Pennsylvania GOP leader on breaking with Trump on election: ‘I’d get my house bombed tonight’

The GOP majority leader of Pennsylvania’s state Senate suggested in an interview published Wednesday that she would be the victim of a violent attack if she indicated her opposition to efforts by President Trump’s supporters to reject the state’s election results.

Speaking with The New York Times, state Sen. Kim Ward (R) made the remark when asked if she would have signed a letter to the state’s congressional delegation urging them to “object, and vote to sustain such objection, to the Electoral College votes received from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania” during the session of Congress certifying the Electoral College results next month.

“If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’ ” Ward told the Times, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

Ward is supporting an effort by hard-line Republicans to call on Congress to reject President-elect Joe Biden’s win in Pennsylvania — considered a key battleground that led to his victory.

Her comment comes as the president has personally leaned on lawmakers and state leaders, Ward herself included, following his election loss to Biden last month. He has urged them to take steps that would overturn their respective states’ election results.

The Trump campaign’s legal efforts have thus far failed to gain any traction in the courts. The president now has appeared to pin his hopes on a lawsuit filed by the attorney general of Texas alleging that four states’ results are “tainted” by recent changes to voting processes and therefore should be invalidated. Pennsylvania is among the four states named in the suit.

Other targets of the president’s personal outreach in the hopes of overturning his defeat to Biden include Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp (R), who has so far refused public calls from the president to summon a special session of the state’s legislature to challenge the state’s election results.