Pennsylvania Republican leader fears her house being bombed if she opposes Trump

Senator Kim Ward made comments in reference to a letter by 64 Republicans urging Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation to reject the state’s Electoral College votes for Joe Biden

The Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania senate said she feared that her “house would be bombed” if she tried to oppose President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of her state’s election.  

Mr Trump lost Pennsylvania to his challenger Joe Biden by 81,000 votes, paving the Democrat’s way to the White House. In an effort to subvert the results, 64 Republicans in the General Assembly signed a letter last week urging the state’s congressional delegation to reject the state’s Electoral College votes for Mr Biden. 

Kim Ward, the GOP leader in the Pennsylvania state senate, told the New York Times that though she had not seen the letter signed by the state’s lower chamber lawmakers, she would face the wrath of the Republican base for publicly refusing to embrace the president’s claims of electoral fraud.  

“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ I’d get my house bombed tonight,” said Ms Ward on being asked if she would have signed the letter. 

A Reuters-Ipsos poll taken in mid-November found that 68 per cent of Republican respondents said they believed the election was rigged.

The New York Times reported that Pennsylvania was one of the three states where Mr Trump made calls to state lawmakers in a bid to overturn the election results. The others were Michigan and Georgia.  

At the same time, Mr Trump’s legal team has suffered a long string of defeats in courtrooms across the country, in their attempts to deny Mr Biden his electoral victory. 

The latest challenge comes in the form of a submission by Texas and 17 other red states before the Supreme Court, urging it to throw out Mr Biden’s win in the key swing states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.  

The Texas attorney general Ken Paxton on Wednesday urged the US Supreme Court to block the states in the electoral college, as he claimed that Covid-19-related changes to election procedures violated federal laws.  

Other states whose attorney general signed the amicus brief include Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.