A federal judge in Texas on Friday tossed out a lawsuit by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) that sought to overturn the results of the presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
U.S. District Judge Jeremy Kernodle issued an order dismissing the case after finding Gohmert’s alleged injury “far too uncertain to support standing.”
The decision by the Trump-appointed judge comes after Gohmert and a group of President Donald Trump’s allies argued that a vice president has the power to decide who wins a presidential election, regardless of the results.
The judge criticized Gohmert’s efforts at mounting “speculative” scenarios that presupposed “what the Vice President will do on January 6, which electoral votes the Vice President will count or reject from contested states, whether a Representative and a Senator will object under Section 15 of the Electoral Count Act, how each member of the House and Senate will vote on any such objections, and how each state delegation in the House would potentially vote under the Twelfth Amendment absent a majority electoral vote.”
“All that makes Congressman Gohmert’s alleged injury far too uncertain to support standing,” Kernodle wrote.
The Friday filing by Gohmert’s lawyers accused the government of trying to “hide behind procedural arguments,” after the Justice Department requested that the lawsuit be thrown out and indicated that Pence was an ill-suited target for the effort.
Gohmert claimed the vice president has the power to effectively pick the next president during the formal recording of electoral college votes by Congress in a joint session next week.
The filing to ultimately endow Pence the power to overturn the will of the people, asserted that the way Congress certifies presidential elections is unconstitutional. It suggested that Pence “may count elector votes certified by a state’s executive, or he can prefer a competing slate of duly qualified electors. He may ignore all electors from a certain state. That is the power bestowed upon him by the Constitution.”
In addition to the effort from the Justice Department to toss out the farfetched lawsuit, lawyers for the House of Representatives had also asked the judge to reject the Gohmert suit, saying it would “authorize the Vice President to ignore the will of the Nation’s voters.”
Read Judge Kernodle’s full order of dismissal below:
