A federal judge found Gohmert lacked standing, meaning Vice President Mike Pence will not be allowed to pick the next president.
On Friday, a federal court in Texas dismissed the latest in a long line of Republican lawsuits intended to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The suit, which was brought late last year by Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert and a slate of would-be Republican electors in Arizona, asked the US district court for the eastern district of Texas to grant Vice President Mike Pence the “exclusive authority and sole discretion under the Twelfth Amendment to determine which slates of electors for a State, or neither, may be counted.” Such authority — which Pence very much lacks — would grant the vice president the power to choose the next president, clearing the way for Pence to throw the election to President Donald Trump and install him to an unelected second term in office. In reality, Pence does have a role to play when Congress meets to certify the Electoral College’s votes on January 6, but it is more a formality than anything. As vice president, Pence is also president of the Senate — thus, according to the 12th amendment, Pence’s job is to “open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” The actual certification of the votes, though, falls on Congress. In his case, Gohmert claimed vice presidents were meant to be more than “the glorified envelope-opener in chief,” a position at odds with more than a century of established practice. The court, however, didn’t consider the merits of that claim in its Friday ruling. In a 13-page order dismissing the suit, Trump-appointed Judge Jeremy Kernodle concluded that the court was “without subject matter jurisdiction” to hear the suit in the first place, arguing that the plaintiffs lacked standing — essentially that they would not be harmed should the certification process proceed — that the suit relied too heavily on convoluted hypotheticals, and that the plaintiffs weren’t even suing the right person. Specifically, Gohmert sued Mike Pence — the very person to whom his lawsuit would grant sweeping powers if successful. Pence, understandably, wasn’t exactly on board. In a response from Trump’s own Justice Department requesting that the Texas court deny emergency relief to Gohmert on behalf of Pence — acting Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark, joined by two deputy assistant attorneys general — wrote that “the Vice President is not the proper defendant to this lawsuit.” “If plaintiffs’ suit were to succeed,” the Justice Department filing continues, “the result would be to remove any constraint the Electoral Count Act places on the Vice President. To the extent any of these particular plaintiffs have a judicially cognizable claim, it would be against the Senate and the House of Representatives.” The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman reported Friday that Trump was upset the Justice Department took this stance, and that he complained to Pence about it.
