Representative Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, outside the Capitol, December 3, 2020.
Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images
Rep. Louie Gohmert became the last Republican to file a long-running lawsuit that sought to reverse the victory of President-elect Joe Biden, this time suing Vice President Mike Pence.
The latest legal effort, filed Sunday, was by Gohmert, an eight-term Texas congressman, along with 11 Arizona residents who had been nominated by the state’s Republican Party to run for election.
It comes a week before Pence is scheduled to chair a joint session of Congress where the Electoral College votes for Biden and President Donald Trump will be counted.
Voters had already voted two weeks earlier. Biden received 306 electoral votes, 36 more than he needed to win, while Trump received 232.
The lawsuit asks federal judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump nominee in East Texas, to declare that Pence has “the exclusive and exclusive discretion” to decide which election votes for a particular state should be counted.
Although pro-Trump voters in some states who won Biden have symbolically voted their own votes, experts say those votes have no legal weight.
The Republican complaint calls for a portion of the 1887 Electoral Count Act to be declared unconstitutional, as it clashes with the 12th Amendment.
This amendment contains “the exclusive dispute resolution mechanisms,” according to the lawsuit, including that “Vice President Pence determines which voter voting list counts, or none, for that state.”
Legal scholars quickly dismissed the Republican demand as desperately far-fetched.
“No, that’s not going to work,” tweeted election law expert Rick Hasen at the University of California, Irvine.
“The lawsuit is going nowhere,” wrote Joshua Geltzer, executive director of the Institute for Constitutional Defense and Protection at Georgetown University.
“This is crazy,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.
Spokesmen for the Pence office did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The lawsuit also claims that “public reports” have “highlighted electoral fraud” in battlefield states, citing a document written by White House adviser Peter Navarro that includes numerous claims that have been rejected in other lawsuits or denials by fact-checkers.
Trump has refused to grant Biden. He has falsely claimed he won the race while publicly pressuring Republican lawmakers to “intensify and fight for the presidency.” At the same time, Trump is spreading unfounded and discredited conspiracy theories that denounce election fraud and widespread voters.
Some House Republicans have said they will challenge the election results when Congress meets to count the election votes on Jan. 6. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Would have urged his group not to make similar objections.
Objections to electoral votes must be submitted in writing and signed by at least one member of the House and one member of the Senate. If an objection is raised, the two chambers consider the objection separately.
The Trump campaign and several allies of the president have launched dozens of attempts to challenge election results in numerous swing states. None of these legal efforts have failed to invalidate the votes for Biden or turn around the results of any state’s presidential election.
In early December, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an offer by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to sue four key states based on changes they made to voting procedures. Trump had called that lawsuit “the big one.”