Congressional Record/Volume 167/Issue 4/House/Counting Electoral Votes/Pennsylvania Objection Debate/Herrera Beutler Speech
Ms. Herrera Beutler. Madam Speaker, is this a country, is this an America that we want to give to our children, a country of lawlessness, of might makes right, of mob rule?
Previous generations of Americans have laid down their lives to answer “no” to that question. I do not want to be the first generation of Americans so selfish as to answer “yes.” Nothing is more important to me than preserving this constitutional Republic as a Representative.
Article II of the Constitution states: “Each State shall appoint, in such manner as the legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors,” meaning that it is the duty of the State legislatures to select their electors in a manner they stipulate. It is right here.
The Founders of our Republic did not want to federalize elections, which is why they reserved the selection of electors to the State legislatures.
Historically, when Congress intervened in the electoral process, it was in the Civil War. It was when States were sending multiple slates of electors. But that is not the case today.
Of the six States actively being contested, five have Republican legislatures; five are controlled by one party; five have the authority to get together and to vote to change the elector that they sent to us.
How many of the six did? Not one.
Pennsylvania did not get together and vote as a body and send us a new slate of electors. They did not send us a bill or a resolution citing injustice at the State level.
None of them.
Are they cowards? Do they not know the Constitution? Have they not read it, like you and I? Or are they merely passing the buck?
Here is the reality. Look, I believe this was not a fraud-free election. I believe that there were problems in Pennsylvania and in Georgia. But the Constitution gives us the right to fix that at the State level, not throw out the electoral college. We do not want to absolve the responsibility of the people in those States to hold their own lawmakers accountable.
I, as a Washington State Congresswoman, don’t know better than the people in Pennsylvania and Georgia.
Folks, we can’t vote to undermine the electoral college today. We have to uphold it.