WASHINGTON (AP) – The Justice Department asked a federal judge to reject a last-minute lawsuit led by a House Republican that aims to give Vice President Mike Pence the power to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s presidential election when Congress formally counts the votes of the Electoral College next week.
Pence, as president of the Senate, will oversee Wednesday’s session and declare the winner of the White House race. The Electoral College cemented Biden’s 306-232 victory this month, and several legal efforts by President Donald Trump’s campaign to challenge the results have failed.
The suit names Pence, who has a largely ceremonial role in next week’s proceedings, as the defendant and asks the court to reject the 1887 law that establishes how Congress treats vote counting. He states that the vice president “can exercise exclusive authority and exclusive discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given state”.
The Justice Department is representing Pence in a case that seeks to find a way to keep its boss, President Donald Trump, in power. In a lawsuit in Texas on Wednesday, the department said Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and a group of Arizona Republican voters “sued the wrong defendant” – if, in fact, any of the lawsuits really has “a judicially recognizable claim.”
“It is the prescribed role for the Senate and House of Representatives in the Electoral Counting Law that claimants are opposed to, not any actions that Vice President Pence has taken. … A process to establish that the vice president has discretionary power over counting, brought against the vice president, is a walking legal contradiction. “
Trump, the first president to lose a candidacy for re-election in almost 30 years, attributed his defeat to widespread electoral fraud. But a number of non-partisan and Republican election officials confirmed that there was no fraud in the November dispute that would change the election results. That includes former attorney general William Barr, who said he saw no reason to appoint a special lawyer to examine the president’s allegations about the 2020 elections. He resigned last week.
Trump and his allies filed about 50 lawsuits questioning the results of the elections, and almost all were dismissed or removed. He also lost twice in the Supreme Court.