The Senate Rules Committee voted Tuesday to advance reforms to the Electoral Count Act of 1887, legislation aimed at making it harder to overturn a presidential election.
The panel approved the bill 14-1, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) casting the lone “no” vote. The bill is now ready for consideration by the full Senate.
A House version of the electoral reform bill that passed last week is more stringent than its Senate counterpart, and the two would have to be reconciled if passed by the upper chamber before going to President Joe Biden’s desk.
The Senate bill, which already had 10 Republican co-sponsors, got a boost Tuesday from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who announced his support on the Senate floor.
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JAN. 6 COMMITTEE LAWMAKERS ROLL OUT BILL TO PREVENT ATTEMPTS TO OVERTURN ELECTIONS
Ahead of Tuesday’s markup, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who chairs the committee, argued the bill would address deficiencies to the 1887 law that former President Donald Trump attempted to exploit after losing the 2020 election.
“Today, we’re going to get this bill out of committee,” Klobuchar said on MSNBC on Tuesday morning. “What it does: makes it clear that the vice president [has a] ceremonial role in this game, and by the way, when those insurrectionists were 40 feet away from Mike Pence, yelling, ‘Hang Mike Pence,’ Donald Trump was trying to use that old law in a way that wasn’t correct.”
“We’re clarifying: two — two out of 535 people — that’s all it takes to lodge an objection and create havoc in this process,” she continued. “We’re putting that number up in this Senate bill to 20%. No. 3, you can’t have legislators after the fact creating slates of fake electors. We’re clarifying that process. And the fourth thing: a very clear appeals process. So, we’re working together on this.”
The Senate version differs from the House bill in the number of members of Congress needed in each chamber to object to a state’s Electoral College votes. The House bill would require one-third of all lawmakers, while the Senate bill requires one-fifth. Under current law, only one member from each chamber needs to object. Additionally, the House version has narrower grounds on which legislators can object to state election results.
Klobuchar and ranking member Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) previously agreed on a manager’s amendment that addresses concerns about overly broad language in the bill. The changes under this amendment specify that expedited court proceedings for election certification challenges will not interfere with other election-related judicial cases and narrow the “catastrophic” grounds for extending an election to the legal definition of “force majeure,” which excludes “acts of God”-type disasters.
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Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) sponsored the House bill along with Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), chairwoman of the House Administration Committee. Both serve on the Jan. 6 committee investigating the Capitol riot and events surrounding it. Lofgren said members of Congress “took advantage of ambiguous language as well as a low threshold to have Congress play a role that they really aren’t supposed to play” in the 2020 election.
The Senate is not expected to take up its version of the bill immediately. With only three legislative days remaining before the fiscal year ends, the Senate is currently working to pass a stopgap bill to keep government agencies funded at current levels before money runs out on Friday at midnight.
