Republicans plan to challenge Biden’s Electoral College victory. It’s the same scenario that played out in 2004.

Congress will count the Electoral College votes in a joint session of Congress on January 6, which represents Trump’s final chance to try to overturn the election result he lost to Biden. In reality, Trump’s Republican allies have virtually zero chance of changing the result, only to delay the inevitable affirmation of Biden as the Electoral College winner and the next president.

“I believe we have multiple senators, and the question is not if, but how many,” Brooks said last week.

Brooks said the Republicans are preparing to object to Biden’s win in as many as six states, which would force a dozen hours of debate on the House and Senate floors, turning the counting of Biden’s victory into a political circus.

GOP senator leaves door open to objecting

In order to force a vote to challenge a state’s election results, however, a senator must join with a member of Congress in writing to object to the results. McConnell, who has recognized Biden’s victory, has warned his conference not to join the House GOP effort and force the Senate GOP conference to take a politically toxic vote on whether they’re siding with Trump or not.

But Tuberville, who beat Trump’s former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in the Alabama Republican primary, left the door open last week to objections to the Electoral College results. Tuberville’s comments prompted Trump to tweet multiple stories about the new Alabama senator potentially defying McConnell and speak to him over the weekend.

“He said, ‘You made me the most popular politician in the United States,'” Trump added. “He’s great.”

Should Tuberville or another senator join the House objections, the two chambers would separate and debate each state’s objection for two hours before voting. Because Democrats control the House, the effort has effectively zero chance of succeeding, and even in a Republican-controlled Senate, numerous Republicans have said there was not widespread fraud.

“In the Senate, it would go down like a shot dog,” South Dakota Sen. John Thune, the No. 2 Senate Republican, said last week. “I just don’t think it makes a lot of sense to put everybody through this when you know what the ultimate outcome is going to be.”

Previous objections have failed without Senate backing

The joint session to count the Electoral College votes on January 6 will be led by Vice President Mike Pence, who attended Monday’s White House meeting with Trump and House Republicans, raising questions about how he will handle being in the awkward position of affirming Biden’s victory over his own presidential ticket.

It’s the same position that former Vice President Al Gore faced in 2001 following his razor-thin loss to Bush that came down to a disputed recount in Florida. During that vote, House Democrats protested the Florida result, but no senator objection, and the effort died.

That’s also what happened in 2017, when a group of House Democrats objected to Trump’s win in several states, citing Russia’s election interference and problems with voter suppression. No senators joined the House members, however, and Biden — who was presiding over the session in his role as president of the Senate — gaveled down and dismissed the objections, certifying Trump as the winner.

“We were trying to focus attention on (Russian President Vladimir) Putin’s efforts to undermine and sabotage the American election,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, one of the Democrats who raised an objection on the floor in 2017. “There’s certainly a lot more evidence of Vladimir Putin’s cyberattacks on the DNC and the (Hillary) Clinton campaign and efforts to manipulate American public opinion through social media than there’s been of any fraud or corruption in the 2020 election.”

House GOP leaders have cited past Democratic objections, including Boxer’s and House Democrats’ 2017 objections, to justify disputing Biden’s victory next month.

“If any Republicans did it, it’s clearly not the first time it’s been done,” House Minority Whip Steve Scalise, who has yet to acknowledge Biden as President-elect, said last week. “Every Republican president in the last three terms have been objected to by Democrats.”

‘People wanted to strangle me’

Boxer said that Tubbs Jones, who died in 2008, convinced her to join the 2005 objection by showing her the problems that took place with Ohio’s votes, including hours-long lines at polls, broken voting machines and high rates rejection rates for provisional ballots in the state’s African American communities.

“This objection does not have at its root the hope or even the hint of overturning the victory of the president,” Tubbs Jones said on the House floor when the two chambers separated to debate. “But it is a necessary, timely and appropriate opportunity to review and remedy the most precious process in our democracy.”

In the Senate, Boxer’s fellow Democrats spoke in support of addressing problems with voter suppression. But when it came time to vote, only Boxer cast a vote to sustain the protest. She lost 74-1.

In the House, the vote was 267-31 against the objection, and Ohio’s votes were counted.

“It was one of my proudest moments, even though I stood alone,” Boxer told CNN. “I was very unpopular that day in the Senate — people wanted to strangle me.”

In the weeks after they had raised the Electoral College objection, Boxer and Tubbs Jones joined with then-Sen. Hillary Clinton to introduce new voting rights legislation, though it didn’t advance in the Republican-held Senate.

“Looking back on it, I think we were so prescient because after that, things got even worse with voter suppression,” Boxer said. “We had hoped that our taking that stand would set the stage for legislation, but we could never get it done in the Republican Senate. We could just not get it out.”