Greg Sargent, Washington Post: “With Republicans preparing to oust Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming from the House GOP leadership and replace her with Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, reporters have been digging up past Stefanik statements displaying her true credentials as a Republican leader of the future. Those credentials, most obviously, are her unwavering loyalty to Donald Trump and to his Big Lie about the stolen 2020 election. But another crucial credential, one getting less attention, is Stefanik’s willingness to deceive her own constituents to justify taking official action to invalidate legitimate election results. Just before voting to object to President Biden’s electors on Jan. 6, Stefanik released a lengthy statement faithfully echoing numerous Trumpian lies about the election, included flatly debunked nonsense about 140,000 unauthorized votes in Georgia.”

“This showed Stefanik embracing Trump and his lies more directly than many other Republicans, who carefully couched votes against Biden electors behind procedural objections. As Josh Marshall notes, this is a big reason Stefanik is a rising GOP star. But what came next is also important. A few days after the insurrectionist mob attack on the Capitol, Stefanik came under fire for feeding the lies that incited the violence. She defended herself to a local news outlet. ‘President-elect Biden was certified,’ Stefanik told WCAX. ‘But that debate was important for the American people to hear.’ In other words, Stefanik said, she did the right thing in objecting to Biden’s electors, because it drew attention to problems with the election that Americans deserved to learn about. Those problems didn’t actually exist, of course, but Stefanik herself also amplified them. It’s important to understand that this isn’t mere after-the-fact spin. Rather, it’s an explicit declaration of liberation on the part of the speaker to deceive voters with falsehoods about legitimate election results, for the express purpose of justifying official action to overturn those results.”