OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Buried in the massive 4,100-page $1.7 trillion spending bill just passed by both chambers of Congress with substantial Republican help in the Senate is a provision that some claim is a parting shot at former President Donald Trump.
The measure reforms the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which added to procedures already outlined in the U.S. Constitution regarding the manner in which electoral votes are counted for president and vice president, according to reports.
The libertarian Cato Institute notes:
The Electoral Count Act (ECA) defines the process when Congress meets every four years on January 6 to count the electoral votes for president and vice president. This meeting is mandated by the Constitution, which requires that all electoral votes be sent to Congress and counted in front of the House and Senate. This count is normally a formality, but the ECA includes a caveat with potentially enormous consequences. Congress can reject an electoral vote, the law says, if a majority of both the House and Senate finds that an elector’s appointment was not “lawfully certified” or that the elector’s vote was not “regularly given.”
After the 2020 election, several Republican lawmakers as well as Trump interpreted that act, as well as the Constitution, as empowering Vice President Mike Pence to reject electors from states were the results were being contested, most notably in Arizona and Pennsylvania, with the hope of swinging the presidential contest for Trump.
As Cato explains further:
These members of Congress treated the ECA as a license to relitigate election‐law disputes that the courts had already settled. Their plans to oppose enough votes to swing the election gave false hope to many of Donald Trump’s supporters, who came to view January 6 as the day the president’s theories of election fraud would be vindicated.
This was never the intent of those who passed the ECA in 1887. They intended to draw a clear line of distinction between two stages of the election process. Disputes over the conduct of a general election were to be handled by the courts or other adjudicators established by the states, a process that determines which electors have been validly chosen. Once those electors have cast their ballots, Congress bears witness to the count and ensures that the electors themselves have complied with the Constitution’s basic rules (such as not voting for two people from their own state).
Now, however, it appears as though the law has been reformed.
“The ERA now states that the vice president has solely a ministerial role in presiding over the joint session of Congress when lawmakers certify Electoral College results,” Trending Politics noted in an analysis on Friday.
“Even more striking is the Congress raising the threshold to return a [slate] of electors to a state to one-fifth of the House and one-fifth of the Senate. This change would require nearly half of a party’s representatives and senators to vote in unison to return a slate of electors to a state if there is nearly even control over the legislative branch,” the analysis continued.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump argued that Republicans should leave the 1887 law as-is, noting it’s “probably better to leave” the Electoral Count Act “the way it is so that it can be adjusted in case of fraud.”
“The only reason this change is being promulgated is to reform The Electoral Count Act so that the VP cannot do what they powerfully said he couldn’t do, but if it couldn’t be done, why are they making this law change? The whole thing is one big Scam! Trump posted.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who was blasted by conservatives for pushing GOP members to pass the spending bill with the ECA reform, also took some parting shots at Trump on Friday.
“We lost support that we needed among independents and moderate Republicans, primarily related to the view they had of us as a party — largely made by the former president — that we were sort of nasty and tended toward chaos,” McConnell said, per Trending Politics. “And oddly enough, even though that subset of voters did not approve of President Biden, they didn’t have enough confidence in us in several instances to give us the majority we needed.”
