On Friday, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit by Congressman Louie Gohmert of Texas, who sought to authorize Vice President Mike Pence to decide unilaterally the results of the 2020 elections, rather than Congress counts electoral votes on January 6. Pence and the Justice Department on Thursday asked the court to reject Gohmert’s action, saying the power is in the hands of the House and the Senate.
United States District Court Judge Jeremy Kernodle of the Eastern District of Texas said the plaintiffs do not have “legitimacy” to prosecute, since they claim “institutional damage” to the House of Representatives, but “this is insufficient to sustain legitimacy “.
He also said that Gohmert “does not identify any damage to himself as an individual, but an ‘entirely abstract and widely dispersed’ institutional damage to the House of Representatives.”
The House and Senate are expected to count the votes of the Electoral College on January 6, an event that generally attracts little fuss. But some of President Trump’s supporters are using this as a last-ditch attempt to overturn election results.
Gohmert claimed in the process that Pence has the “only” power to decide the outcome of the election, and Gohmert said he had 140 members of the House willing to object to the election results.
“According to the Constitution, he has the authority to conduct the process as he sees fit,” wrote Gohmert in the process. “He can count the electoral votes certified by the executive of a state, or he may prefer a competing slate of suitably qualified voters. He can ignore all voters in a given state. That is the power that the Constitution gives him.”
The Justice Department said on Thursday that Republican lawmakers could not overturn the 130-year-old law that governs how Congress counts electoral votes. Gohmert argued that giving Pence the unilateral power to decide the results of the elections “will help smooth the way for a reliable and peaceful conclusion to the presidential election process”.
Deputy Attorney General John Coghlan, representing Pence, called the process a “walking legal contradiction” because Gohmert was suing the vice president to empower the vice president.
As president of the Senate, Pence will chair the vote count, as did President-elect Joe Biden in 2017 for Trump’s victory. If Pence refuses to preside over the count, Senate President pro tempore, Senator Chuck Grassley, will step in.
Lawmakers can object to the results and Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri is the only senator who has said he will object. CBS News learned that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell held a conference call on Thursday asking Hawley to state his plans, but Hawley was not in it.
Republican Senator Mitt Romney said on Friday that Hawley’s objection is “dangerous to democracy here and abroad” because it “continues to spread the false rumor that the election was somehow stolen”.
The leader of most Republicans, John Thune, said in December that any objection is likely to “fall like a targeted dog.” Mr Trump on Friday called Thune “Mitch’s boy” and “RINO John Thune” in a tweet. Mr. Trump also tweeted that he “hoped to see” his ally, South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem, at the Thune primary in 2022.
Thune laughed when he heard the tweet and told reporters “well, finally an attack tweet! Why did he take so long? It’s okay, that’s how he communicates.”
Thune said the Republican Party leadership was allowing the conference to “vote for your conscience” on January 6 and described the Electoral College certification as “incredibly consistent, incredibly historically rare and a very precedent scenario.”
Weijia Jiang, Arden Farhi, Jack Turman and Alan He contributed to this report.