[Ed. – The media are naturally depicting this as Pence being unfriendly to the effort itself; i.e., objecting in an effective way to the Electoral College results. Pence is actually saying the tactic is bad. The Gohmert suit seeks to empower the vice president to make “the” big decision on rejecting the EC results in the Senate. I’m with Pence that that’s a bad move. If we want that changed, it’s something Congress needs to do, and set deliberate limits of its own on.]
The lawsuit, filed earlier this week, seeks to expand Pence’s role in an upcoming Jan. 6 meeting of Congress to count states’ electoral votes and finalize Biden’s victory over President Trump.
But in a Thursday brief to Texas-based U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump appointee, Pence said he was not a proper defendant to the suit.
“A suit to establish that the Vice President has discretion over the count, filed against the Vice President, is a walking legal contradiction,” a Department of Justice attorney representing Pence wrote in the filing.
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Typically, the vice president’s role in presiding over the Jan. 6 meeting is a largely ceremonial one governed by an 1887 federal law known as the Electoral Count Act.
But the Republican lawsuit seeks to invalidate the law as an unconstitutional constraint on the vice president’s authority to choose among competing claims of victory when state-level election results are disputed.
