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WASHINGTON (AP) – The Justice Department has asked a federal judge to dismiss a final trial led by a House Republican seeking to give Vice President Mike Pence the power to overturn the results of the presidential election won by Joe Biden when Congress formally counts the electoral college votes next week.
Pence, as Senate speaker, 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 President Donald Trump’s multiple legal campaign efforts to challenge the results have failed.
The lawsuit names Pence, who has a largely ceremonial role in next week’s proceedings, as a defendant and asks the court to reject the 1887 law that specifies how Congress handles the counting of the votes. He asserts that the vice president “may exercise the exclusive authority and sole discretion to determine the 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 his boss, President Donald Trump, in power. In a lawsuit in Texas on Wednesday, the department said Representative Louie Gohmert of R-Texas and a group of Arizona Republican voters “sued the wrong defendant” – if, in fact, one legally recognizable claims. “
“This is the prescribed role for the Senate and House of Republicans in the Electoral Count Act that the complainants oppose, and not the actions Vice President Pence has taken. … A lawsuit to establish that the vice president has discretion over the count brought against the vice president is a common legal contradiction.
Trump, the first president to lose a re-election bid in nearly 30 years, attributed his defeat to widespread electoral fraud. But a series of non-partisan election officials and Republicans confirmed that there was no fraud in the November contest that would alter the election results. This includes former Attorney General William Barr, who said he saw no reason to appoint a special advocate to review the president’s claims about the 2020 election. He resigned his post last week.
Trump and his allies have filed around 50 lawsuits challenging the election results, and nearly all of them have been dismissed or dropped. He also lost twice in the Supreme Court.
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