Trump falsely claims Pence had power to overturn the 2020 election, attacks bipartisan push to tighten certification process

[Tin tức]

Donald Trump repeated the false assertion that Mike Pence could have overturned the 2020 election.
It came in response to a bill seeking to make elections less vulnerable to subversion.
The updates to the 1887 Electoral Count Act are supported by some GOP and Democratic figures.

By Tom Porter



Former President Donald Trump falsely claimed that his vice president, Mike Pence, could have overturned the 2020 election results and kept him in power.

Trump repeated the untrue assertion as part of a broader attack on efforts in Congress meant to eliminate confusion about the legal process of certifying US elections.

In a statement Sunday, Trump took aim at a bill aiming to reform the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which aims to clarify and strengthen the 1887 law that governs how the US Senate confirms the winners of presidential elections.

Its backers include GOP Senators Mitt Romney, Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, and Roger Wicker, alongside Democratic Senators Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and Jeanne Shaheen.

In a statement, Trump said: "If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had 'absolutely no right' to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?"

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"Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!"

After Trump's defeat in 2020, he and his allies honed in on the usually routine Senate procedure in which vote counts from states are received and the vice president confirms who won.

John Eastman, a Trump campaign attorney, described a process whereby he claimed that Pence had unilateral authority to reject the vote counts in some states, changing the balance of electoral college votes and leaving Trump the winner.

The argument underpinning the strategy has been rejected by legal and constitutional scholars, who say the vice president is limited to a ceremonial role in the process. Pence himself also decided he didn't have the legal authority to block Joe Biden's victory in 2020.

The certification process on January 6, 2021, was disrupted by the riot at the US Capitol by Trump supporters. Many of them believed, as suggest by Trump at the time, that Pence could change the outcome, and some searched the Capitol in the hope of finding and punishing him.

Although the insurrection delayed the certification process, it did not change the outcome that Joe Biden was declared the winner.

Pence's refusal to bend to Trump's demands opened a rift between the pair. Pence in an interview last week said he hadn't spoken to Trump for months.

The reform of the Electoral Count Act being touted by lawmakers, among other measures, aims to make more explicit the limited role played by the vice president in the hope of reducing the potential for interference.

In a tweet, Republican attorney George Conway, a longtime Trump critic, criticized Trump's argument, and insulted the former president.

"The Twelfth Amendment and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 already make it entirely clear that the Vice President merely opens the envelopes," he wrote. "But sometimes we want to make laws even clearer so that even semiliterate psychopaths have a chance at understanding them."

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