If Donald Trump is right that former Vice President Mike Pence could have single-handedly tossed out the results of the 2020 presidential election, that means current Vice President Kamala Harris gets to choose the next president, quipped Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.).
Pence did not — nor will Harris — have the right to unilaterally pick a president regardless of voters’ choice.
But Lofgren was mocking Trump’s claim. If it were up to a vice president — and not the nation’s voters — to choose the next president, a political party would never quit the Oval Office.
“I guess the former president is saying that the vice president gets to choose the next president,” Lofgren said Sunday on CNN. (Check out the video above at 1:40.) “In which case, Kamala Harris will be presiding at the [next] counting of the [electoral] votes. I guess he’s saying she gets to chose who the next president is.”
Lofgren, a member of the House select committee investigating the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, added, smiling: “That’s clearly not what the Constitution provides for. He must be kidding.”
He didn’t sound like he was kidding. Pence “did have the right to change the outcome” of the presidential election, Trump said in a statement Sunday. “Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”
MSNBC’s Ari Melber early last month challenged Trump’s former trade adviser Peter Navarro, who also boldly discussed plans to overthrow the presidential election.
Melber accused Navarro of maneuvering to leverage the remaining “incumbent losing party`s power” to “reverse” Trump’s defeat. “Do you realize you`re describing a coup?” Melber asked.
“If the incumbent administration, through the president or the vice president, could just cancel the election outcome ... then a lot of people would try to stay in power,” Melber added. “We have an entire system designed to thwart” that idea.
Trump’s critics on Twitter — tongues firmly in cheek — loved the idea of Harris picking the next president, just the way the former president thinks it ought to be.