Jonah Goldberg: Veep gambit puts some GOP legislators on stupid side of history

A lot of stupid things are said about history.

For example, there is no “right side” of history, if by that you mean events are destined to play out in some sort of preordained way.

But there is such a thing as being on the stupid side of history — and there’s a mad rush to be on it.

President Trump’s lawyers failed to convince a single judge, Trump-appointed or otherwise, that there was systemic fraud in the 2020 election, never mind sufficiently outrageous fraud to warrant disenfranchising millions of voters. So Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, sued Vice President Mike Pence to force him to do exactly that.

The lawsuit, dismissed by a federal judge Friday, was premised on an idea very popular in the more feverish corners of the right. It held that because the vice president has a ceremonial role in receiving the certified votes from the states, he has the authority to reject any votes he doesn’t like. There are people who want Pence on Wednesday to take the official, certified and approved electoral votes and say, in effect, “Nope, these don’t count. Send me electoral votes for my boss, Donald Trump.”

I’m reluctant to take this argument too seriously, lest some people get the impression it’s a serious argument. But here’s what you need to know.

First, voters don’t directly elect the president. The states do. Each state holds its own presidential election. The winner in each state gets that state’s Electoral College votes. Each state has final say on which candidate its electors go to. The winner of the most votes in the Electoral College wins the presidency. This system is the bedrock of our federalist structure.

The Constitution says: “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.” The president of the Senate is the vice president of the United States.

Putting everything else aside, how profoundly stupid do you have to be to believe that the founders intended for the vice president to be able to select the next president regardless of official election results? Why is former Vice President John Nance Garner’s verdict that the job isn’t worth a “bucket of warm spit” (or in some versions, a more noxious form of bodily effluvia) the only thing for which anyone remembers Garner?

I should note if you take this idea seriously, not only would the vice president be massively more powerful than anybody ever thought, but the very idea of federal elections and federalism itself would be rendered null and void. A single highly partisan politician simply could override the will of the states, and the electorate generally, and pick the winner. Why not just have the debates in the vice president’s living room from now on?

Now, Gohmert is nobody’s idea of a legal scholar. But Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., fancies himself one. A former Missouri attorney general and law professor, Hawley didn’t endorse Gohmert’s lawsuit, but he lent aid and comfort to the idiotic idea behind it.

I’ll be blunt and state the obvious: Hawley doesn’t believe any of it. But he does believe embracing a stupid lie about the election being stolen is in his political interest. Hawley made a lot of noise people such as Gohmert want to hear. The same goes for a large number of GOP House members who also will contest the election results this week, not because they believe what they’re saying, but because they think it’s more important to pass yet another Trump loyalty test.

And this is what I mean about the stupid side of history. There is zero chance future generations will remember this as anything other than an idiotic and unpatriotic gambit. But for Gohmert and Hawley, it’s apparently better to be on the stupid side of history than to be on the right side of anything.