024 presidential race. Potential candidates such as Cruz and Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, the first senator to announce he’d challenge the Electoral College results, are betting that loyalty to Trump will be important to GOP primary voters.

It probably will. But many are also patriots devoted to our republican government and the Constitution. We’d call them the true conservatives, literally aiming to conserve our cherished democracy.

For the good of the party and the country, it’s important that they prevail.

Editor’s note: Updated Wednesday morning to reflect Georgia runoff results.

This story was originally published January 5, 2021 at 12:54 PM.