Republican Congressman Louie Gohmert, of Texas, has filed a lawsuit against Mike Pence in his official capacity as vice president demanding he overturns President-elect Joe Biden’s election win and declares Donald Trump the winner instead.
In the lawsuit, first reported by Law & Crime, the Texas hardliner “contends the Constitution empowers Pence to ignore a statute making his work ministerial and select “competing slates of Presidential Electors” so he could “unilaterally decide the outcome of the election.”
The lawsuit claims that the Vice President “may exercise the exclusive authority and sole discretion in determining which electoral votes to count for a given state, and must ignore and may not rely on any provisions of the Electoral Count Act that would limit his exclusive authority and his sole discretion to determine the count, which could include votes from the slates of Republican electors from the Contested States.”
It further contends that the Electoral Count Act “limits or eliminates [the Vice President’s] exclusive authority and sole discretion under the Twelfth Amendment to determine which slates of electors for a State, or neither, may be counted.”
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Of course, these assertions are based on outright falsehoods. The election results in every U.S. state have already been certified and the Electoral College votes for Biden have already been cast. There is absolutely no constitutional provision allowing for states to have “competing” or “alternate” slates of electors. The “votes” those groups sent to Congress do not have any legal authority.
The lawsuit further seeks an injunction prohibiting enforcement of any ECA provision limiting Pence’s “exclusive authority and his sole discretion to determine which of two or more competing slates of electors’ votes are to be counted for President.”
Federal Judge Jeremy Kernodle, an appointee of President Donald Trump will preside over the case in the Eastern District of Texas.
UC Irvine law professor Rick Hasen said Gohmert’s legal challenge “won’t work,” while national security attorney Bradley P. Moss called the lawsuit “garbage,” according to Law & Crime.
Actual lawyers signed their names to this garbage (one of them uses an AOL e-mail address but I won't hold that against them). https://t.co/OM6DpLdJk5
— Bradley P. Moss (@BradMossEsq) December 28, 2020
Read the full lawsuit below via Scribbs.
