Ohio’s Sen. Rob Portman won’t support electoral vote challenges in Congress

WASHINGTON, D.C. - Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman announced Monday that he won’t side with Republicans who hope to challenge the electoral vote counts in several states on Jan. 6 in hopes of swaying the results of the 2020 presidential election to incumbent Republican Donald Trump.

“The Constitution created a system for electing the President through the Electoral College that ensures the people and the states hold the power, not Congress,” said a statement that Portman released on Monday. “I cannot support allowing Congress to thwart the will of the voters.”

Portman issued his statement as several Republicans in the U.S. Senate announced that they’ll back efforts to challenge the presidential election results when when Congress meets on Jan. 6 to count and certify Electoral College votes.

Democratic President-elect Joe Biden clinched the election with 306 electoral votes to 232 for Trump, but Trump has insisted that the results were tainted by fraud in several states that backed Biden. He has not provided evidence to back his claims, and courts have tossed out dozens of Trump-backed lawsuits aiming to overturn the election results. Despite the lack of legal success, a faction of Republicans loyal to Trump whose members include Champaign County Republican Rep. Jim Jordan and Holmes County Republican Rep. Bob Gibbs plan to challenge the electoral vote count of the states Trump disputes. After that happens, the Senate and House will meet individually to weigh the arguments.

In a statement released Monday, Gibbs said he doesn’t believe the fraud allegations got their day in court since many of the cases were dismissed on procedural grounds. He said he will object to the certification of the Electoral College for some states on Wednesday so Congress can provide a venue for the American people to hear evidence that wasn’t presented in court, and to “ensure the validity of our elections.”

“The Constitution gives state legislatures the authority and power to set elections, and I believe state judiciaries and state executive offices overstepped their authority in a handful of states,” said Gibbs. “Based on my reading of federal code, Congress has the authority to deem whether electors were appointed in accordance with state election law.”

GOP Rep. Anthony Gonzalez of Rocky River released a constituent letter on Thursday that cited reasoning similar to Portman’s for declining to contest the election results.

“There is simply no legal basis for Congress to throw out the the certified electoral vote and overturn the results of this election,” Gonzalez wrote.

Because a majority in both the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate and the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives would have to reject any state’s results, the anticipated debate is unlikely to keep Biden from assuming the presidency, though it could have political fallout for elected officeholders like Portman.

Portman’s statement said he voted for Trump, campaigned for him, supports his policies, and was disappointed by the results of November’s election.

“Following the election, I supported the Trump campaign’s right to pursue recounts and legal challenges,” Portman’s statement said. “There were instances of fraud and irregularities, as there are in every presidential election, and those who engaged in that conduct should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. But after two months of recounts and legal challenges, not a single state recount changed a result and, of the dozens of lawsuits filed, not one found evidence of fraud or irregularities widespread enough to change the result of the election. This was the finding of numerous Republican-appointed judges and the Trump Administration’s own Department of Justice. Every state has now weighed in and certified its electoral slate based on its vote and the process set out in the Constitution.”

Portman said that because there were some cases of election irregularities and he understands many Americans believe the election was unfairly decided, he has urged Congress to create a “blue ribbon bipartisan panel on election integrity that would provide transparency into issues in the 2020 election, and recommend best practices for the next election.”

He noted the objections to be lodged on Jan. 6 have happened only twice since Congress enacted the statute that enabled them, and the challenges were never upheld. He called it an “extreme remedy” that would allow “Congress to substitute its judgment for the judgment of voters, and for the judgment of states that certified the results.”

The statement observes that when Portman was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2005, he opposed an effort by Cleveland Democratic Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones to challenge Ohio’s electoral vote count to draw attention to voting problems in the state such as hours-long lines at the polls. Unlike the efforts on Trump’s behalf, the Tubbs Jones protest did not aim to overturn the results of the 2004 election, and was not endorsed by the losing candidate: Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

“I stood in opposition to Democrats then, saying Congress should not ‘obstruct the will of the American people,’” Portman’s statement said. “I was concerned then that Democrats were establishing a dangerous precedent where Congress would inappropriately assert itself to try to reverse the will of the voters. I cannot now support Republicans doing the same thing.”

Even though Portman was re-elected in 2016 with a more than 20% edge over that year’s Democratic candidate, former Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland, he has been loath to alienate voters in the state who support Trump, who won the state’s voters by an 8% margin each year he was on the ballot, observes Baldwin Wallace University political scientist Thomas Sutton.

Portman is up for re-election in 2022, and Sutton believes he’d prefer to avoid a primary challenge from a Republican such as Jordan who might argue Portman was insufficiently loyal to Trump. Shortly after GOP Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine referred to Biden as “President-elect” in a November CNN interview, Trump posted a message on Twitter that asked: “Who will be running for Governor of the Great State of Ohio? Will be hotly contested!” The comment was widely interpreted as an invitation for a DeWine primary challenge. Portman waited until December to call Biden “President-elect.”

Sutton said that Trump has “deep, broad, enthusiastic support among core Republican constituencies” in nearly all of Ohio’s 88 counties, and can have an effect on the state’s 2022 election if he remains politically active. Because Ohio voters have trended Republican in statewide elections in recent years, Sutton believes a primary challenge has greater potential to thwart Portman’s re-election than any Democrat. Sutton says Portman has low name recognition for an incumbent U.S. Senator, and is more of a policy expert than a “popular presence.”

A Trump loyalist like Jordan could mount a challenge if he doesn’t decide to remain in the U.S. House of Representatives to assume a party leadership role if Republicans win control of the legislative body in 2022, says Sutton.

“Trump is clearly a charismatic, dynamic presence on the political scene,” said Sutton. “People either really love him or really don’t.”