Donald Trump isn’t getting less paranoid-sounding in relation to ongoing investigations into his attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
On Truth Social, Trump complained in recent days about efforts in Congress to clarify the role of the vice president in the Congressional certification of the electoral college outcome. He’s consistently pushing the idea that these legislative efforts prove the vice president actually could essentially reject certain electoral votes, as Trump unsuccessfully pressured Pence to do. However, there’s no secret allowance, without the reforms yet in place, for vice presidents to take action that would amount to upending democracy. “Senators are meeting right now on reforming the Electoral Count Act so that a Vice President can no longer do what EVERYBODY, except for certain Conservative legal scholars, said was not allowed to be done. So they all lied. The V.P. could have sent fraudulent votes back to State Legislatures!” Trump claimed.
A document associated with the office of Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that deals with efforts to reform the Electoral Count Act is very clear about the way reform efforts are treating the role of the vice president: the aim is clarification, not a change to some covert opportunity for action. “ECRA would reform and modernize the outdated 1887 Electoral Count Act to ensure that electoral votes tallied by Congress accurately reflect each state’s public vote for President,” the document said, referring to a proposed piece of legislation. “It would replace ambiguous provisions of the 19th-century law with clear procedures that maintain appropriate state and federal roles in selecting the President and Vice President of the United States as set forth in the U.S. Constitution.”
The bill “Affirmatively states that the constitutional role of the Vice President, as the presiding officer of the joint meeting of Congress, is solely ministerial and that he or she does not have any power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate disputes over electors,” according to that same doc. A key component of that description is how the bill “affirmatively” outlines the vice president’s role — the point isn’t changing something. It’s affirming the legal framework. As for other components of the efforts at reforming the Electoral Count Act, the legislation discussed by the Collins document would also close perceptible loopholes that dangerous, destructive forces might exploit. For example, the bill — if enacted — would leave the responsibility of submitting a state’s electoral votes to Congress with a single official in each state, although the federal legislation would seemingly let states enact laws to alter that framework.
Keeping it at one official submitting votes lessens possibilities for so-called alternate slates of electors. One substantial change to the process of certifying the presidential election outcome is that, under the proposed legislation, one-fifth of the members of each chamber of Congress would need to support an objection to any electoral votes for that objection to go to debate and a vote. Currently, it’s just a single member from both houses of Congress who need to back such an objection for it to move forward. Meanwhile, all of Trump’s desperate attempts to basically prove he’s right although he’s not remotely correct simply reek of desperation, like he’s trying to beat the clock of potential Justice Department action by somehow changing reality to make him believable.
