Senate Expected to Close Electoral College Loopholes, Clarify That VP's Role in Certifying Votes Is Ceremonial
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Olivier Douliery/Pool/Getty; Alex Wong/Getty Donald Trump (left), Mike Pence
A group of senators is working on finalizing legislation to reform electoral loopholes and to clarify the role of the Vice President in electoral certification as ceremonial only.
The bipartisan group, which just recently resumed their talks amid the Jan. 6 hearings, aims to have the final text by next week, NBC reported.
"We're very close," Republican Sen. Susan Collins told reporters Wednesday, per NBC. "We've got a few technical issues that we need to iron out, and I'm very hopeful that we'll have a bill early next week — or bills."
Multiple bills might be needed, she explained, because "the Rules Committee clearly has jurisdiction over the Electoral Count Act, Homeland Security clearly has jurisdiction over the Postal Service and over presidential transitions, which we are also trying to smooth out when there's a case when it isn't clear who's won."
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Francis Chung/AP
The senators met on Wednesday in an attempt to finalize any unresolved issues, and CNN reported Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell are both on board with the talks aimed at closing loopholes in election law.
"We gained consensus on presidential transition, the Electoral Count Act and the responsibility of the vice president about certification proceedings," Republican Sen. Thom Tillis told NBC News.
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Talk of electoral reform first arose when former President Donald Trump made efforts to get Congress and former Vice President Mike Pence to object to President Joe Biden's electoral win and deliver Trump a second term instead.
At the time, Trump berated Pence and encouraged him to send the decision back to the states, CNN reported. Pence resisted Trump and became a target of Trump and his mob of supporters, who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Scott Eisen/Getty Mike Pence
During the hearings into the attack and the wider efforts to overturn Joe Biden's 2020 election victory, Pence has been one of the main focus points of the committee.
Former aides and those close to Trump, including daughter Ivanka Trump, attorney Rudy Giuliani, former assistant Nicholas Luna, and Ivanka's chief of staff Julie Radford, testified before the U.S. House committee investigating the riots of Jan. 6, 2021 that the former president had an "angry" phone call with Pence the morning of Jan. 6.
"The conversation was ... was pretty heated," Ivanka said, in pre-recorded video testimony. "It was a different tone than I'd heard him take with the vice president before."
Luna offered further details, saying, "I remember hearing the word 'wimp.' Either he called him a wimp — I don't remember if he said, 'you are a wimp, you'll be a wimp' — wimp is the word I remember."
According to Radford, Trump called Pence "the p-word."
The testimony backs up previous reporting by The New York Times, which claimed that Trump had told Pence he could "either go down in history as a patriot [or] you can go down in history as a p----." (Trump later said he "wouldn't dispute" those reports.)
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The committee also heard testimony alleging that Trump approved of the outrage directed at Pence by the rioters, some of whom were filmed chanting, "Hang Mike Pence" as they entered the building.
In day one of the public hearings, Vice Chair Liz Cheney — the top Republican on the House committee — said that witness testimony revealed that Trump "'didn't really want to put anything out,' calling off the riot or asking his supporters to leave ... Aware of the rioters' chants to 'hang Mike Pence,' the President responded with this sentiment: 'Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it."
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Speaking on Fox News in January, Pence said he hadn't spoken to his former boss since "last summer."
"And you know I've said many times, it was difficult, Jan. 6 was difficult," he told told Fox News host Jesse Watters on Jesse Watters Primetime. "It was a tragic day in the life of the nation."
Pence continued: "I know I did my duty under the Constitution of the United States, but the president and I sat down in the days that followed that, we spoke about it, talked through it, we parted amicably."
