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A federal judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit by Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert to empower Vice President Mike Pence to unilaterally decide the results of the 2020 election rather than having Congress counts electoral votes on January 6. Pence and the Justice Department on Thursday urged the court to dismiss Gohmert’s trial, saying power lies with the House and Senate.
U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Kernodle, of the Eastern District of Texas, said the plaintiffs lacked “standing” to sue, as they alleged “institutional harm” in the House of Representatives, but “this is insufficient to justify standing ”.
Le Gohmert also said that “identifies no injury to himself as an individual, but rather a” totally abstract and widely dispersed institutional injury “in the House of Representatives.
The House and Senate are expected to count the electoral college votes on January 6, an event that usually attracts little fanfare. But some supporters of President Trump are using it as a last ditch attempt to overturn the election results.
Gohmert had claimed in the lawsuit that Pence had “sole” power to decide the outcome of the election, and Gohmert claimed he had 140 House members ready to oppose the election results.
“Under the Constitution, he has the power to conduct these proceedings as he sees fit,” Gohmert wrote in the lawsuit. “He can count the votes of voters certified by a state executive, or he can prefer a competing list of properly qualified voters. He can ignore all voters in a certain state. confers the Constitution. “
The Justice Department said Thursday that Republican lawmakers could not override the 130-year-old law that governs how Congress counts electoral votes. Gohmert argued that giving Pence the unilateral power to decide the results of the elections “will help to facilitate the path to a reliable and peaceful conclusion of the presidential election process”.
Assistant Deputy Attorney General John Coghlan, representing Pence, called the trial a “walking legal contradiction” because Gohmert was suing the vice president to empower the vice president.
As President of the Senate, Pence will chair the vote count, as President-elect Joe Biden did in 2017 for the victory of Mr. Trump. If Pence refuses to chair the tally, the pro tempore President of the Senate, Senator Chuck Grassley, will step in.
Lawmakers may oppose the results, and Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri is so far the only one who has said he would oppose it. CBS News has learned that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell held a conference call Thursday to ask Hawley to present his plans, but Hawley was not there.
Republican Senator Mitt Romney said on Friday that Hawley’s objection is “dangerous for democracy at home and abroad” because it “continues to spread the false rumor that the election has been stolen”.
GOP Majority Whip John Thune said in December that any objection is likely to “fall like a hound.” Mr Trump called Thune “Mitch’s boy” and “RINO John Thune” on Friday in a tweet. Mr. Trump also tweeted that he “hopes to see” his ally, the governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, in primary in Thune in 2022.
Thune laughed when told about the tweet, and told reporters “Finally, an attack tweet! What took him so long? That’s good how he communicates.”
Thune said the GOP leadership allowed the conference to “vote their conscience” on Jan. 6 and described the Electoral College certification as “incredibly substantial, historically incredibly rare and very precedent.”
Weijia Jiang, Arden Farhi, Jack Turman, and Alan He contributed to this report.
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