Nearly a year after polls, Republicans back Trump’s rigged election claims

Nearly a year after the United States Presidential elections, prominent Republican lawmakers continue to stand behind former President Donald Trump‘s election fraud claims. Steve Scalise, the second-ranking GOP lawmaker in House of Representatives, repeatedly denied saying that the elections were not stolen.

In an interview with Fox News, Scalise dismissed the elections and continued to play down the legitimacy of the 2020 elections, which put Joe Biden in the White House earlier this year.

The Louisiana Representative said, “I have been very clear from the beginning. If you look at a number of states, they did not follow their state-passed laws that govern the election for president”, according to reports from Associated Press.

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Scalise added in the Fox interview, “That is what the United States Constitution says. They don’t say the states determine what the rules are. They say the state legislatures determine the rules.”

Trump himself does not seem to leave behind the idea of the Presidential elections being stolen. At a rally in Iowa on Saturday, the 45th US President spent nearly 30 minutes speaking about his claims. He was joined by a variety of prominent Republican leaders, including Governor Kim Reynolds and Senator Charles Grassley.

Scalise on Sunday appeared to be referring to the legal argument, made in several lawsuits backed by Trump before and after last November’s election, that the Constitution gives the power of election administration exclusively to state lawmakers, according to reports from Associated Press.

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The suits sought to invalidate a number of pandemic-era accommodations including expanded mail voting that were put in place by governors, state election officials and judges.

Representative Liz Cheney, a GOP lawmaker, who is serving on a House committee investigating the January 6 Capitol insurrection, on Sunday slammed Scalise for spreading Trump’s “Big Lie.”

“Millions of Americans have been sold a fraud that the election was stolen,” Cheney tweeted. “Republicans have a duty to tell the American people that this is not true. Perpetuating the Big Lie is an attack on the core of our constitutional republic.”