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A U.S. federal judge today dismissed a last-minute lawsuit led by a House Republican that aimed to give Vice President Mike Pence the power to overturn the results of the presidential election won by Joe Biden when Congress formally count the Electoral College votes next week.
Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Source: Associated Press
Pence, as president of the Senate, will oversee Thursday’s session and declare the winner of the White House race.
This month, the Electoral College consolidated Biden’s 306-232 victory, and multiple legal efforts by US President Donald Trump’s campaign to challenge the results have failed.
The lawsuit named Pence, who has a largely ceremonial role in next week’s proceedings, as the defendant and asked the court to repeal the 1887 law that explains how Congress handles vote counting.
He affirmed that the vice president “may exercise exclusive authority and exclusive discretion to determine which electoral votes to count for a given state.”
In dismissing the lawsuit brought by Rep. Louie Gohmert, Republican of Texas, and a group of Republican voters from Arizona, Trump-appointed Texas District Judge Jeremy Kernodle wrote that the plaintiffs “allege an injury that is not reasonably traceable. “to Pence,” and is unlikely to be repaired with requested relief. “
The Justice Department represented Pence in a case that was aimed at finding a way to keep his boss, President Donald Trump, in power.
In a court filing in Texas yesterday, the department said the plaintiffs “have sued the wrong defendant” if, in fact, any of the plaintiffs have “a judicially recognizable claim.”
The department said, in effect, that the lawsuit opposes long-standing procedures set forth in the law, “not the actions that 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 charge, filed against the vice president, is a walking legal contradiction,” argued the department.
Trump, the first president to lose a re-election bid in nearly 30 years, has attributed his defeat to widespread electoral fraud.
But a number of nonpartisan and Republican election officials have confirmed that there was no fraud in the November contest that would change the election results.
That includes former Attorney General William Barr, who said he saw no reason to appoint a special counsel to investigate the president’s claims about the 2020 elections. He resigned from office last week.
Trump and his allies have filed roughly 50 lawsuits challenging the election results, and nearly all of them have been dismissed or dropped. He also lost twice on the Supreme Court.
