Arizona’s 11 GOP Electors have joined a lawsuit filed in Texas to define the authority of Vice President Pence to reject Electors as his role as President of the Senate.
The lawsuit, filed along with Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, asks the United States District Court for Texas’s Eastern District to “declare that Vice President Pence… has the exclusive authority to determine whether to count or not count competing slates of electors from Arizona and other contested states.” The 12th Amendment which “contains the exclusive dispute resolution mechanisms” for elections gives Pence that power as President of the Senate.
Arizona GOP Chair Dr Kelli Ward is named as a plaintiff on the lawsuit in her role as one of the GOP Electors. In a statement, Ward argued that the 1887 Electoral Count Act “limits or eliminates the Vice President’s ability to determine which electors may be counted,” and as such, the law is unconstitutional. “Plain law cannot contradict a Constitutional Amendment,” Ward said.
🚨 Arizona's 11 Trump Electors filed a suit with Texas Congressman @replouiegohmert to define the authority given to Vice President Pence under the U.S. Constitution's 12th Amendment that grants him the power to decide which slate of electors to count from contested states. pic.twitter.com/FrJDyd92Kk
— Arizona Republican Party (@AZGOP) December 29, 2020
As National File reported, the lawsuit also notes that the “safe harbour” practices also set out by the Electoral Count Act were violated by the contested states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona. Because of that the court should grant Pence the authority to either seat alternative slates of electors advanced from the states, or invalidate those slates, thus sending the election to the US House of Representatives.
In a statement released on Monday evening, Representative Gohmert said that the 2020 election “was one we’d expect to see in a banana republic, not the United States of America:
We continue to hold out hope that there is a federal judge who understands that the fraud that stole this election will mean the end of our republic, and this suit would insure that the Vice-President will only accept electors legitimately and legally elected. There must be an opportunity for a day in court when fraud was this prevalent…
Thanks to spineless politicians, corrupt state officials and a coordinated effort to undermine the will of the American people in favor of business as usual in the D.C. swamp, we now find ourselves in a place where a stolen election becomes just another one of the miscarriages of justice this town refuses to remedy. The D.C. elites want to sweep these electoral injustices under the rug… For the sake of the future of our Republic, come January 6th, Vice President Pence must be authorized to uphold the legal votes of millions of Americans and preserve our nation’s great experiment in self-governance.
