Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, outside the United States 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 to reverse President-elect Joe Biden’s victory – this time by suing Vice President Mike Pence.
The last-ditch legal effort, filed Sunday, came from Gohmert, an eight-term congressman from Texas, along with eleven Arizona residents nominated by that state’s Republican Party to serve as voters.
It will be more than a week before Pence is scheduled to chair a joint session of Congress where the electoral college will vote for Biden and President Donald Trump.
Voters had already cast their votes two weeks earlier. Biden got 306 electoral votes – 36 more than he needed to win – while Trump got 232.
In the lawsuit, federal judge Jeremy Kernodle, a Trump-appointed in east Texas, is asked to declare that Pence has “exclusive authority and sole discretion” to decide which electoral votes of a particular state should be counted.
While pro-Trump voters in some states that Biden won have symbolically cast their own votes, experts say those votes have no legal weight.
The Republican complaint alleges that part of the Electoral Count Act of 1887 should be declared unconstitutional because it clashes with the 12th Amendment.
That amendment includes “the exclusive dispute resolution mechanisms,” the lawsuit claims, including that “Vice President Pence determines which vote counts, or neither, of the voters for that state.”
Legal scholars were quick to dismiss the Republicans’ lawsuit as hopelessly far-fetched.
“No, this won’t work,” tweeted Rick Hasen, suffrage expert at the University of California, Irvine.
“The lawsuit will lead nowhere,” wrote Joshua Geltzer, executive director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection.
“This is insane,” tweeted Anthony Michael Kreis, a law professor at Georgia State University.
Spokesmen for Pence’s office did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment.
The lawsuit also alleges that “public reports” have highlighted “widespread electoral fraud” in battlefield states, citing a document written by White House adviser Peter Navarro that contains numerous claims that have been dismissed in other lawsuits or debunked by fact-checkers.
Trump has refused to give in to Biden. He has falsely claimed to have won the race while publicly pressuring Republican lawmakers to “stand up and fight for the presidency.” At the same time, Trump is spreading baseless and debunked conspiracy theories claiming to prevent widespread voters and electoral fraud.
Some House Republicans have stated that they will contest the election results when Congress meets to count election votes on Jan. 6. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., Senate majority leader, has reportedly urged his caucus not to raise similar objections.
Any objections to the election vote must be submitted in writing and signed by at least one Member of Parliament and one Senate member. If there is an objection, both chambers will deal with the objection separately.
The Trump campaign and several of the president’s allies have made dozens of attempts to challenge the election results in numerous swing states. None of these legal attempts has succeeded in invalidating the votes for Biden or reversing the results of a state’s presidential election.
Earlier in December, the US Supreme Court rejected a bid from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to indict four major swing states for changes they made to voting procedures. Trump had called that lawsuit “the big one.”