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Two things in brief:
1) Eastman got his tit caught in the wringer when he got himself involved with the likes of Trump, Bannon, (Stone?) and Giuliani for starters - to try to overthrow the last presidential election that rolled itself into a coup type of an event on 1/6 at our Capitol. Pence didn't buy into it no matter how hard they tried, especially Trump.
2) I suspect that there needs to be some safeguard clauses added to our Constitutional Amendments to better define and explain the workings of our Constitution that prevents any of our governing officials from abusing it. Especially from a rogue president and their goons! Our nation depends on it.
Or - is everything as it should be and left alone??
Eastman argued that the Constitution gives the vice president the authority to determine how to resolve any conflicts when states send dueling slates of electors, and to disregard any statute that says otherwise. Thus Pence would be on solid ground in throwing out Biden’s victories in seven states, with the result that Trump would be declared the victor. There are two main objections to Eastman’s view: The Constitution gives no such power to the vice president, and even if it did, the states had not sent dueling slates of electors.
The Twelfth Amendment stipulates that the vice president, in his capacity as the president of the Senate, “shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” Eastman quotes that language and then says there is “very solid legal authority” that the vice president gets to judge which electors count. It would have been screwy for the drafters and ratifiers of the Twelfth Amendment to establish a system in which the vice president exercises this kind of power, and there is no evidence in the text to suggest that they did.
No state government body, meanwhile, certified a Trump victory in any of the seven states Eastman mentions. Each state officially submitted only one set of electors to the National Archives. There were no dueling slates of electors. Some Trump supporters claimed to be casting electoral votes for Trump in those states, sure, but they had no official standing under the Constitution, federal law, or state law — and even some of them said they were acting only in case something came of Trump’s election lawsuits.
1) Eastman got his tit caught in the wringer when he got himself involved with the likes of Trump, Bannon, (Stone?) and Giuliani for starters - to try to overthrow the last presidential election that rolled itself into a coup type of an event on 1/6 at our Capitol. Pence didn't buy into it no matter how hard they tried, especially Trump.
2) I suspect that there needs to be some safeguard clauses added to our Constitutional Amendments to better define and explain the workings of our Constitution that prevents any of our governing officials from abusing it. Especially from a rogue president and their goons! Our nation depends on it.
Or - is everything as it should be and left alone??
The Eastman Memo | National Review
Former VP Dan Quayle had better advice for Mike Pence on throwing out Electoral College results — that he had ‘no flexibility on this: None. Zero. Forget it.’
Eastman argued that the Constitution gives the vice president the authority to determine how to resolve any conflicts when states send dueling slates of electors, and to disregard any statute that says otherwise. Thus Pence would be on solid ground in throwing out Biden’s victories in seven states, with the result that Trump would be declared the victor. There are two main objections to Eastman’s view: The Constitution gives no such power to the vice president, and even if it did, the states had not sent dueling slates of electors.
The Twelfth Amendment stipulates that the vice president, in his capacity as the president of the Senate, “shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.” Eastman quotes that language and then says there is “very solid legal authority” that the vice president gets to judge which electors count. It would have been screwy for the drafters and ratifiers of the Twelfth Amendment to establish a system in which the vice president exercises this kind of power, and there is no evidence in the text to suggest that they did.
No state government body, meanwhile, certified a Trump victory in any of the seven states Eastman mentions. Each state officially submitted only one set of electors to the National Archives. There were no dueling slates of electors. Some Trump supporters claimed to be casting electoral votes for Trump in those states, sure, but they had no official standing under the Constitution, federal law, or state law — and even some of them said they were acting only in case something came of Trump’s election lawsuits.
U.S. Constitution - Twelfth Amendment | Resources | Constitution Annotated | Congress.gov | Library of Congress
The original text of the Twelfth Amendment of the Constitution of the United States.