Eighteen Senate Republicans joined Democrats to pass an update to the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act. The act would clarify that vice presidents can’t overturn presidential elections. It is contained within a $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill recently passed by the Senate.
On January 6, 2021, former President Donald Trump pressured then-Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the 2020 Electoral College victory of then-President-Elect Joe Biden, throwing the usual peaceful handover of executive power into conflict. Trump cited the 1887 law when arguing that Pence had the constitutional authority to block Biden’s victory.
Trump said the law allowed Pence to count the votes of alternative (fake) electors who would support Trump instead. However, Pence refused.
a February speech, Pence said: “President Trump is wrong: I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
Republican senators agree.
“The Electoral Count Act, that statute needed to be fixed and clarified,” Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) said. “A couple years ago there were a lot of questions raised about it. There wasn’t any question in my mind about what it said but since there are [questions], I think it’s important to nail that down.”
The proposed change to the law would “remove any doubt that the vice president’s role in counting Electoral College votes is simply ministerial. It would lift the threshold for members of Congress to force a vote on discounting presidential electors from just one member of the House and the Senate each to one-third of both chambers. And it would require governors to send electors to Congress for the candidate who won, based on state law set before Election Day, which cannot be retroactively changed,” MSNBC reported.
The Congressional January 6 committee’s 845-page final report said that Trump asked Pence, other Republican Congress members, and state election officials to falsely claim that an unprecedented conspiracy of nationwide voter fraud “stole” the 2020 presidential election from Trump.
When Congress met to certify the election, Trump held a “Stop the Steal” rally in which he repeated his false fraud claims, and urged his followers to “fight like hell” to keep their democracy. After the rally, his followers rioted at the U.S. Capitol to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s win. Hundreds of rioters have received prison time and other consequences for storming the capitol.
On his badly-named Truth Social site, Trump criticized the proposed change to the 1887 law.
Linking to an article about the change, Trump wrote, “In other words, [my legal advocate] John Eastman and others were correct in stating that the Vice President of the United States had the right to do what should have been done. The only reason this change is being promulgated is to reform The Electoral Count Act so that the VP cannot do what they powerfully said he couldn’t do, but if it couldn’t be done, why are they making this law change? The whole thing is one big Scam!”
Republican Sen. Mitt Romney said Trump’s reasoning would give the current Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris, the power to block a Republican from becoming president, The Hill reported.
“Let’s do something which he’s not fond of doing, which is taking that to the next logical conclusion. On that basis, that means that Kamala Harris would be able to choose the next president. Does he really think that’s the right way to go?” Romney said.