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The House is expected to take up as early as this week a bill that a pair of lawmakers on the Jan. 6 select committee said would prevent attempts to overturn future elections.
DON BOLDUC WALKS BACK 2020 ELECTION CLAIMS AFTER CLINCHING GOP NOMINATION
In the aftermath of the riot, lawmakers in both the House and Senate weighed ways to reform the Electoral Count Act, a 135-year-old election law then-President Donald Trump and his allies tried to use to remain in power even after President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.
Trump and his allies sought to use the 1887 law governing the process of certifying Electoral College votes to overturn the 2020 election results, arguing that Vice President Mike Pence could unilaterally refuse to recognize the results from a handful of key states, swinging the outcome to Trump. Constitutional and legal scholars, and ultimately Pence himself, rejected that argument on Jan. 6, 2021, when a violent mob stormed the Capitol, delaying certification of the election by several hours.
Reps. Liz Cheney (R-WY) and Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) wrote in the Wall Street Journal that their bill would “protect the rule of law and ensure that future efforts to attack the integrity of presidential elections can’t succeed.”
The bill is similar in design to a bipartisan Senate bill introduced earlier this year but has some significant differences. Both would reform the Electoral Count Act to clarify that the vice president’s role in certifying results is ceremonial, but the House bill would raise the threshold for objecting to electors from a single member of a chamber to one-third of the chamber, while the Senate bill only increases that threshold to one-fifth. The House bill also defines certain “catastrophic” events that would permit a state to extend its voting period, while the Senate bill defers to state law. The chambers would need to iron out those differences, as well as pass the bill in both chambers, before it could reach Biden’s desk.
“Our proposal is intended to preserve the rule of law for all future presidential elections by ensuring that self-interested politicians cannot steal from the people the guarantee that our government derives its power from the consent of the governed,” Cheney and Lofgren wrote. “We look forward to working with our colleagues in the House and the Senate toward this goal.”
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) were the lead negotiators on the bipartisan bill. The Senate Rules and Administration Committee is expected to mark up the Senate bill on Sept. 27.
