It's for Mike Pence to Judge whether a Presidential Election Was Held at All
Article publisher:
American Thinker
Article date:
26 December 2020
Article category:
National News
Medium
Article Body:
On January 6, a joint session of Congress will open with Vice President Pence presiding as president of the Senate. His power will be plenary and unappealable. You heard that right. As president of the Senate, every objection comes directly to him, and he can rule any objection "out of order" or "denied." His task will be to fulfill his oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and to ensure that the laws be faithfully executed. This is a high standard of performance, and V.P. Pence will have two choices. He can roll over on "certified" electors, or he can uphold the law.
Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution gives state legislatures "plenary authority" as enunciated in Bush v. Gore...
This leaves V.P. Pence with a dilemma.... But as an honorable man, faced with massive illegality, he must act to protect the law. Consider how things might go down as the two closed envelopes from Georgia are handed to the V.P. Rather than opening them, he says:
In my hand are envelopes purporting to contain electoral votes from Georgia. They are competing for consideration, so it is essential that I consider the law that governs this. That law, according to the Legislature of Georgia and Article II, Section 1 of the U.S. Constitution is the Georgia statute that includes procedures for signature-matching on absentee ballots, a requirement that all absentee ballots be first requested by a legitimate voter, and that election monitors be meaningfully present at all times while votes were counted....
Therefore, the chair rules that Georgia has not transmitted the votes of any presidential electors to this body. Georgia presents zero votes for Donald Trump and zero votes for Joseph Biden....
Richard Nixon chose not to contest the 1960 election because he felt that winning that way would lead to an ungovernable country. If V.P. Pence does this, that same argument might be made. But is the country governable even now? ... How much worse would things be if the V.P. lived up to his oath and upheld the law?
Related
The 12th Amendment Plan: A Pence Path to a Contingent Election, Canada Free Press, December 29, 2020:
… recent scholarship makes a compelling case for the assertion that the 12th Amendment indeed grants the Vice President/President of the Senate such plenary powers over acceptance of Electoral votes.
And if this is true, and if VP Pence were to nullify sufficient slates of Electors (even if he did not endorse competing slates of Republican Electors), the 2020 election would then transition into what is called a Contingent Election in the House of Representatives – the same form of election that elected Thomas Jefferson President. And a Contingent Election will re-elect Donald Trump – because such an election assigns each State only one vote – and Republicans control the majority of the votes because they control the majority of the States.