Republicans Claim Democrats Will Try To Overturn The Next Election
Republicans have an interesting way of seeking to distance themselves from Donald Trump and his mistaken belief that former Vice President Mike Pence could have single-handedly overturned the results of the 2020 presidential election when he presided over the electoral vote certification in Congress on Jan. 6, 2021.
Instead of simply stating the obvious, that it is ridiculous and undemocratic to suggest one man can overturn the results of a free and fair election, GOP officials claim that such a theory would mean Democrats could then turn around and return the favor after the 2024 presidential contest if Trump runs and returns to the White House.
“If President Trump runs for reelection, I believe he would defeat Joe Biden, and I don’t want Kamala Harris to have the power as vice president to overturn that election,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who is facing reelection in November, warned Sunday during an interview with CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election. And Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024,” Pence, a potential 2024 presidential contender, said in a speech last week.
There has been zero discussion among Democrats about the idea of overturning the 2024 presidential election if they lose, Democratic lawmakers told HuffPost on Monday. There’s no reason to think it would even happen. Harris has condemned the U.S. Capitol riot of Jan. 6, 2021, multiple times.
The reason why Republicans are suggesting it now may have more to do about their own politics and Trump’s continued dominance within their party.
GOP officials aren’t willing to risk angering Trump, even though he is no longer in office, because doing so could mean the end of their political careers. So they’re forced to contort themselves on these positions in order to make them more palatable to Trump’s supporters.
Asked Monday why some GOP candidates are siding with Trump and against the truth of the matter, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican who was once a staunch ally of the former president and who may also mount a 2024 presidential bid, admitted as much.
“There are people more afraid of crossing Donald Trump and what that will do in their ability to win the primary than they are in telling the truth,” Christie told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt.
But the idea that Democrats may choose to “go rogue” and certify Biden electors regardless of the popular vote, as some GOP officials sought to do a year ago, could push more Republican lawmakers toward making some reforms to the Electoral Count Act.
There are people more afraid of crossing Donald Trump and what that will do in their ability to win the primary than they are in telling the truth.Chris Christie
A bipartisan group of senators are looking to update the 1887 law, which sets out the formal procedures for the counting of electoral votes following a presidential election, to make it explicitly clear that the vice president’s role in the process is merely ceremonial.
“Some future vice president might exploit an ambiguity in the law,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Monday even as he rejected the notion that Harris might do so in order to overturn the 2024 presidential election.
However, even though there are some ambiguities in the law, none could be reasonably interpreted as giving the vice president the power to unilaterally overturn an election’s results, constitutional law experts told The Associated Press.
Lawmakers are also discussing increasing the threshold of votes required to mount an objection to a state’s electoral vote count. Under those circumstances, GOP members of Congress would not have been able to object to Biden’s win last year.
“This is what we should do because this is what caused” the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), one of the lawmakers involved in the effort, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
This article originally appeared on HuffPost and has been updated.
