In case the true purpose of MAGAland’s January 2021 Pence election-pressure campaign wasn’t already clear up until this point, former President Donald Trump helpfully spelled it out in no uncertain terms on Sunday.
Trump made the admission via a press release from his “Save America” PAC as he was railing against bipartisan lawmakers’ push to reform the Electoral Count Act (ECA), the 130-year-old law he had tried to weaponize to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into throwing out the 2020 election results.
“Actually, what [the lawmakers] are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!” Trump ranted.
The vice president never had the power to overturn elections. The purpose of reforming the ECA is to clarify that that fact and make it more difficult for members of Congress to object to certifying election results. Though the potential reform has bipartisan support, updating the ECA alone won’t be enough to stop Republicans from trying to steal future elections on a state level or from pushing anti-voting laws.
Trump’s screed fully shatters the paper-thin defense some of his allies had invoked claiming that the ex-president and his crew were merely trying to get to the bottom of voter fraud, as were the GOP members of Congress who voted against certifying the 2020 election.
The scheme to get Pence to steal the election was centered on former Trump legal adviser John Eastman’s memo, which made the argument that the vice president could declare the votes from swing states as invalid and replace Biden electorates from those states with Trump’s (which the Trump campaign had on standby).
