Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano wants President Joe Biden to meet with him on Biden’s Tuesday visit to Pennsylvania. To say that this is presumptuous doesn’t begin to describe it.

Biden is visiting Pennsylvania to talk about voting rights. What does Mastriano want Biden to sit down with him and discuss? Donald Trump’s Big Lie, which Mastriano has been avidly promoting. “Millions of Pennsylvanians have serious doubts about the accuracy of the 2020 General Election,” Mastriano writes in his request for a meeting, before going on to call for a “full forensic investigation”—translation: a Pennsylvania fraudit. In other words, he wants Biden to take time out of a visit intended to boost the fight for voting rights to talk about an effort to undermine the legitimacy of U.S. elections. 

Mastriano has been using his position as the chair of the state Senate Intergovernmental Operations Committee to try to kick off an investigation of specific counties with results he didn’t like. As Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, put it, “Although two legal audits have already been completed in Pennsylvania, Senator Mastriano is now requesting a laundry list of confidential and privileged information from three Pennsylvania counties in continued efforts to pay homage to former President Trump and further spread misinformation about our elections.”

But the president of the United States should definitely take time to talk to the guy pushing the lies and conspiracy theories.

Oh, by the way, Mastriano was in the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, though he doesn’t seem to have gone inside the building itself. Rather than taking that as a caution—thinking, whoa, I was swept up in something very ugly, maybe I should be careful—Mastriano is continuing to embrace Trump’s lies about his election loss, and hopes to run for governor with his fealty to Trump as a key credential.

He’s not the only one. At least two other potential Republican gubernatorial candidates are trying to get Trump’s endorsement in the race by alleging election fraud or calling for an investigation of the vote. Multiple U.S. Senate candidates in the state are likewise casting doubt on the 2020 election and its results, despite an actual, official audit of a sample of votes in 63 of the state’s 67 counties already having been done.

There are two reasonable ways Biden can respond to Mastriano’s request for a meeting: Tell him to pound sand, or ignore it completely as beneath even the briefest response. But the fact that Republicans continue to try to boost their own political careers by embracing and promoting Trump’s lies, at the cost of faith in U.S. democracy, is a major problem that Democrats need to grapple with and respond to aggressively. A democracy where one of two major parties is seeking to overturn elections and restrict voting is a democracy in trouble.