House Republicans are being excluded from full access to documents as a committee decides if first-term Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks of Iowa really won her seat, GOP lawmakers say.
In November, Miller-Meeks prevailed in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District over Democratic rival Rita Hart by six votes out of more than 394,000 cast. The Democratic-majority in January seated Miller-Meeks “provisionally,” while the House Administration Committee reviews how the results were tabulated.
And that’s where the problems begin, says Rep. Rodney Davis of Illinois, the top Republican on the House Administration Committee. The panel last week voted against dismissing Hart’s challenge, and now Davis says Republicans aren’t being given access to documents like Democrats are.
In a letter to House Administration Committee Chairwoman Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, Davis wrote that Republican staffers were blindsided at the last-minute by committee Democrats’ decision to postpone consideration of Miller-Meeks’s motion to dismiss Hart’s contest.
HOUSE COMMITTEE STARTS PROCESS FOR DEALING WITH TWO CONTESTED ELECTIONS
According to Davis, after the meeting concluded, Democrats circulated a draft letter asking Miller-Meeks’s and Hart’s attorneys for responses on several issues involving the discovery process.
“The majority could have provided the draft much earlier, but it waited until this afternoon and left Republican members and their staff with insufficient time to review the draft,” Davis wrote. That letter, Davis says, ignores “Iowa’s free and fair election and recount procedures” and “seeks to shift the burden away from Ms. Hart and to Congresswoman Miller-Meeks.”
Davis called it a thinly veiled pretext for overturning the lawful election of Miller-Meeks and handing the seat to Hart, which would affect the balance of power in the House where Democrats hold 219 seats and Republicans hold 211, with five vacancies.
“The only conceivable reason for the majority’s effort to speed up this election contest is that it has already decided to steal the seat from the people of Iowa and their chosen representative and give it to Ms. Hart.”
A Lofgren spokesman responded to Davis’s allegations, telling the Washington Examiner, “In accordance with Section 2 of Committee Resolution 117-10, which was approved unanimously with Republican support, the Chairperson consulted the Ranking Minority Member and incorporated minority feedback prior to requesting further briefing from the contestant and contestee on March 10.”
Although the Iowa Canvassing Board certified Miller-Meeks as the election winner following a recount and a recanvass of the district’s 24 counties, Hart contested the election to the House of Representatives instead of going to an Iowa appeals court to challenge the decision.
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In her petition to the committee, Hart alleged 22 ballots were left out from the final count, claiming that if the ballots were included, she would have been the winner.
The Iowa Republican, who was seated on Jan. 4, filed a motion to dismiss Hart’s case, saying precedent compels the House to reject the contest because Hart did not initially take her appeal to Iowa’s state court.
Miller-Meeks argued the 22 ballots in question were left out of the final tally because they were already deemed to be illegitimate by the recount board.
“These ballots were not found. All the ballots have to be in. They have to be postmarked the day before the election, and they have to be at the auditor’s office and cured by the Monday after the election,” Miller-Meeks told the Washington Examiner. “So, these ballots were already reviewed through all of this process and through the recount board.”
House Democrats, she said, are trying to reverse-engineer the ballot-counting process to find a way to make her rival the winner.
“It’s an outcome that they want to change politically because they can’t change the election and the results of the election,” Miller-Meeks said.
