Breaking down the quixotic attempt to challenge the Jan 6 Electoral College vote
By: Paul Oliva
Tags: Biden, Politics, Election Fraud, Trump, Electoral College

If you follow politics on social media, you’ve likely seen something like the above Tweet recently. It suggests that the December 14 electoral college vote didn’t mean much since congress must count the votes and vote to certify them on January 6. It further implies that on January 6, some sort of reversal will take place, resulting in Joe Biden not taking office.

While it is true that those who would challenge the results still have some tools left in their toolkit, that doesn’t mean these efforts will be effective. Let’s use the Constitution, existing federal law, and the Congressional Research Service’s Overview of Procedures for Counting Electoral Votes to decouple the fanfare from the realistic options available to members of congress.

At the beginning of the January 6 vote counting session, each state’s election certificate is read out loud. After each state, “the (Vice President) shall call for objections, if any.” Any such objection must be presented in writing and must be signed by at least one Senator and one Representative. The congressional procedures note that the vice president sometimes has to shut down members of congress who try to use unsupported objections to make a speech.

Democrats actually attempted this when congress counted the Electoral College votes January 6, 2017.

This year, GOP Rep. Mo Brooks has said that he will object to certificates from swing states where fraud has been alleged.

Assuming a Senator signs on to his objections in writing — a few GOP senators seem to be toying with the idea — the next step is for the House and Senate to split off into their individual chambers and vote.

Again, this has happened more recently than you might realize. In 2005, a D-Ohio Representative and D-California Senator submitted a written objection to Ohio’s electoral votes for George W Bush, citing voting irregularities. Both houses ended up tossing the objections out after debating for a couple hours.

You can still watch the entire 2005 debate in the CSPAN archives.

After each chamber votes, they go back into a joint session and report back. The electoral votes in question are only tossed if BOTH chambers (House AND Senate) vote to agree to the objection.

Any Democrat voting to block Biden would immediately be voted out of office in their next primary, so I don’t see that as a realistic possibility. If we assume a straight party-line vote in both chambers (which is unlikely and I’ll explain why later), Nancy Pelosi and her majority in the House would dispose of each objection.

If they really wanted to, Brooks and one GOP senator could do this for all 50 states and force both chambers and the joint session to formally adjourn and reconvene dozens of times (50 of those CSPAN debates), though I don’t believe there’s precedent for that. But even after all that they would not have the votes in the House to toss a single state’s electoral votes and Biden would still win.

In recent days, Mitch McConnell, the leader of the GOP’s Senate majority has called Joe Biden “President-Elect” and has been privately encouraging GOP Senators not to sign on to any written objections presented on January 6. It’s definitely not unlike McConnell to make the smart move politically, and his actions in this case are likely aimed at preventing GOP senators from being forced to put their votes for/against objections on the record. He knows the rules and therefore realizes it’s a losing effort at this point. By drawing out the Electoral College fight, the GOP risks a big internal feud between institutionalists like McConnell and Trump loyalists. A feud like this could potentially damage the party as badly as the Bernie/Hillary infighting Democrats suffered in 2016.

I guess we’ll see if any GOP senator is willing to charge that machine gun nest anyway.