WASHINGTON – A federal judge on Friday rejected a last-minute lawsuit led by a House Republican who intended to give Vice President Mike Pence the power to overturn the results of Joe Biden’s won presidential election when Congress formally votes. of the Electoral College next week.
Pence, as president of the Senate, will oversee the session on Wednesday 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 named Pence, who has a largely ceremonial role in next week’s proceedings, as a defendant and asked the court to reject the 1887 law that specifies how Congress treats vote counting. He said the vice president “can exercise exclusive authority and sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given state.”
In rejecting the lawsuit filed by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and a group of Republican voters from Arizona, Texas, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle, appointed by Trump, wrote that the plaintiffs “allege an injury that is not reasonably traceable “to Pence,” and is unlikely to be repaired by the requested measure. “
The Justice Department represented Pence in a case aimed at finding a way to keep its boss, President Donald Trump, in power. In a lawsuit in Texas on Thursday, the department said the plaintiffs “sued the wrong defendant” – if, in fact, any of the lawsuits actually had “a known legal action”.
The department said, in effect, that the lawsuit challenges long-standing procedures under the law, “not any actions that Vice President Pence has taken”, so he should not be the target of the lawsuit.
“A process to establish that the vice president has discretionary power over counting, brought against the vice president, is a walking legal contradiction,” argued the department.
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.