How many GOP senators will object to the certification of the Electoral College vote?

QAnon nutcase and gun fetishist Lauren Boebert, who got elected to the House of Representatives in a Colorado swing district, is going to be one of dozens of GOP legislators who object to certifying the Electoral College vote:

The key question from a post-Trump landscape perspective is, how many GOP senators are going to go along with this pernicious nonsense?

Since the adoption of the present system after the 1876 election, only two senators in US history have objected to the certification of any Electoral College votes: In 1969 Edmund Muskie joined an objection by a House member regarding the vote of a single faithless elector from North Carolina, who was pledged to Nixon but had voted for George Wallace, while in 2005 Barbara Boxer agreed to join a protest vote by 31 House Democrats against the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes.

It’s worth noting that no senators were willing to object to the certification of electoral votes in either 2016 or most notably 2000. Indeed until recently Congressional certification of the EC vote was completely routine: the single House member who Muskie joined in objecting to one vote in 1969 marked the first time any legislator from either house of Congress had ever objected to the certification of an electoral college vote.

But like so many other formerly routine ministerial acts, Congressional certification of the vote is now becoming weaponized by a radicalized Republican party, that at bottom doesn’t accept the legitimacy of elections they lose, because they don’t accept the legitimacy of their opponents (This is what the birther conspiracy theory was really all about, which as you may remember provided the starting point for Donald Trump’s excellent presidential adventure).

So: How many Republican senators will object to certification? My guess is that about half the caucus will go along, but that’s just a guess. (This would all be much more interesting, in the Chinese curse sense of the word, if the GOP had taken the House in last month’s election. Electoral College votes are certified unless a majority of both Houses object to them). In any event, the number, whatever it turns out to be, will be significant, because it will indicate a number of things about the extent to which Republican elites are willing to try to move beyond Trump himself, if not Trumpism per se.