US senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley are “complicit in the big lie” and “have a lot of soul-searching to do” over their attempts to overturn the presidential election in favor of US President Donald Trump, a Republican US Senate colleague said on Sunday, amid growing calls for the two men to resign or be censured.
Republican objections to Electoral College results failed, but Cruz and Hawley were prominent among 147 representatives and senators who backed the late-night effort on Wednesday, even after a mob incited by the president attacked the US Capitol.
Five people including a police officer died amid the chaos, in which lawmakers were apparently the target of planned kidnappings .
Photo: AFP
The riot has fueled calls for Trump to resign, as Democrats in the US House of Representatives prepare articles of impeachment.
Speaking to NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, US Senator Pat Toomey became the second Republican senator to say that the president had committed impeachable offenses, adding that he should “resign and go away as soon as possible.”
Toomey did not call for Cruz and Hawley to quit, although he said that they were “going to have a lot of soul-searching to do and the problem is they were complicit in the big lie, this lie that Donald Trump won the election in a landslide and it was all stolen.”
Photo: AFP
“They compounded that with this notion that somehow this could all be reversed in the final moments of the congressional proceedings. So that’s, that’s going to be, that’s going to haunt them for a very long time,” Toomey said.
On CNN’s State of the Union, he added: “They’re going to pay a big price for this. I think their reputations have been affected. You’ve seen the kind of reaction in the media back in their home states, so their constituents will decide the final way to adjudicate this.”
Democrats piled in.
Photo: AFP
On Saturday, US Senator Sherrod Brown, a Democrat, called for Cruz and Hawley’s “immediate resignations,” and said that they had “betrayed their oaths of office and abetted a violent insurrection on our democracy.”
“If they do not resign, the Senate must expel them,” he added.
US senators Patty Murray, Chris Coons and Tina Smith were among other Democrats to call for Cruz and Hawley to go.
On Sunday, US Senator Joe Manchin told CNN: “Whether they should resign or not, I don’t know, [but] how they can live with themselves knowing that people have died because of their words and actions?”
Hawley, from Missouri, was the first senator to say he would object to election results.
He has condemned the Capitol violence, but was also pictured raising a clenched fist toward Trump supporters.
He has defended his actions and decried the decision by his publisher, Simon and Schuster, to cancel a forthcoming book.
Hawley also objected to criticism from US president-elect Joe Biden, which Toomey echoed on Sunday.
Biden invoked Hitler’s propaganda minister, saying that the senators were “part of the big lie … Goebbels and the great lie. You keep repeating the lie, repeating the lie.”
Cruz also condemned the violence and objected to Biden’s comparison.
He has pushed back on calls for his resignation, including from the Houston Chronicle, saying he has no regrets.
“What I was working to do is find a way to re-establish widespread trust in the system,” he told his hometown newspaper.
Other Republicans backed off their planned objections after the Capitol violence.
Manchin told CNN he admired those who put the “constitution above their own political preferences and their own political ambitions.”
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