Louie Gohmert: How to sue Mike Pence is the ‘electoral fraud’ crowd’s last breath

Louie Gohmert: How to sue Mike Pence is the ‘electoral fraud’ crowd’s last breath

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“We continue to hope that there will be a federal judge who understands that the fraud that stole this election will mean the end of our republic, and this process would ensure that the vice president will only accept legitimate and legally elected voters,” he said. Gohmert said in a statement on Monday. “There must be an opportunity for a day in court when fraud prevailed.”
It is probably important to note here that there has not yet been any evidence of the widespread fraud that Gohmert, Trump and the president’s most fervent supporters continue to claim. In fact, as The New York Times noted over the weekend, Trump’s forces lost everyone except one of the 60 (!) Lawsuits they filed to try to prove electoral fraud. There has been no documented case of widespread malfeasance – whether from dead people voting or from non-citizens who voted.

There is simply no “there”. Like, none.

Without being overwhelmed by this absence, Gohmert moved on. And while the legal case is a joke – and that is putting it well – it is worth examining what would happen if Gohmert’s fantasy really did come true, and how distinctly non-conservative it would all be.

So, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that Gohmert is successful. And instead of just playing the ceremonial role of Senate president on January 6, Pence was allowed to choose which voters are “legal”, which, I suppose, would exclude voters from states where President-elect Joe Biden won, but Trump what he did falsely suggested that there was fraud, like Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania.

In doing so, Pence would install Trump alone as president for the next four years. And it would set a precedent that the vice president would retain the power to choose the president going forward – regardless of the appearance of the popular vote or the Electoral College.

Uh, yes.

This would not only be extremely undemocratic – depriving the rights of the more than 81 million people who voted for Biden in 2020 – but also profoundly anti-conservative.

Republicans are the party that reduces the power of the federal government and empowers state and local governments, you remember. Which means that suing the vice president for allowing him to override the results of a presidential election should be a total anathema to people who claim to be conservative or republicans. Because it would create an all-powerful federal government, capable of overcoming the whims (and votes) of states.

This, of course, is not the first time that the so-called conservatives have abandoned the principles in vain attempts to reverse the electoral results. Earlier this month, 18 Republican-controlled states – led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton – sued to invalidate election results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. If the Supreme Court had agreed – it, um, disagreed – it would have allowed one state to dictate how the vote should be conducted in another state, a flagrant disregard of conservatives’ long-held belief in the rights of each state to govern itself.

This indiscriminate abandonment of the fundamental pillars of conservatism in pursuit of making Trump president for another four years, then, is not new. But that It’s a remarkable testimony of how some (many?) Republicans strayed from their party’s basic principles to worship at Trump’s altar.

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