Senators Aim to Prevent Another Jan. 6 by Changing Electoral Vote Law

(Bloomberg) -- Three senior senators proposed legislation Tuesday aimed at heading off a repeat of the efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to throw out Electoral College votes and overturn the 2020 election, a move that the top Senate Democrat said wouldn't lessen the need to counter restrictive new voting laws in some states.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the legislation, which would revise the 1887 Electoral Count Act, “may be necessary but not sufficient.” Democrats, he said, still hoped to revive issues in a voting-rights bill scuttled last month after Republicans blocked it and Democrats couldn't overcome an intra-party rift over the Senate's filibuster rules.

“Reforming the Electoral College is a good thing to do, but it sure doesn't replace the need to deal with voting rights, dark money and reapportionment,” Schumer told reporters.

The draft plan from Angus King, an independent who caucuses with Democrats, Rules Chair Amy Klobuchar and Judiciary Chair Dick Durbin would update the 1887 Electoral College Act by prohibiting state legislatures from selecting electors that don't reflect the vote on election day and substantially raising the thresholds for senators and House members to force debate and votes on overturning a state's results.

It also would clarify that the vice president has no authority to block electors. Trump over the weekend attacked former Vice President Mike Pence again for refusing to overturn the 2020 election when Congress convened on Jan. 6, 2021, to certify the Electoral College votes.

Trump's statement Sunday that the effort to revise the law shows that Pence did have the authority to overturn the election is disputed even by Trump's allies in the Senate. Trump also criticized Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, who has led a bipartisan effort to overhaul the law.

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“To me, President Trump's comments underscore the need for us to revise the Electoral Count Act because they demonstrated the confusion in the law and the fact that it is ambiguous,” Collins told reporters at the Capitol on Monday. “I think the 12th Amendment's pretty clear, but the Electoral Count Act, which was written in 1887, clearly needs to be revised.”

Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell said the Electoral Count Act “is flawed and does need to be fixed.” He was non-committal on some of the other changes being discussed.

The Collins-led effort comes after a Democrat-only push to rewrite federal election laws stalled in the Senate last month.

The bipartisan group, which met Monday night at the Capitol, is also considering legislation protecting election workers from threats and attacks, as well as a new round of election grants.

The group has tasked smaller groups to discuss different pieces of the legislation, Senators Lisa Murkowski, an Alaska Republican, and Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat, told reporters.

King said everyone thinks the law is “confusing, vague and an invitation to problems and issues and we just want to try and clarify it.”

Others remain reluctant.

Republican Senator Mike Rounds of South Dakota said he isn't yet convinced any major changes are needed, despite Trump's comments.

“The law worked the way that it was supposed to work. Mike Pence did what he was supposed to do,” he said. “Mike Pence should be recognized for, under very challenging circumstances, doing exactly what the vice president or the president of the Senate was supposed to do in that situation.”

Republicans said they know of no senator who agrees with Trump's view that Pence could have legally overturned the election on his own.

“I do not think that and did not at the time,” said Josh Hawley of Missouri, the first senator to announce he would challenge states' Electoral College votes. “I don't think that's a fair reading of the statute.”

Hawley said he would look at proposals but would be “very careful about making a lot of changes.”

Under the Democratic legislation, the threshold for forcing a debate and votes on rejecting a state's electors would rise to one-third of both chambers of Congress — a move that would have short-circuited challenges by Hawley and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas to force debates on Jan. 6, 2021 because they had far less than the support of one-third of the Senate. After the riot, more than 90 senators rejected both challenges to the election results.

Pardon Controversy

Several Republican senators also disagreed with Trump dangling pardons, should he again be elected president, for people charged in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump raised the possibility of pardons at a rally in Texas on Saturday.

Murkowski said “Those people that came into this building, defiled this place, threatened not only the institution itself, deserve to be in jail, they don't deserve to be pardoned.”

Hawley also opposed pardons.

“Folks who committed crimes, actual crimes, they ought to be prosecuted,” Hawley said. “You know, if you commit crime and assault officers and whatever, you ought to pay the penalty for that.”