Opinion: Lawsuit Puts some GOP Lawmakers on Dumb Side of history

A lot of stupid things are said about history.

For example, there is no “right side” of history, if by that you mean events are destined to play out in some sort of preordained way.

But there is such a thing as being on the stupid side of history — and there’s a mad rush to be on it.

President Trump’s lawyers failed to convince a single judge, Trump-appointed or otherwise, that there was systemic fraud in the 2020 election, never mind sufficiently outrageous fraud to warrant literally disenfranchising millions of voters. So Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, sued Vice President Mike Pence to force him to do exactly that.

The lawsuit holds that because the vice president has a ceremonial role in receiving the certified votes from the states, he actually has the authority to reject any votes he doesn’t like. There are people who want Pence on Jan. 6 to take the official, certified and approved electoral votes and say, in effect, “Nope, these don’t count. Send me electoral votes for my boss, Donald Trump.”

I’m reluctant to take this argument too seriously, lest some people get the impression that it’s a serious argument. But here’s what you need to know.

First, voters don’t directly elect the president; the states do. Each state holds its own presidential election. The winner in each state gets that state’s Electoral College votes. Each state has final say on which candidate its electors go to. The winner of the most votes in the Electoral College wins the presidency. This system is the bedrock of our federalist structure.

The Constitution says: “The president of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates, and the votes shall then be counted.” The president of the Senate is the vice president of the United States.

Putting everything else aside, how profoundly stupid do you have to be to believe that the founders intended for the vice president to be able to select the next president regardless of official election results? Why is former Vice President John Nance Garner’s verdict that the job isn’t worth a “bucket of warm spit” the only thing for which anyone remembers Garner?