monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

Luke Letlow, a congressman-elect from Louisiana, died of covid-19 on Tuesday at a hospital in Shreveport, according to state officials.

Letlow, 41, won a runoff earlier this month to represent the state’s 5th Congressional District, succeeding his former boss, Rep. Ralph Abraham (R-La.), who did not run again after three terms in Congress.

Letlow is the highest-ranking U.S. politician to die of covid-19, which has killed more than 337,000 Americans. He was scheduled to be sworn into office on Sunday.

Letlow announced that he had tested positive for the novel coronavirus on Dec. 18, the Monroe News-Star reported, and isolated at his home in Richland Parish in northeastern Louisiana. By the next day, he was admitted to the hospital and later transferred to Ochsner LSU Health in Shreveport.

Just seems like that mofo likes to hurt people.

President Trump and his supporters are trying to turn the Jan. 6 congressional session for counting electoral college votes into something that it is not and was never intended to be: a forum for litigating Trump’s claims of voter fraud.

Never mind that Trump has no evidence to support his assertion that massive fraud is what caused Joe Biden to win the popular vote in enough states for an electoral college victory. The critical point is this: Even if there were such proof, the Jan. 6 session is not the place to present it.

The Constitution and the Electoral Count Act of 1887 intended the Jan. 6 session to address a narrow question: Are the electoral votes received by Congress ones cast by electors the states appointed?

This limited inquiry requires Congress simply to authenticate the documents. Remember, these rules were formulated in the 19th century, when there was a realistic risk of counterfeit papers pretending to be official. Thus, the 1887 act requires a state’s governor to affix “the seal of the State” to the certificate confirming the appointment of electors.

Further, the 1887 act obligates Congress to consider “conclusive” a state’s own “final determination” of litigation over a state’s appointment of electors when two conditions are met. The “final determination” must occur by a certain date, Dec. 8 this year, and must be based on state laws existing before Election Day, Nov. 3. Congress instructs governors to provide verification of these two conditions in their certifications.

This is the opposite of Trump allies’ feverish imaginings about using the session as an opportunity for congressional fact-finding on whether fraud or error tainted the tally of the state’s popular vote.

The Constitution says only: “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.”

This provision, part of the 12th Amendment that reengineered the electoral college after the calamitous Jefferson-Burr tie in 1800, presumed that counting a state’s electoral votes would be straightforward: The joint session would merely identify the state’s electoral votes and add them up.

It would not be Congress’s job to second-guess the state’s appointment of its own electors. And it certainly would not be Congress’s job to let a sitting vice president — as Adams had been in 1796 or Jefferson in 1800 — determine the election’s outcome by deciding unilaterally whether or not to count a state’s electoral votes. Note that, Vice President Pence.

While the Constitution makes each house of Congress the “judge” of elections to its own body, there’s no comparable provision for presidential elections. In fact, it’s the reverse. To prevent the electoral college from being subservient to Congress, the Constitution requires Congress to accept whatever the state decides regarding the appointment of its electors.

The constitutionally appropriate venue for claiming fraud in the counting of a state’s popular vote, therefore, is the state’s own courts. Trump sued there but failed — because his claims lacked merit. Having lost, he can’t now relitigate his allegations in a congressional proceeding designed solely to receive what the state sent. As Justice Joseph Bradley explained during the disputed 1876 election, “It is the business and jurisdiction of the State to prevent frauds from being perpetrated in the appointment of its electors, and not the business or jurisdiction of the Congress.”

Imagine if Richard Nixon had tried Trump’s stunt. Nixon in 1960 had far better grounds for claiming fraud. But it would have been inappropriate for Nixon, who as vice president chaired the joint session, to insist that Congress adjudicate claims that John F. Kennedy’s allies in Illinois and Texas had stolen the election. Nixon knew Congress was bound by what the states themselves determined.

Even more preposterous is the idea that Nixon would have been entitled to unilaterally disqualify the electoral votes from these two states just because he personally distrusted them. Yet that is the desperate argument being made in a new lawsuit brought by Rep.Louie Gohmert (R-Tex.). According to Gohmert, a vice president can dictate the outcome of an election in which he is a candidate. Al Gore could have decided by himself the fate of Florida’s electoral votes in 2000. Giving any individual this kind of self-serving power is contrary to a Constitution that aims at checks and balances.

There are good reasons to modernize the procedures that Congress uses for counting electoral votes. This modernization could include new rules for verifying the integrity of a state’s popular vote — although these new rules would need to respect the state’s primary role, under the Constitution, in appointing its electors.

For the current election, however, Congress must use its existing procedures, and they contemplate no fact-finding of the type Trump is demanding. Trump might not care that the Jan. 6 joint session comply with the Constitution and existing law. Principled conservatives in Congress surely should.

Lawyers representing Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and Arizona’s 11 GOP electors disclosed in a court filing Tuesday that Vice President Pence rejected their request to join their attempt to subvert the results of the presidential election.

Gohmert and the electors filed suit against Pence on Monday in an attempt to argue that the vice president has sole authority to determine which presidential electors Congress will count when it certifies the results of the election. The far-fetched suit essentially asks the court to grant Pence the authority on Jan. 6 to overrule the results in swing states such as Arizona and have Congress count only pro-Trump electors instead of the ones President-elect Joe Biden won.

In new court filings made public Tuesday, the plaintiffs disclosed that they had reached out to Pence before filing their suit in an attempt to join forces but that their talks did not reach any kind of agreement.

“In the teleconference, Plaintiffs' counsel made a meaningful attempt to resolve the underlying legal issues by agreement, including advising the Vice President's counsel that Plaintiffs intended to seek immediate injunctive relief in the event the parties did not agree,” lawyers for Gohmert and the electors said in the filing. “Those discussions were not successful in reaching an agreement and this lawsuit was filed.”

The revelation was made in a filing in which Gohmert’s attorneys sought an expedited schedule for a ruling to try to press U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle of the Eastern District of Texas, a Trump appointee, to decide the case by Jan. 4, two days before the certification.

The decision by Pence, one of President Trump’s most ardent loyalists, marks one of the most notable breaks with his boss, who has pushed lawmakers to challenge Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results. Pence will oversee the joint session on Jan. 6 during which Biden will be recognized by Congress as the victor in the White House election, though the role is largely ceremonial.

Pence has not made any public remarks indicating how he plans to handle the Jan. 6 joint session of Congress, nor has he commented on Trump’s unrelenting pressure campaign urging lawmakers to reverse the Electoral College results.

Trump’s efforts to influence the Electoral College certification comes after a sprawling legal campaign to overturn results in individual states on allegations of voter fraud and irregularities largely failed. Virtually all of the GOP cases were tossed in court for lack of evidence or standing.

resident Trump on Wednesday called for Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to resign, escalating his criticism of a fellow Republican who has refused to intervene in the state’s presidential election or embrace Trump’s baseless claims of widespread fraud.

“@BrianKempGA should resign from office,” Trump said in a tweet. “He is an obstructionist who refuses to admit that we won Georgia, BIG!”

“Also won the other Swing States,” Trump claimed, continuing a series of false claims he has made since President-elect Joe Biden was projected as the winner nationally.

Trump’s latest criticism of Kemp came in a tweet that urged his supporters to watch a broadcast of a Senate hearing in Atlanta on purported election irregularities.

In fact, no credible evidence of widespread fraud has emerged in Georgia or other states since the Nov. 3 election. Biden’s narrow victory has withstood multiple recounts, court challenges and other examinations of the voting process, including some spurred by Trump’s unfounded allegations of fraudulent mail-in ballots.

On Tuesday, the Georgia secretary of state’s office announced the results of a signature audit conducted of mail-in ballots from the election cast in Cobb County.

Working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, the secretary of state’s office said it reviewed signatures on 15,118 ballot envelopes, finding none were fraudulent and that all but two included signatures that matched that of the voter on file — demonstrating that election officials who examined the signatures before the vote had a 99.99 percent accuracy rate.

Kemp’s office did not immediately respond Wednesday to the president’s tweet.

A significant number of Americans believe misinformation about the origins of the coronavirus and the recent presidential election, as well as conspiracy theories like QAnon, according to a new NPR/Ipsos poll.
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Georgia reporter Stephen Fowler was one of the first to debunk the theory that Brad is related to Ron Raffensperger, a random man with the same last name who serves as CTO for a subsidiary of the Huawei conglomerate.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) announced Wednesday that he would object next week when Congress convenes to certify the electoral college vote, a move that all but ensures at least a short delay in cementing President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

President Trump has repeatedly suggested congressional intervention as a last-ditch way to reverse the election results, despite opposition from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and other leading Republicans, who have conceded it is bound to fail and will put their members in an awkward position.

In a statement, Hawley said he feels compelled to put a spotlight on purported election irregularities.

“At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections. But Congress has so far failed to act,” Hawley said.

Any member of the House, joined by a member of the Senate, can contest the electoral votes on Jan. 6. The challenge prompts a floor debate followed by a vote in each chamber.

Trump will inevitably lose that vote, given that Democrats control the House and a number of Senate Republicans have publicly recognized Biden’s victory, including Sen. Mitt Romney (Utah), who has called Trump’s refusal to accept the election dangerous.

Even in the unlikely event that Trump were to prevail in the Senate, where Vice President Pence would be in position to cast a tie-breaking vote if needed, the challenge still would fail given the House vote.

Just 3 more weeks before Trump leaves office, and one week until the election is officially certified once and for all.