It’s been over 500 days since President Joe Biden was sworn into office—but some Texas Republicans still refuse to believe it.
The Republican Party of Texas over the weekend passed a resolution rejecting Biden’s victory in the 2020 election in the latest attempt to further promote false voter fraud claims. The resolution was made during the party’s first in-person state party convention in four years, where they voted on the official party platform that also called homosexuality “an abnormal lifestyle choice” and urged Texas schools to reach children “about the humanity of the preborn child.”
“We reject the certified results of the 2020 Presidential election, and we hold that acting President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. was not legitimately elected by the people of the United States,” read the resolution, which was passed on Saturday. “We strongly urge all Republicans to work to ensure election integrity and to show up to vote in November of 2022, bring your friends and family, volunteer for your local Republicans, and overwhelm any possible fraud.”
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The shocking platform once again promotes the far-right false belief that former President Donald Trump was the winner of the 2020 election. It comes after a week of hearing about the Jan. 6, 2021, riots that sought to overturn the electoral certification of Biden’s presidency.
Despite that these false election claims have repeatedly been debunked, including by many of Trump’s own former aides and several unsuccessful legal battles, the Texas Republican Party still passed the resolution, which also insists the elections violated Articles 1 and 2 of the Constitution. It also notes that the group believes that “various secretaries of state illegally circumvented their state legislatures in conducting their elections in multiple ways, including by allowing ballots to be received after November 3, 2020” and that “substantial election fraud in key metropolitan areas significantly affected the results in five key states in favor of” Biden.
And the denial of Biden’s presidency wasn’t the only highlight at the Republicans’ convention. The party now officially, in writing, opposes “all efforts to validate transgender identity” and does not support the use of taxpayer funds for any “medical gender dysphoria treatments or sex change operations.” The resolution also urges the Texas Legislature “to abolish abortion.”
“The official position of the Texas schools shall be that there are only two genders: biological male and biological female,” the resolution states. “We oppose transgender normalizing curriculum and pronoun use. We hold that biological men shall compete against other biological men and biological women shall compete against other biological women in athletics in the public school system of Texas and at the collegiate level.”
The state party’s resolution also opposes the bipartisan gun bill currently in negotiations—noting that “all gun control is a violation of the Second Amendment and our God given rights.”
Even Republican stalwarts like Sen. John Cornyn were not spared from the far-right. The senator was repeatedly booed by members of his own party on Friday after working with colleagues across the aisle on potential gun control legislation.
In a video taken by KHOU 11, Cornyn was met by constant booing as he mentioned on stage that he is “making sure that violent criminals and the mentally ill cannot buy firearms”—even though he insisted that he was not supporting any policy that would impact Second Amendment rights. The negotiations come in the wake of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
