A slew of prominent Republicans have filed a lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence, asking a federal court in Texas to declare that Pence does, in fact, have the authority to unilaterally disqualify certain electoral votes when Congress meets to certify the electoral college totals on January 6. Certain Republicans have pushed the claim that Pence, in his role presiding over the Congressional proceedings dealing with the electoral vote totals, has the authority to discard Biden electoral votes, despite the lack of any apparent actual legal precedent for this anti-democratic assertion. In reality, Pence “can’t reject any electors on his own,” Forbes recently explained.
⚖️NEW: VP Pence has been sued by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.), Kelli Ward and other GOP mbrs in a far-fetched bid to overturn Biden's win
Plaintiffs ask Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump-appt'd fed judge in Texas, to find that Pence is authorized to pick pro-Trump electors on Jan. 6 pic.twitter.com/BumNwLm5ss
— John Kruzel (@johnkruzel) December 28, 2020
No matter the constraints of basic legal and democratic precedent, the plaintiffs in the new lawsuit against Pence are pushing ahead. The plaintiffs, including Republican member of Congress Louie Gohmert of Texas and Republican state Rep. Anthony Kern of Arizona, claimed that their case is well-timed because “the State of Arizona (and several others) have appointed two competing slates of electors,” but that’s not what happened. In a number of swing states, Trump allies gathered and made a show of casting supposed alternate electoral votes, but these supposed alternate electoral votes have no legal weight. There is no apparent provision in federal law for the establishment of supposed alternate electoral votes. Every state has certified its election results and every actual member of the electoral college has cast their vote.
The Republican lawsuit against Pence carries a lot of nonsense. The plaintiffs complain, for instance, that “Arizona’s Governor and Secretary of State appointed a separate and competing slate of electors who cast Arizona’s electoral votes for former Vice-President Joseph R. Biden, despite the evidence of massive multi-state electoral fraud committed on Biden’s behalf that changed electoral results in Arizona and in other states such as Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” but there is simply no such legitimate evidence of election outcome-altering fraud. When he was still on the job, even then-U.S. Attorney General Bill Barr confirmed the absence of any legitimate evidence of systematic election fraud.
Furthermore — the members of the electoral college for Arizona and other swing states who cast their votes for Biden are not “competing,” and pretending otherwise constitutes little more than ignorant theatrics based in little more than political cosplay. Republicans don’t automatically earn any legal weight for their so-called alternate electoral votes just because they went through some of the supposedly legitimizing motions. These theatrics don’t erase the duly documented will of the people in these respective states, as confirmed by state authorities in every single state in the country.
