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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27236 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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I don't think that is a fair characterization of what people wanted the Pence to do. The problem was after certification occurred even if the fraud was found it would be unlikely that the courts would allow the final result as certified to be overturned. The idea was to send the contested results back to the states so the irregularities could be properly investigated before certification.

The most similar election was in 1876. It didn't involve the VP rejecting certification himself and infact there was controversy over who had the power to count the votes during certification but there are very strong parallels and no-one was prosecuted for what happened: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election

Tbf 76 wasn't handled by our current laws because those laws were designed in response to 76. From Goodyear's "President Garfield":

In 1887 President Glover Cleveland would sign the Electoral Count Act into law, expressly to ensure the fiasco of a decade prior could never repeat. Hereafter Congress would have to be in session at one o'clock on the afternoon of January 6 following every Presidential election to formalize the results; representatives and senators would have limited authority to challenge certificates submitted by the states; the Vice President would serve as presiding officer but, likewise, not have the power to invalidate election returns.

The Compromise of 77 narrative is also somewhat contrived. Grant had already decided it was time to withdraw troops from the South and Hayes agreed that he would follow him in this policy; they made their decision well in advance of the general election (Garfield approved as well). Likewise, the Democrats at the Wormely meeting who offered to end the Democratic fillibuster were rebuffed because they had no power over their party to actually make this happen, and indeed the fillibuster continued after the meeting, suggesting no deal was made. It wasn't really a meaningful offer anyway - the vote count had already begun and the results were certain, the only issue was how long it would take the fillibuster to end.

That’s insane. One of those bits of history that gets glossed over in high school, and summed up as “this Rutherford guy ended Reconstruction.”

Worth noting that after the debacle, Congress specifically clarified the situation via law. The Eastman strategy tried to get around this by appealing to Jefferson’s precedent. I don’t know how that was supposed to make the ECA unconstitutional, but I guess that’s why I’m not a partisan law professor.

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