A Republican lawmaker compared the supposed fraud that allegedly cost President Trump a second term to the Japanese internment camps in the 1940s.
Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, who was one of the 126 House Republicans who signaled their support for a now-defunct lawsuit from the state of Texas seeking to get the Supreme Court to invalidate election results in a handful of battleground states that President-elect Joe Biden won, made the comparison in a social media post on Friday.
“The internment of 120K American citizens of Japanese ancestry during World War II happened. It was real. It was wrong. It was abhorrent. And it was challenged in court as a violation of Constitutional rights. The Supreme Court of the United States did not stop it,” he wrote of the internment camps.
“Lessons of history,” Higgins continued. “They were 120 thousand. We are 75 million. We, the People… will not concede. We will not take a knee to oppression. 75 million Americans re-elected Donald J. Trump as our President. In the dead of night, the election was corrupted by coordinated massive fraud and by unconstitutional election process manipulation in major cities of key states.”
The Louisiana lawmaker, who included a photo of newspapers reading “ouster of all Japs in California near” in the post, then asked: “[I]f you were a Japanese American in WWII… would you just concede?”
The suit that Higgins and more than half of the GOP House members supported, which was filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday night and rejected on Friday by the Supreme Court. The suit alleged that the election “suffered from significant and unconstitutional irregularities,” and it claimed there were “intrastate differences” in how certain voters were treated and that there was an unconstitutional “relaxation” of ballot-integrity laws.
Texas was hoping the Supreme Court would rule that the states can send electors to vote for Trump despite the election’s results. Additionally, 17 states’ attorneys general filed an amicus brief supporting Paxton.
Most state election officials and the Department of Justice have found no proof to support allegations of widespread fraud on a scale large enough to overturn the election results that have been promoted by the president, his campaign, and his supporters.
This is not the first time one of Higgins’s social media posts has garnered attention. In September, Facebook removed one of his posts in which he threatened to shoot and kill armed protesters if they showed up in his area.
