Portman
File photo | The Lima News
WASHINGTON, D. C. – The U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday approved bipartisan legislation that aims to thwart future efforts to overturn presidential election results by rejecting frivolous challenges when Congress tallies electoral votes and establishing that its role in the process is purely ministerial.
The legislation passed in a 229 to 203 vote, with support from all the legislative body’s Democrats and nine Republicans, including Rocky River’s Anthony Gonzalez, who dropped his re-election bid after voting to impeach former President Donald Trump over his role in the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. It faces an uncertain future in the U.S. Senate, where a different bipartisan proposal is under consideration.
“This bill will prevent Congress from illegally choosing the president itself,” said Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, an outspoken critic of Trump’s effort to overturn results of the 2020 election. Congress accepted electoral votes from the states on January 6, 2021, in a process disrupted by rioters who wanted Vice President Mike Pence to reject electoral votes from states where Trump unsuccessfully tried to dispute results in court.
Cheney said the bill would reaffirm “what the Constitution and existing law make plain,” that the Vice President has no authority or discretion to reject states’ electoral votes.
California Democrat Zoe Lofgren, who collaborated on the bill with Cheney, said it would require a larger threshold of Congress members than is currently required to challenge electoral votes, and that none of the electoral vote objections raised in Congress over the last 100 years would have been allowed under the bill.
“This bill will ensure that the voice of the American people is the final word on the future of our republic,” Lofgren said. “All told the reforms in this bill confine Congress to its true, narrow role in presidential elections.”
A Republican opponent of the bill, Georgia’s Barry Loudermilk, said he believes that Congress ought to clarify how it counts electoral votes and ensure that security at the U.S. Capitol isn’t breached again, as it was on January 6, but said he objected to the fact that Cheney and Lofgren – who are members of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol – were spearheading the bill. He said any proposal should have been drafted with wider input from Republicans.
“With midterm elections looming and the prospect of a new majority in the House and the Senate, they feel they need to justify the time they’ve wasted by inserting themselves into what was once a bipartisan, bicameral discussion of an electoral count reform act,” Loudermilk said.
In the U.S. Senate, Ohio Republican Rob Portman was part of a bipartisan group that issued separate proposals intended to reform and modernize the outdated Electoral Count Act of 1887 to ensure that the electoral votes tallied by Congress accurately reflect each state’s vote for president. The proposal backed by Portman would stipulate that the vice president lacks power to adjudicate disputes over electors and attempts to thwart submission of competing slates of electors by stipulating that Congress will only accept slates of electors submitted by each state’s governor, or the official each state designates to submit them.
The legislation Portman supports is currently before the Senate Rules Committee. He told reporters this week that he believes that committee will approve bipartisan legislation “very close to what we have in our recommendation.” He said the House of Representatives bill has some differences from the Senate proposal, and said that competition between the two bills would make passage more difficult.
“I would hope that we can find a way to come up with a solution that both sides can support,” said Portman. “Our legislation would avoid the kinds of issues that happened on Jan. 6, among other things, ensuring that the Vice President’s role is simply ministerial and would not have the ability to overturn state certification.”
U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown, a Democrat who served as Ohio’s chief election official in the 1980s, applauded the House of Representatives action and said he thinks “it’s pretty unbelievable that they need to do that” in the face of GOP claims that the election was rigged “when no fair-minded judge or elections official says it was rigged.”
He said no questions about election fairness were raised when he and his successor, Republican Bob Taft, served as Ohio Secretary of State, and said “we just can’t have an election system where the losers, even before the election, say ‘If we lose, it’s rigged.’ … Any way we can fight back, we should.”
