CNN –
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell announced Tuesday that he would support legislation that would make it harder to void a certified presidential election, an endorsement that will bolster his chances of passage in his chamber and the will put him at odds with former president Donald Trump, who he has called. to Republican senators to scuttle the plan.
McConnell said the “chaos” of the pro-Trump attack on the Capitol last year “certainly underscored the need for an update.”
“I strongly support the modest changes that our colleagues on the task force have developed after literally months of detailed discussions,” McConnell said. “I will support the legislation with pride, as long as nothing more than technical changes are made to its current form.”
“The congressional process for recounting the votes of presidential electors was written 135 years ago. The chaos that culminated on January 6 of last year underscored the need for an update,” McConnell added. “So did January 2001, 2005 and 2017. In each of which, Democrats tried to challenge the legal election of a Republican president.”
Last week, House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy and the vast majority of House Republicans opposed their chamber’s version of the bill that would amend the Voter Count Act of 1887. Although the bill The House bill has several similarities to the Senate version, including the vice guarantee. The president has only a ministerial role in overseeing a joint session of Congress that approves state-certified election results, it differs in some of its details. Among the differences: the number of lawmakers who would have to force the House and Senate to vote to overturn a state’s certified election results and the procedures for resolving election disputes in federal courts.
Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Sen. Joe Manchin, D-West Virginia, have already lined up 10 Republican co-sponsors for their so-called Voter Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act, enough support to overcome a filibuster with 50 Democratic votes .
The Senate bill would make a number of changes to the Election Counting Act and the Presidential Transition Act of 1963, in an attempt to address the ambiguity in the election law that Trump sought to exploit.
It would increase the number of House and Senate members needed to raise an objection to election results when a joint session of Congress meets to certify them. Currently, a member of the House and a senator can oppose electoral votes, sending them to a vote in Congress; If either chamber rejects the objection, the votes are counted. The Senate bill would require the support of one-fifth of each chamber to raise an objection. The House bill would raise the threshold even higher, to one-third of each chamber, to force both chambers to vote on whether to throw out a state’s election results.
In an effort to respond to Trump allies who tried to send fake voters to Congress, both bills try to make it harder for there to be confusion about the voters themselves. In the Senate bill, it states that the governor of each state would be responsible for the presentation of a certificate that identifies the voters, eliminating the possibility of several state officials sending multiple lists of voters. But the bills differ on how lawsuits challenging election results can be addressed in federal courts, with the House bill providing new avenues for suing, something some key Senate Republicans oppose.
In a clear response to Trump’s efforts to get then-Vice President Mike Pence to throw out the election results of states won by President Joe Biden, both bills establish the vice president’s role as purely ceremonial. The Senate bill would deny the vice president the power to “determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes concerning the proper list of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.”
While constitutional experts say the vice president currently cannot ignore a state-certified election result, Trump pushed Pence to obstruct the Electoral College certification in Congress. But Pence refused to do so, and as a result became the target of the former president and his mob of supporters who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The Senate bill has been split into two separate proposals, one of which will be voted on by the Senate Rules Committee on Tuesday. The other package will go before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, which has yet to consider the measure. The full Senate is unlikely to act before the November midterms, putting the issue off until a session of Congress later this year.
It is not yet known if both chambers can reconcile their differences or if the House will be forced to simply accept the Senate version. Some House Republicans who opposed their chamber’s bill, authored by Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., and Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., objected to how it did not go through the committee process and indicate that they might support the Senate plan.
“The resulting product, this bill, as presented, is the only chance to get a result and make law,” McConnell said Tuesday. “It keeps what’s worked well and modestly updates what hasn’t.”