https://pjmedia.com/election/tyler-o-neil/2020/12/28/louie-gohmert-lawsuit-seeks-to-give-mike-pence-power-to-overturn-electoral-college-vote-n1289433
On Sunday, Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) led a group of Republicans in suing Vice President Mike Pence in order to empower Pence to overturn the Electoral College vote in favor of Joe Biden and give President Donald Trump a second term. Gohmert’s lawsuit asks the court to strike down the 1887 Electoral Count Act as unconstitutional, enabling Pence to select which slate of electors he will count from each state. Some Republicans in contested swing states have formed their own slates of electors and claimed to cast Electoral College votes for Trump.
On January 6, 2021, Pence will meet before Congress to count the Electoral College votes and finalize Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. While there are serious concerns about fraud and irregularities in the presidential election, team Trump’s lawsuits have failed to overturn the results and it seems unlikely that further efforts will conclusively prove that Trump won more legitimate votes than Biden in key swing states.
The lawsuit seeks to empower Pence to effectively overturn the election results by selecting alternate slates of electors and counting their votes instead of the votes cast by the state’s official electors based on the states’ certified election results.
In order to enable this switch, the lawsuit claims that the 1887 Electoral Count Act — which made the vice president’s role largely ceremonial — violates the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1804). The amendment merely states that “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.”