President Donald Trump has refused to concede he lost the election to Joe Biden. Trump’s Republican allies have launched a long-shot bid to overturn the loss.
The Department of Justice on Thursday slammed a desperate Republican-led lawsuit to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College win, calling the case against Vice President Mike Pence “a walking legal contradiction.” The DOJ said in a new court filing that Rep. Louis Gohmert, R-Texas, and 11 Arizona Republicans have “sued the wrong defendant” — Pence — in the case. And top DOJ officials urged a judge to reject the request that he issue an emergency injunction that purportedly would empower Pence to ignore the Electoral College votes from a handful of battleground states who have given Biden his margin of victory over President Donald Trump. Pence next week is scheduled to preside over Congress when it meets to certify Biden’s win. Gohmert’s suit asks federal Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee in U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Texas, to declare that Pence has the “exclusive authority and sole discretion” to decide which electoral votes from a given state should be counted. The Republicans ask Kernodle to deliver that power to Pence by striking down key sections of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, a law they claim contradicts the 12th Amendment. Gohmert’s claim conflicts with legal experts who say that Pence’s role, or the role of any vice president, is to preside over the counting of the votes submitted by the Electoral College, not to judge which ones are valid or not.
