Matt Bush, FISM News
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Outgoing representative Liz Cheney (R.-Wyo.) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D.-Calif.), both members of the January 6 Select Committee, will introduce a long-awaited piece of legislation later this week that would reform the Electoral Count Act of 1887.
The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed by the two representatives last night that laid out part of their upcoming plan to reform the Electoral Count Act. In the op-ed, Cheney and Lofgren wrote that they will propose reforms “to protect the rule of law and ensure that future efforts to attack the integrity of presidential elections can’t succeed.”
The two representatives said their proposal was based on four principles: two of which reaffirm that the vice president does not have the authority to reject electoral counting while the other two focus on raising the threshold for objecting to a state’s electors.
The Jan. 6 Committee has been probing the attack on the Capitol for more than a year now with a stated goal of making recommendations to prevent a similar event from ever happening again. These reforms are a major component in reaching those goals.
However, the op-ed shows once again that the largest goal of the committee is to try former President Trump in the court of public opinion. In the post, they assert that “Mr. Trump ‘more likely than not’ violated two criminal statutes by ‘corruptly attempt[ing] to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress on January 6, 2021,’ and ‘dishonestly conspiring’ to do so.”
The select panel has accused Trump and those close to him of attempting to use the Electoral Count Act to block the certification of the 2020 election and illegally thrust the power to make the decision into the hands of the vice president.
The pair also said that a broad reform is needed prior to future elections because Trump and candidates he supports “embrace those [election] lies and other groundless conspiracy theories,” adding, “This raises the prospect of another effort to steal a presidential election, perhaps with another attempt to corrupt Congress’s proceeding to tally electoral votes.”
Since the 2020 election, the Electoral Count Act of 1887 has received a large amount of publicity from those on both sides of the aisle. The reform being led by Cheney and Lofgren is just another in a long line of attempts to reform the centuries-old voting legislation.
A bipartisan Senate group led by Sen. Susan Collins (R.-Maine) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D.-W.Va.) have been working on a proposal to reform the Electoral Count Act as well. While they appear to be getting close, there are still some issues to be worked out and with a Sept. 30 government shutdown looming, many senators are focusing their attention there.
In addition, Reps. Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and Fred Upton (R-Mich.) could unveil a similar but separate plan later this week. This is yet another bipartisan attempt by a pair of moderate representatives to change the Electoral Count Act.
NBC News explains that Gottheimer and Upton were hoping to get their moderate bill put out ahead of Cheney and Lofgren’s version which is expected to be more broad in nature.
All of these bills are being introduced almost two years after the election occurred. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, however, was open to reforming this Act back in January of 2021 as reported by MSNBC.
McConnell is famous for describing many Democratic pieces of legislation as “solutions in search of problems,” but he had expressed that he was more than open to discussing a reform of the centuries-old Voting Act to immediately fix loopholes in the legislation.
In what could be construed as a lesson in how politics work, rather than coming up with bipartisan legislation immediately following the Jan. 6 fiasco, Congress instead chose to convene a special panel, air their grievances on national television, and propose three different potential pieces of legislation to fix one problem.