There are many ways we could describe Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert’s lawsuit against Vice President Mike Pence in his official capacity — none of which are printable. The lawsuit essentially asks a Texas Trump-appointed judge to rule the Electoral Count Act unconstitutional, because it supposedly limits the vice president’s powers as president of the Senate as laid out by the 12th Amendment. The end goal is to give Pence the opportunity to overturn the election’s results during the final Electoral College meeting on Wednesday.
For context: Many are already familiar with the Electoral College. What you may not know is that each presidential candidate’s party chooses a slate of electors long before the general election. When we (the general populace) vote, we are actually voting for the slate of electors, which is determined by the popular vote for president. That means in West Virginia there were two slates of electors ready to go before Election Day: A slate of five Republicans for Trump and a slate of five Democrats for Biden. Trump won the state’s popular vote, so the votes from the slate of electors for Trump are the ones that count in the Electoral College. But some states Biden won saw Republican electors cast votes as well as the Democratic electors, according to Fox News. Gohmert and his GOP cohorts claim that Pence has the power to choose which electors get counted, meaning that he could ignore the votes from the slate of Democratic electors in battleground states and choose to count the Republican electors instead.
Even Fox News calls foul: “The 12th Amendment and the Electoral Counting Act, however, address different circumstances that could arise during the counting process. While the Act … describes a process of dealing with objections to announced votes, the only controversy that the 12th Amendment addresses is what happens if there is no majority winner after all votes have been counted. … The amendment does not address what should happen if electors from both parties in a state submit votes.”
Efforts from Trump and his allies to overturn a fair election have reached new levels of absurdity and we are sick of these ridiculous, futile and frankly juvenile attempts to drag out a failed coup. It’s like watching a toddler who is throwing a temper tantrum because he hasn’t gotten his way make his rounds to every adult in the room in an endeavor to get a different answer. Except this is even more pathetic, because it’s not a lone toddler, but an entire group of adults displaying such infantile behavior.
Is this what we should expect from GOP lawmakers for the next four years? Perpetuating myths of fraud when they don’t get their way? Denying reality when they disagree? Turning to the courts when they don’t get their way?
The election is over. Trump lost. Biden won. All these frivolous lawsuits, all this backroom scheming and peacocking for the fan base do nothing but undermine the sanctity of our elections, call into question the veracity of our democracy and make us look like fools on the world stage. Jan. 6 is three days away; it’s time to put the matter to rest.
