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WASHINGTON – A federal judge on Friday dismissed a last-minute trial led by a House Republican that sought to give Vice President Mike Pence the power to overturn the results of the presidential election won by Joe Biden when Congress counts officially the electoral college votes 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 President Donald Trump’s multiple legal campaign efforts to challenge the results have failed.
The lawsuit 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 handles the counting of the votes. He asserted that the vice president “may exercise the exclusive authority and sole discretion to determine the electoral votes to count for a given state”.
PENCE, HOUSE SEEKS TO REJECT GOHMERT-GOP COSTUME AIMING TO REVERSE ELECTION
Dismissing the lawsuit brought by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and a group of Republican voters in Arizona, Texas, Trump-appointed Judge Jeremy Kernodle wrote that the plaintiffs “allege an injury that does not is not sufficiently traceable “to Pence,” and the requested repair is unlikely to be fixed. “
A lawsuit brought by U.S. Representative Louie Gohmert, left, which was dismissed on Friday had named Vice President Mike Pence as the defendant.
The Justice Department represented Pence in a case to find a way to keep his boss, President Donald Trump, in power. In a lawsuit in Texas Thursday, the department said the plaintiffs “sued the wrong defendant” – if, in fact, any of those suing actually had “a legally identifiable claim.”
The department said, in effect, that the lawsuit opposes long-standing procedures set out in the law, “not the actions Vice President Pence has taken,” so he should not be the target of the lawsuit.
“A lawsuit to establish that the vice president has discretion over the tally, brought against the vice president, is a common legal contradiction,” argued the department.
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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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