It wasn't just Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley and a handful of the wackier Republicans.
It turns out that even mild-mannered Mike Lee, a Senate Republican from Utah, pushed Donald Trump to do almost everything possible to throw American democracy in the garbage after Trump lost the 2020 election.
In new text messages to White House chief of staff Mark Meadows obtained by the House committee investigating the Capitol riot (and by CNN), Lee encouraged the White House "to exhaust every legal and constitutional remedy at your disposal to restore Americans faith in our elections."
Lee told Meadows to bring in attorney Sidney Powell; after she made crazy statements at a press conference, he suggested law professor John Eastman, who wrote memos outlining how Vice President Mike Pence could stop Congress from certifying the election.
And Lee begged for talking points: "Please tell me what I should be saying," he wrote on Nov. 22.
Then Lee settled on the "independent state legislature" doctrine, a legal theory that would allow Republican state lawmakers to throw out Democratic victories in their states.
"If a very small handful of states were to have their legislatures appoint alternative slates of delegates, there could be a path," Lee wrote on Dec. 8.
As Jan. 6, 2021, approached and there did not appear to be any coherent plan to stop Congress from certifying the election, the texts show Lee begging the White House to call off the shenanigans, saying the day's plan for a rally and unfounded objections could "backfire badly." Which, of course, it did.
There are two takeaways from Lee's texts. One is that even a self-styled "constitutional conservative" can contort himself into supporting authoritarianism. The other is that Republicans could really have stolen that election if only Trump's legal team had been less flamboyantly idiotic and a few Republican legislatures had played along. It's something to watch for next time if Congress fails to reform the Electoral Count Act.
CNN also obtained texts from Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas), who similarly urged the White House to craft a plan for undoing the election results and then didn't like the plan they came up with.
Roy wrote on Jan. 1 that if the president somehow undid the election, "we're driving a stake in the heart of the federal republic."
As it happens, when I asked Roy in October if he believed the election had been rigged, he screamed at me so loudly that a Capitol Police officer walked over to make sure he didn't try to beat me up. (He didn't answer the question.)
– Arthur Delaney (tips: arthur@huffpost.com, @arthurdelaneyhp)
