By MARSHA MERCER
President John F. Kennedy said what any smart
homeowner knows: “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”
Kennedy used the line in his 1962 State
of the Union address to urge Congress to pass his anti-recession economic
legislative agenda. Sixty years later, it’s time to repair the roof of our
democracy after the manmade disaster of Jan. 6, 2021, and to prevent another
assault on the electoral process.
The violent mob that stormed the Capitol
– with some protesters chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” – wanted to overturn the presidential
election. They were misinformed and misled by a president who could not accept
defeat.
Donald Trump still falsely claims the Electoral
Count Act of 1887, which sets timetables and rules for counting electoral
votes, allowed Vice President Mike Pence to ditch state election results and
install Trump for another four years. Pence did the right thing by refusing to bow
to Trump’s power grab.
The Constitution “constrains me from
claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be
counted and which should not,” Pence wrote that day in a letter to Congress. Under
the 12th Amendment, the vice president, as president of the Senate,
opens the certificates of electoral votes from each state, which are then counted.
More than a year late, Pence rebuked
Trump publicly.
“And I heard this week President Trump
said I had the right to `overturn the election.’ President Trump is wrong,”
Pence said in February in a speech to the conservative Federalist Society. “I
had no right to overturn the election.”
Our system held, but one shudders to
think what would have happened IF . . . if Pence had agreed with Trump and
others who wanted to run roughshod over the will of the people.
So, what now? To ensure the peaceful
transfer of power in the future, we must update and clarify the antiquated Electoral
Count Act, once described in a Washington Post story as a “confusing word salad of
run-on sentences.”
The Democratic staff of the House
Administration Committee studied the law for months and concluded in a 31-page
report in January the law is “badly in need of reform” to remove ambiguity
about the vote count process. Ambiguity is the leak in democracy’s roof.
Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine,
announced in late January a bipartisan group of 16 senators, including Democrat
Mark Warner of Virginia, is working on legislation to clarify the law,
including the vice president’s role as purely ceremonial.
Trump showed his hand in a statement
that said in part: “how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky
Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow
the Vice President to change the results of the election?”
Better question: Why should a
vice president have the power to overturn the votes of millions of Americans
and the hard work of thousands of local and state election officials?
A group of Senate Democratic leaders
also is involved in “discussion drafts” of reform.
One likely change would make it harder for
members of Congress to challenge a state’s electoral votes and raise the bar
for sustaining challenges. Currently, if only one senator and House member
object to a state’s results, they can draw out the counting process. Also, the timetable for recounts and lawsuits in the states
could be lengthened.
Updating the count act would make
counting the votes more fair, but there’s concern that it would do nothing to
make voting itself more fair.
Republican candidates still insist the
2020 election was stolen as GOP-run state legislatures tighten election rules
and ballot access. House Democrats have tried to pass major voting rights legislation
only to see it stalled in the Senate.
Some liberals fear updating the count
act alone could make it more difficult to stop Republican state officials from
negating elections their favored presidential candidate lost, leaving Congress
locked into certification.
The White House is “open to and a part
of conversations about the Electoral Count Act,” but that reform should not
replace larger voting reforms, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.
Congress needs to address these valid
concerns now -- and reform the Electoral Count Act while the sun shines.
©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.
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