Congressional Record/Volume 167/Issue 4/Senate/Counting of Electoral Ballots/Pennsylvania Objection Debate/Toomey Speech
OBJECTION TO COUNTING OF PENNSYLVANIA ELECTORAL VOTES
Mr. Toomey. Mr. President, I appreciate the indulgence of my colleagues allowing me to speak twice today. But my understanding is that later this evening, objectors will object to the certification of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes because they disapprove of the process that my State used in the last election. So in light of my expectation of this objection, I rise to defend the right of my citizens, my constituents, to vote in the Presidential election.
Let’s be clear. That is exactly what this objection is about. It is what it would do. It would overturn the results of the Presidential election in Pennsylvania, and it would thereby deny Pennsylvania’s voters the opportunity to even participate in the Presidential election.
Even if Congress did have the constitutional responsibility to judge the worthiness of a State’s election process, which it does not, rejecting Pennsylvania’s electoral votes would still be wildly out of proportion to the purported offenses and very damaging to our Republic.
Let me go through a few facts about Pennsylvania.
First, some of the objectors and, in fact, even the President of the United States this morning have observed that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court disregarded existing law when it ruled that mail-in ballots could be counted even if they arrived up to 3 days after election day.
Now, the objectors are right about that. In my view, the Supreme Court of the United States should overturn that illegal decision. But only 10,097 ballots arrived in Pennsylvania during the 3 days after the election, and those 10,097 ballots have been excluded from the vote count that resulted in President-Elect Biden winning Pennsylvania by about 80,000 votes. What greater remedy could the objectors possibly want than the complete exclusion of the late-arriving ballots? How could we possibly invalidate the entire Pennsylvania election over 10,000 votes that were not even included in the vote count?
A second charge we heard—and the Senator from Missouri alluded to it this evening—is that a 2019 Pennsylvania law that allows mail-in ballots for any reason—that that might violate the Pennsylvania Constitution. First of all, as Senator Casey observed, this was a bipartisan law passed with nearly unanimous Republican support. Clearly, the State legislators and the Governor believe it is consistent with the Pennsylvania Constitution.
Secondly, this law was not challenged when it was passed. It wasn’t challenged when it was applied during the June primary election. It was challenged only after President Trump lost the general election. But 2.6 million Pennsylvanians voted by mail-in ballot in the general election. Over 37 percent of Pennsylvania voters, in good faith, relied on a law to cast their votes, as they had done previously. Now, I understand you can make a theoretical argument about whether this is consistent with Pennsylvania’s Constitution, and that needs to be resolved for future elections. But because of this constitutional question that some people have, the objectors want to prevent Pennsylvania voters from participating in the Presidential election entirely. That would be an outrageous remedy to this purported offense.
A third charge we have heard is that Pennsylvania officials did not properly implement Pennsylvania election law in a variety of other ways. But the Trump campaign has shown that many of these issues have—well, first of all, none of these issues would have changed the election outcome, but more importantly, the campaign had many opportunities, of which it availed itself, to litigate these issues. They did time and again, and they lost repeatedly, often in unanimous, bipartisan decisions.
Some of the objectors also cite Congress’s own failure to investigate allegations of election irregularities, and that is their justification for refusing to certify the election results. But the allegations of election irregularities and fraud have been investigated. They have been adjudicated. They were adjudicated in the States in which they were alleged to have occurred.
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign took their case of election irregularities into the courtroom of Judge Matthew Brann of the Federal district court. Judge Brann is a conservative Republican Federalist Society member. Here is what he said about the Trump campaign case:
This court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations … unsupported by evidence. In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all [the] voters of the sixth most populated state.
So the campaign then appealed Judge Brann’s decision to the Third Circuit, and they drew a three-judge panel, all Republican-appointed judges, one appointed by President Trump. The panel concurred with Judge Brann.
Certainly there were irregularities in this election—there always are—but there is no evidence of significant fraud, conspiracies, or even significant anomalies that cast any serious doubt on who actually won the election.
You know, one of the ways you can tell is to look at the big picture in Pennsylvania. Look at what happened. In 2016, President Trump won Pennsylvania by eight-tenths of 1 percent. In 2020, he lost Pennsylvania by a little over 1 percent. Is there anything at all that is implausible or surprising about a 2-percent change in the election outcome?
Relative to 2016, in Pennsylvania the President lost a little ground in most of the rural counties he had carried. He lost a lot of ground in the big suburban counties, and he slightly narrowed his large loss in Philadelphia. There are no surprises here. This reflects a pattern that occurred all across the country.
My colleagues, as I have said, it is not our responsibility to sit in judgment of State election procedures in the first place, but if it were, there would not be nearly sufficient reason to deny my constituents their right to participate in this Presidential election.
Joe Biden won the election. That is not what I had hoped for, but that is what happened. It was an honest victory with the usual minor irregularities that occur in most elections.
We witnessed today the damage that can result when men in power and responsibility refuse to acknowledge the truth. We saw bloodshed because the demagogue chose to spread falsehoods and sow distrust of his own fellow Americans. Let’s not abet such deception. Let’s reject this motion.