WASHINGTON – A federal judge on Friday rejected a recent lawsuit by a Republican from the House aimed at giving Vice President Mike Pence the power to reverse the outcome of the presidential election won by Joe Biden if Congress formally counts the votes of the Electoral College 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 this month confirmed Biden’s 306-232 victory, and multiple legal attempts by President Donald Trump’s campaign to challenge the results failed.
The case is Pence, who plays a major ceremonial role in next week’s proceedings, as the defendant and has asked the court to overturn the 1887 law setting out how Congress handles the vote count. It claims that the vice president “may exercise the sole authority and discretion to determine which election votes should count for a given state.”
In rejection of the lawsuit by Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and a group of Republican voters from Arizona, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump nominee, wrote that the plaintiffs’ claim an injury that cannot be reasonably traced. not ” Pence, “and is unlikely to be corrected by the requested correction.”
The Department of Justice represented Pence in a case aimed at finding a way to keep his boss, President Donald Trump, in power. In a court case filed in Texas on Thursday, the department said the plaintiffs “sued the wrong defendant” – if one of the steps actually had a legally recognizable claim. ‘
The department has in fact said that the case objects to lengthy procedures set out in the law, ‘not any actions taken by Vice President Pence’, so he should not be the target of the case.
“A case to establish that the vice president has a discretion over the score, which was filed against the vice president, is a material inconsistency,” the department argued.
Trump, the first president to lose a re-election bid in nearly 30 years, attributed his defeat to widespread voter fraud. But a series of non-partisan election officials and Republicans confirmed that there was no fraud in the November race that would change the outcome of the election. These include former attorney general William Barr, who said he sees no reason to appoint a special advocate to investigate the president’s demands over the 2020 election. He resigned from his post last week.
Trump and his allies have filed about 50 lawsuits challenging election results, and nearly all have been fired or dropped. He also lost twice at the Supreme Court.