EXTRTEMISTS FORCE US TO WRITE OUT LAWS...:

To be clear, abuse of the ECA didn't start in the 2020 election. The act's provisions were mostly unexplored for well over a century until congressional Democrats began using the process for grandstanding objections to the 2000, 2004 and 2016 elections. While these were much more tepid protests and attracted much less support than the 2020 objections, they helped pave the way for the Republicans' escalation.

The Democrats' previous attempts to exploit weaknesses in the ECA no doubt bolstered Republican support for ECA reform. In September, the Senate Rules Committee advanced the Electoral Count Reform Act, the flagship product of the bipartisan working group led by Sens. Susan Collins and Joe Manchin. The bill was voted to the Senate floor on a resounding 14-1 bipartisan vote, including a crucial yes vote from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose support makes it politically easier for other Republicans to back the reform. Only one Republican, Sen. Ted Cruz, opposed the measure, and his arguments, which were confused and unpersuasive, included the idea that Congress could overrule the decisions of state elections officials--a contradiction of his purported conservative, federalist principles.

Under the Senate bill, a number of important changes are made to make the ECA clearer, harder to exploit and more closely aligned with sound interpretations of the Constitution. Federal courts are provided with a streamlined procedure and clearer statutory basis to decide presidential election disputes, including how to handle a rogue governor or secretary of state who refuses to certify the rightful winner of their state's electoral votes, thereby undermining the state's appointment of electors. In addition, the role of Congress is much more explicitly curtailed, reflecting the constitutional principle that it is not within Congress' power to sit in judgment of how each state conducted its popular election. Most crucially, the number of congressional cosponsors needed to raise objections and launch full-scale debate during the electoral count in Congress is raised from the current threshold of just one member of each chamber to one-fifth of each chamber.

The reformed law would also repudiate one of the most dangerous claims made by John Eastman and other Trump allies in 2020: the idea that state legislatures have any power to overturn their state's results after the fact, such as by convening in December to pick a slate of Trump electors even after the state's voters chose Biden in November. Instead, the bill would clearly state the proper constitutional interpretation: that a state legislature's power over the "manner" of choosing electors expires once that method is implemented on Election Day.

On top of these substantive provisions, the law also provides a much-needed reorganization of the rules of congressional procedure contained in the ECA. Gone are the run-on sentences that ramble on for hundreds of words and are nearly impossible to parse. Though it might sound superficial, simply inserting more punctuation, paragraph breaks and clearer language goes a long way to clean up ambiguities that could be exploited in the future. Among these rules changes is an unambiguous declaration that the vice president has no discretionary power over the proceedings, shutting down the argument that Mike Pence could have simply refused to count votes for Biden.

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