JoyV wrote:
You'd have to ask him. It could be he didn't want Trump winning the election. But I think more likely he is ignorant of the constitution and beleived what was being presented by the left as his duty. He strikes me a basically being a man of integrity. There could be other reasons.
Various kinds of challenges had been going on for a long time, since even _before_ the election, when Trump had already been drumming up support for the idea that if he lost then it must be rigged. None of them got very far in the courts. There were about 60 court cases where Trump's allegations about the election were found to be groundless. Many months ago I looked at a few bits of the allegations and, for myself, found them to be a ramshackle frivolous bunch of assertions. Trump's been like that for a long time (since 2015 at least). He acts like a blowhard without much substance. Most of the talk from the Trump-supporting side has been about voter fraud but they have quite a dearth of people they can actually name who did it, and no convictions. (This is discussed in more detail and more authoritatively by Greg Palast in his book "How Trump Stole 2020".) The system is designed to detect voter fraud. Of the very few people who even try to commit voter fraud, the ones who are detected have been Trump voters, and they do get named and prosecuted for it.
Republicans in the houses of Congress, or at least some of them, have shown themselves to be lacking in substance and/or fortitude. They disapprove of Trump in private but support him in public for their political careers. One of their main leaders, Mitch McConnell, has said (in essence -- I don't have an exact quote handy) that Trump was responsible for the violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, and yet later he changed his tune. Republican officials (including Senators and Representatives) are often running scared of the Trump popular movement.
After those 60 court cases, with no end in sight to Trump's allegations (as soon as one is shown false or explained to him that it is false, he just abandons it and goes on to some other allegation, apparently with no accountability for making false allegations), the country, and Congress, had to move ahead, and Jan. 6 was the prescribed day to do it.
I remember seeing a lot of footage of what happened in the joint session of Congress in 2000. I know there are technical things that go on, such as "objections" that have some procedures attached to them. This 2020 election is the only one in my lifetime, that I know about, where a U.S. presidential candidate just flat refused to concede no matter what. Meanwhile we have a majority (represented by about 78 million voters as I recall) who have been sidelined, and had to endure Trump's grandstanding, and hearing Trump's side of things, for a long time. Now they have managed to vote him out, and this majority's will and perspective is being expressed now by Congress's select committee about Jan. 6.
I know it's not like a court trial with cross-examinations of witnesses. Neither were the Republican-led impeachment hearings.
Republicans opted out of participating in an investigation, so we ended up with this select committee instead of an earlier idea which was called a bipartisan investigation.
The Republicans that the House leadership proposed to be on the select committee were, I believe, not appropriate people to be on it. Apparently the Speaker is allowed to make a judgment call like that. I guess it wouldn't make sense to have the same people who are trying to overthrow the government to be on the committee that investigates what they were doing.