Robert Aderholt has been in the U.S. House since 1997. In 29 years, the most consequential thing he has done is not a bill. It is a sequence of votes cast over seven months in 2020 and 2021, every one of them a matter of public record.

Here is the sequence.

November 2020: casting doubt before the votes were counted

Three days after the election, with counting still underway, Aderholt put out a statement saying there was "no reason to rush to a conclusion" about the result.

That is the opening move. Not an allegation you can be held to — just a suggestion that the outcome is unsettled, issued before the Electoral College had met.

December 2020: asking the Supreme Court to void four states

In December, Texas's attorney general filed a lawsuit asking the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out the presidential results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — four states Joe Biden won.

Aderholt was one of 126 House Republicans who signed an amicus brief supporting it.

Think about what that document asked for. Not a recount. Not an audit. It asked nine unelected judges to void the votes of millions of Americans in four states none of the signers represented, and hand the presidency to the candidate who lost them.

The Supreme Court declined to hear the case, holding that Texas had no standing to challenge how another state runs its own election.

January 2, 2021: "too many reports of serious fraud"

Four days before Congress met to count the electoral votes, Aderholt announced he would contest the results, saying there were "too many reports of serious fraud for this not to be debated in the House and Senate."

"Reports of." Not findings. Not evidence produced in court — where, by then, dozens of challenges had already been thrown out. Reports.

January 6 and 7: the votes themselves

A mob attacked the Capitol on January 6 to stop the count. Members were evacuated. Police were beaten. Congress reconvened that night.

And Aderholt voted for the objections anyway — both of them.

Both objections failed. But the votes are the record of what he wanted to happen: two states' results discarded, after a mob had just tried to accomplish the same thing by force.

Then: no impeachment, and no investigation. Twice.

The rest of that year is a straight line.

• Roll Call 17, January 13, 2021 — impeaching Trump for inciting the mob. Aderholt voted Nay, saying impeachment "causes more division and does not advance unity or healing."
• Roll Call 154, May 19, 2021 — H.R. 3233, creating an independent, bipartisan commission to investigate the attack, modeled on the 9/11 Commission, with equal numbers of Republican and Democratic appointees. Aderholt voted Nay. It passed the House and died in the Senate.
• Roll Call 197, June 30, 2021 — establishing the House Select Committee to investigate the attack, after the independent commission was blocked. Aderholt voted Nay.

That last pair is the part that resists explanation. The usual defense of the second vote was that the select committee was partisan. But the first one wasn't — H.R. 3233 was the evenly split, bipartisan commission that Republicans had asked for. He voted against that too.

So the position was not "investigate it fairly instead." The position was don't investigate it.

What "unity and healing" bought

Aderholt said impeachment would not advance unity or healing. Consider what happened in the five years since he chose that instead.

The man who drove a stun gun into a police officer's neck on January 6 had been sentenced to 12.5 years. On his first day back in office, Trump gave clemency to every defendant charged in the attack, including the ones who assaulted police, and he walked out. In April 2026 the Justice Department went further and asked a federal appeals court to erase the seditious-conspiracy convictions of the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys members who organized it.

There is no official, bipartisan accounting that everyone accepted, because the members who could have created one voted it down. Aderholt was one of them, twice.

He is not a backbencher

This matters more coming from him than from a freshman. Aderholt is one of the most senior appropriators in Congress — he chairs the subcommittee that funds the nation's schools, health agencies and worker training, and he wrote this year's bill for it. He is not somebody who got swept along. He is somebody with a gavel who knew exactly what each of these votes was.

And he has not held a public in-person town hall in years, so Alabamians who'd like to hear him explain the sequence have nowhere to ask. He says he prefers "one-on-one" meetings at his district offices.

He is on the ballot again in November, seeking a 16th term.

We deserve better.

Sources

• House Roll Call 10, 11, 17, 154 and 197 — Office of the Clerk, U.S. House of Representatives.
• Amicus brief of 126 members of the U.S. House of Representatives in Texas v. Pennsylvania — Supreme Court of the United States, December 2020.