Rasmussen Polls is tweeting Trump propaganda now:
This is wrong, needless to say:
Supporters of President Trump have made similar arguments that Pence, as president of the Senate, has the power to reject Electoral College results.
However, the theory is based on a misreading of U.S. code that simply authorizes the vice president to call on states to submit their electoral votes if they do not do so by the fourth Wednesday in December, according to The Washington Post.
“The Vice President is not supposed to control the outcome of the process for counting the electoral votes from the states. That’s true from the perspective of the Constitution as well as the Electoral Count Act,” Edward Foley, a law professor at the Ohio State University, told The Hill in an email.
“The Vice President chairs the joint session, but does not decide what electoral votes to count,” he added, noting it “was clearly understood…that the Vice President might be a candidate in the election under consideration, and they did not want this conflict of interest to affect the result.”
T. Greg Doucette, an attorney and Trump critic who frequently fields questions about the president’s capacity to legally challenge the results of the election, tweeted that “Pence has no power to ‘strike’ anything. He opens the envelopes, gives the certificates to the tellers, the tellers count.”
All this does is hurt Mike Pence. They are telling the Trump cult that he has the power to hand the election to Trump. If he refuses to do it he will be a traitor to the cause. If he does do it, it will fail and he will still be a traitor to the cause.
But you have to admit, quoting Stalin in defense of Trump is just:
Update:
A group of Republicans including Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas and Kelli Ward of Arizona is suing Vice President Mike Pence in a desperate, last-ditch attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. The Electoral College is scheduled to certify the win on Jan. 6, a procedural task overseen by the sitting vice president—in this case, Pence, who has not yet publicly acknowledged the fact that Trump lost his bid for a second term. In the lawsuit, details of which reporter John Kruzel of The Hill posted on Twitter, Gohmert, Ward, and 10 other plaintiffs such as Students for Trump COO Tyler Bowyer, Arizona Republican Party Executive Director Greg Safsten, and Maricopa County Republicans Second Vice Chair Nancy Cottle, are asking federal Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee, to declare Pence legally authorized to pick pro-Trump electors on Jan. 6.
Since Trump lost his November bid for a second term in the White House, certain members of the GOP have continued to stoke his delusion of having won by floating unlikely—and thus far, entirely unsuccessful—court challenges to President-elect Joe Biden’s victory. Meanwhile, other Republicans have urged the president to gracefully accept defeat. On Monday, Rep. Denver Riggleman (R-VA) retweeted news of the lawsuit against Pence with an exasperated, “This is NUTS.”
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