Law professor, cited by Trump attorney John Eastman, says his argument was abused as part of a 'ploy
Source: Business Insider
to get Pence to overturn the 2020 election
A law professor whose work was cited as part of an effort to overturn the 2020 election says former President Donald Trump's legal team butchered his argument as part of their "ploy" to disenfranchise millions of voters.
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"This reading of the 12th Amendment has also been advanced by Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe," Eastman claimed, citing a September 2020 article co-written by the former Obama administration official.
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But nowhere in the September 2020 piece did Tribe and his coauthors argue that Pence would have the power to do any of this on his own, be it rejecting slates of electors or handing the matter off to the House.
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"This Eastman memo pretends to be based on my analysis," he posted on Twitter, "but in fact takes snippets of my work wholly out of context and spits a totally fake web of 'law' that no halfway decent lawyer would take seriously."
Link to tweet
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/law-professor-cited-by-trump-attorney-john-eastman-says-his-argument-was-abused-as-part-of-a-ploy-to-get-pence-to-overturn-the-2020-election/ar-AAOG5FM?li=BBnb7Kz
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illustrate exactly how they were trying to undo the established electoral certification process, including the completion of the Certificate of Ascertainment, by declaring the election "fraudulent" and citing this -
Section 1.
The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America. He shall hold his office during the term of four years, and, together with the Vice President, chosen for the same term, be elected, as follows:
Each state shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors, equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or person holding an office of trust or profit under the United States, shall be appointed an elector.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/articleii
Thus, per their claim, they could essentially deputize state legislatures (except if they were controlled by Democrats
) to "select the electors" and decide on the outcome.
Of course they forgot that years ago, all of the state legislatures passed laws on how to conduct Presidential elections, including creating a delegation-of-authority position of "Secretary of State" (in most states), where one of that position's duties was to oversee elections in general, including the selection of Presidential electors.
So given these facts, it would end up with their need to consider some ex post facto law to overturn procedures that were already put in place and had been used for decades. But since they were cherry-picking which states to do this with, it made what they were attempting to do even more ludicrous.
This is a copy of PA's Certificate of Ascertainment -
as tweeted by the National Archives -
Link to tweet
TEXT
@USNatArchives
Additional Certificates for Ascertainment have been posted to https://archives.gov/electoral-college/2020
Alabama
Michigan
Pennsylvania
South Dakota
#ElectoralCollege #Election2020
📸 Page 1 of Pennsylvania Certificate of Ascertainment
Image
9:20 AM · Nov 27, 2020
Here is NARA's link to all of the Certificates - https://www.archives.gov/electoral-college/2020
