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- In a last-ditch effort unlikely to be successful, Representative Louie Gohmert is among those pursuing a bid to have Vice President Mike Pence declare President Donald Trump the winner in the 2020 election.
- President-elect Joe Biden won the election and Pence is expected to chair a joint session of Congress to certify the results on Wednesday.
- The Justice Department responded to Gohmert’s complaint by saying that Pence was not the right person to prosecute, and Gohmert responded by saying that the vice president was not simply a “glorified envelope opener in chief”.
- Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.
Texas Representative Louie Gohmert wasted no time responding to the Justice Department’s request on New Years Eve to dismiss his lawsuit to overturn the 2020 election.
In a futile last-ditch effort, Gohmert and other diehard supporters of President Donald Trump are suing Vice President Mike Pence, attempting to have him declared Trump the winner when he presides over the joint session of Congress to certify the electoral college results on Wednesday. .
President-elect Joe Biden won the election, winning 306 votes to 232. Each state certified their results and voters officially voted, making Biden the president-elect in December. The final ceremonial event before Biden’s inauguration on January 20 is the joint session of Congress.
Read more: Secret Service experts speculate in panel discussions on how Trump could be kicked out of the White House if he doesn’t budge on inauguration day
Pence and the Justice Department said in a court filing Thursday that the vice president was not the right person to prosecute and asked the judge to dismiss Gohmert’s claim.
On New Years Day, Gohmert and his allies hit back in a 55-page response saying the DOJ and Pence were wrong, and that the Vice President is not just “the big chief envelope opener” and that ‘he’s the right person to take legal action against. try to make President Trump again, The Washington Post first reported.
Trump’s allies have argued that Pence could decide to change the rules when he chairs the joint session of Congress on Wednesday: “Under the Constitution, he has the power to conduct this process as he sees fit. He can count. the votes of voters certified by a state. executive, or it may prefer a competing list of properly qualified voters. It can ignore all the voters of a certain state. This is the power conferred on it by the Constitution. “
Gohmert’s brief also made reference to the 140 House Republicans and a GOP senator who plan to oppose the election results during the joint session as a reason to consider the case.
But Law & Crime reported that experts called the Gohmert trial “absurd.”
“Their lawsuit is flawed for the reasons noted by counsel for the defendants, including Vice President Pence,” Ross Garber of Tulane Law told Law & Crime. “And their litigation is more of a political and public relations campaign than a serious effort to seek a judicial resolution of a legitimate dispute.
Wednesday should nevertheless be a spectacle. In addition to the expected objections in Congress, Trump urges supporters to rally in DC.
In contrast, when Biden presided over the joint session of Congress to certify the 2016 election results, the former vice president dismissed objections from his fellow Democrats and made Trump the 45th president.
See the full court documents from Gohmert’s latest filing and Pence’s response below:
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