In a last-ditch effort to overturn the results of the presidential election, Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas is suing Vice President Mike Pence in the hopes that Pence will choose Trump-friendly electors when Congress meets next week to certify the Electoral College’s decision.
The lawsuit is just the latest bit of nonsense being pushed by President Trump’s allies. Pence does not have the constitutional right to disregard the states’ wishes and choose electors of his own liking, nor does he have the power to circumvent the Electoral College and choose the winner of the presidential election himself. Gohmert knows this but is running circles around constitutional and common sense to justify his case.
In the suit, Gohmert claims that the Electoral Counting Act, which governs disputes over electoral votes in Congress, violates the 12th Amendment by blocking Pence from exercising total authority to choose which votes to count.
“Under the Twelfth Amendment, Defendant Pence alone has the exclusive authority and sole discretion to open and permit the counting of the electoral votes for a given state, and where there are competing slates of electors, or where there is objection to any single slate of electors, to determine which electors’ votes, or whether none, shall be counted,” the suit states.
Put simply, Gohmert is arguing that only Pence has the power to decide which slate of electors to choose from a state, regardless of which slates’ votes were certified by the Electoral College. In other words, Gohmert is reading into the Constitution the power to create as many Electoral Colleges as he likes until he gets the result he wants. He ignores the specificity of the Constitution and statutes about which “sealed” sets of “certif[ied]” electoral votes the vice president “shall” open and count.
It doesn’t matter that Gohmert has little chance of legal success. This is a deliberate attempt to expand the powers of the vice presidency into something it was never intended to be. And if it was Vice President-elect Kamala Harris rather than Pence in this position, Gohmert and every single other Republican supporting this lawsuit would be the first to raise hell.
But now, these very same congressmen, many of whom claim to defend and uphold the Constitution, are attempting to turn the federal government into their own personal banana republic. They will fail, but not before they risk bringing everyone else down with them — Trump included.
