Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren to propose bill to stop another January 6 attack
Two members of the US congressional committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack have revealed details of a bill proposing to block any other attempt to coerce the House and the Senate “to steal a presidential election”.
On Sunday, House members Liz Cheney and Zoe Lofgren wrote an opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal outlining reforms to the Electoral Count Act that they said would ensure “Congress can’t overturn an election result”, which is what those who staged the Capitol attack in early 2021 wanted.
“It’s past time”, added Cheney – a Republican from Wyoming – and Lofgren, a California Democrat.
They cited how a number of people seeking political office in November’s
midterm elections, including those who would oversee the electoral process, have embraced lies from former president Donald Trump that fraudsters stole the election from him against Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race. Those lies inspired Trump’s supporters to mount the Capitol attack in a desperate plot to prevent the House and Senate from certifying the former Republican president’s electoral college loss to his Democratic rival.
“This raises the prospect of another effort to steal a presidential election, perhaps with another attempt to corrupt Congress’s proceeding to tally electoral college votes,” the piece from Cheney and Lofgren said.
One of the changes which the two congresswomen propose to the Electoral Count Act – first passed in 1887 – is to make clear that a vice-president who ceremonially presides over the Senate lacks any “authority or discretion” to reject a race’s result or delay its certification.
That measure is a direct response to Trump’s long-held insistence that his vice-president, Mike Pence, could have single-handedly stopped Congress’s certification of his defeat. Pence – who Trump’s supporters wanted to hang on the day of the attack – has correctly noted that he had no constitutional or legal authority to do that.
Additionally, Cheney and Lofgren said they wanted to empower presidential candidates to sue any local-level officials who try to hold up sending
election results to Congress for certification. And the pair wanted to limit the grounds on which members of Congress can protest against slates of electors, requiring one-third approval from both chambers for any objections to be considered and a majority to be sustained.
Cheney and Lofgren said their proposal “intended to preserve the rule of law for all future presidential elections by ensuring that self-interested politicians cannot steal from the people the guarantee that our government derives its power from the consent of the governed”.
The duo’s bill, which they expect to formally introduce this week, could be considered in the House in the coming days, according to the chamber’s Democratic majority leader, Steny Hoyer of Maryland.
The Senate, for its part, is engaged in government funding negotiations as a 30 September deadline approaches.
The bipartisan committee to which Cheney and Lofgren belong held a series of public hearings earlier this year pressing the case that Trump appears to have violated federal law, among other alleged misdeeds, when he ignored pleas to take action that would have halted his supporters’ assault on the Capitol. The Capitol attack investigation panel has also explored the potential roles that Trump and his advisers had in advance of the January 6 assault.
Meanwhile, in August, FBI agents searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after the bureau said it found evidence that the defeated former president was improperly retaining government secrets there without authorization.
Cheney’s work on the January 6 committee – and her general opposition to Trump’s lies about his defeat to Biden – carried a steep political cost for her. She was denied another term in Congress after losing a Republican primary election in August to Harriet Hageman, who has echoed Trump’s falsehoods about the outcome of the 2020 presidential race.
In June, Lofgren won her party primary and is set to face Republican challenger Peter Hernandez during the 8 November midterm elections.