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      Trump's phone call to Brad Raffensperger: six key points

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      Donald Trump has been recorded pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to overturn US president-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state, in a tape obtained by the Washington Post.
      The conversation is mainly between Trump and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, but Trump allies including Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff, and attorney Cleta Mitchell were also present, as was Ryan Germany, Raffensperger’s general counsel. Here are the main points:
      1. Trump sought to change the election result
      On the call Trump pressed Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes”.
      “The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.” He later pleaded: “So what are we going to do here folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”
      Joe Biden won Georgia. The result has been certified and Biden’s electoral college victory will be ratified by Congress on Wednesday.
      2. Trump tried to intimidate Raffensperger
      Trump insisted: “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.” He went on to suggest that Raffensperger could face a criminal investigation. “You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” Trump said. “You know, that’s a criminal offence. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”
      3. Trump applied pressure over Georgia runoffs
      Trump told Raffensperger that if he did not act by Tuesday he would be harming the chances of Georgia Republicans David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler in this week’s runoff elections, which will determine whether the Democrats or the Republicans control the Senate. Referring to the runoffs in the call, Trump said, “You would be respected, really respected, if this can be straightened out before the election.”
      4. Raffensperger continued to stand up to Trump
      Raffensperger is a Republican who has pushed back against Trump and insisted Biden’s win in Georgia was fair. Responding to Trump, he said: “Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”
      When Trump claimed that over 5,000 ballots were cast in the state by dead people, Raffensperger responded: “The actual number was two. Two. Two people that were dead that voted.”
      5. Trump may have committed a crime
      The University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said Trump might be “in legal jeopardy after Biden is inaugurated”. In an email to the Guardian, he wrote: “For example, if the justice department or US attorneys believe that Trump violated federal law, or if local prosecutors in states such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump may have engaged in similar behaviour with state or local election officials, believe that Trump violated state election laws, the federal or state prosecutors could file suit against Trump.”
      Richard H Pildes, a constitutional law professor at New York University, told the Washington Post: “The president is either knowingly attempting to coerce state officials into corrupting the integrity of the election or is so deluded that he believes what he’s saying.” Trump’s actions may have violated federal statutes, he said.
      Michael R Bromwich, a former federal prosecutor in the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, wrote: “Unless there are portions of the tape that somehow negate criminal intent, ‘I just want to find 11,780 votes’ and his threats against Raffensperger and his counsel violate 52 U.S. Code 20511.”
      6. Trump refused to back down
      On Sunday Trump tweeted: “I spoke to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday about Fulton county and voter fraud in Georgia. He was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”
      Twitter labelled the tweet with the disclaimer: “This claim about election fraud is disputed” and Raffensperger responded to Trump’s claims with a tweet saying: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.” More

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      'I just want 11,780 votes': Trump pressed Georgia to overturn Biden victory

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      In an hour-long phone call on Saturday, Donald Trump pressed Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger to overturn Joe Biden’s victory there in the election the president refuses to concede.The Washington Post obtained a tape of the “extraordinary hour-long call”, which Trump acknowledged on Twitter.Amid widespread outrage including calls for a second impeachment, Bob Bauer, a senior Biden adviser, said: “We now have irrefutable proof of a president pressuring and threatening an official of his own party to get him to rescind a state’s lawful, certified vote count and fabricate another in its place.”The Post published the full call.“The people of Georgia are angry, the people in the country are angry,” Trump said. “And there’s nothing wrong with saying, you know, um, that you’ve recalculated.”Raffensperger is a Republican who has become a bête noire among Trump supporters for repeatedly saying Biden’s win in his state was fair. In one of a number of parries, he said: “Well, Mr President, the challenge that you have is, the data you have is wrong.”Trump said: “So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have. Because we won the state.”He also insisted: “There’s no way I lost Georgia. There’s no way. We won by hundreds of thousands of votes.”Trump’s contempt for democracy is laid bare. Once again. On tapeTrump did not win Georgia, which went Democratic for the first time since 1992. Its result has been certified. Attempts to pressure Republicans in other battleground states have failed, as have the vast majority of challenges to results in court.Despite promised objections from at least 12 Republican senators and a majority of the House GOP, Biden’s electoral college victory will be ratified by Congress on Wednesday. The Democrat will be inaugurated as the 46th president on 20 January. Trump will then leave the White House – where he remained, tweeting angrily, all weekend.Edward B Foley, an Ohio State law professor, told the Post the call was “‘inappropriate and contemptible’ and should prompt moral outrage”. Trump’s behaviour was “already tripping the emergency meter,” he added. “So we were at 12 on a scale of one to 10, and now we’re at 15.”In an email to the Guardian, University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said: “The conduct that the press has reported might place Trump in legal jeopardy after Biden is inaugurated.“For example, if the justice department or US attorneys believe that Trump violated federal law or if local prosecutors in states, such as Arizona, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, where Trump may have engaged in similar behaviour with state or local election officials, believe that Trump violated state election laws, the federal or state prosecutors could file suit against Trump.”Noah Bookbinder, executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, went further, calling for Trump to be impeached a second time, even though he has little more than two weeks left in office.“The president of the United States has been caught on tape trying to rig a presidential election,” Bookbinder said. “This is a low point in American history and unquestionably impeachable conduct. It is incontrovertible and devastating.“When the Senate acquitted President Trump for abusing his powers to try to get himself re-elected [in February 2020, regarding approaches to Ukraine for dirt on Biden], we worried that he would grow more brazen in his attempts to wrongly and illegally keep himself in power. He has … Congress must act immediately.”From Congress, in a tweet, Adam Schiff, the Democratic chair of the House intelligence committee, said: “Trump’s contempt for democracy is laid bare. Once again. On tape.”The lead prosecutor at Trump’s Senate impeachment trial last year added: “Pressuring an election official to ‘find’ the votes so he can win is potentially criminal, and another flagrant abuse of power by a corrupt man who would be a despot, if we allowed him. We will not.”Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat widely expected to be elected House speaker for a fourth term, set out her strategy for the election certification in a memo to colleagues.“Over the years,” she wrote, “we have experienced many challenges in the House, but no situation matches the Trump presidency and the Trump disrespect for the will of the people.”Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois, tweeted: “This is absolutely appalling. To every member of Congress considering objecting to the election results, you cannot – in light of this – do so with a clean conscience.”Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock’White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Cleta Mitchell, a Republican lawyer, were also on the call, during which Trump ran through a laundry list of debunked claims regarding supposed electoral fraud and called Raffensperger a “child”, “either dishonest or incompetent” and a “schmuck”.Characteristically, Trump also threatened legal action.“You know what they did and you’re not reporting it,” he said. “You know, that’s a criminal offence. And you know, you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan [Germany], your lawyer. That’s a big risk.”Referring to runoffs on Tuesday that will decide control of the Senate, Trump said Georgia had “a big election coming up and because of what you’ve done to the president – you know, the people of Georgia know that this was a scam.“Because of what you’ve done to the president, a lot of people aren’t going out to vote, and a lot of Republicans are going to vote negative, because they hate what you did to the president. OK? They hate it. And they’re going to vote. And you would be respected, really respected, if this can be straightened out before the election.”Republican incumbents Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue, seeking to beat Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, have ranged themselves behind Trump. But Georgia Republicans fear his attacks could suppress his own party’s turnout as Democrats work to boost their own.Early voting has reached unprecedented levels and on Sunday, former gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams told ABC’s This Week: “What we’re so excited about is that we haven’t stopped reaching those voters. Millions of contacts have been made, thousands of new registrations have been held. We know that at least 100,000 people who did not vote in the general election are now voting in this election.”Trump told Raffensperger: “Stacey Abrams is laughing about you. She’s going around saying, ‘These guys are dumber than a rock.’”Trump also said he knew the call wasn’t “going anywhere”. Raffensperger ended the conversation.On Twitter on Sunday, Trump said Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more. He has no clue!”Twitter duly applied a standard disclaimer: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.”Raffensperger also responded: “Respectfully, President Trump: What you’re saying is not true.” More

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      'Traitors and patriots': Republican push to keep Trump in power seems doomed

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      All 12 Republican senators who have pledged not to ratify the electoral college results on Wednesday, and thereby refuse to confirm Joe Biden’s resounding victory over Donald Trump in the presidential election, declined to defend their move on television, a CNN host said on Sunday.
      “It all recalls what Ulysses S Grant once wrote in 1861,” Jake Tapper said on State of the Union, before quoting a letter the union general wrote at the outset of a civil war he won before becoming president himself: ‘There are [but] two parties now: traitors and patriots.’
      “How would you describe the parties today?” Tapper asked.
      The attempt to overturn Trump’s defeat seems doomed, a piece of political theatre mounted by party grandees eager to court supporters loyal to the president before, in some cases, mounting their own runs for the White House.
      Nonetheless on Saturday Ted Cruz of Texas and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin led 11 senators and senators-elect in calling for “an emergency 10-day audit” of results in states where the president claims electoral fraud, despite failing to provide evidence and repeatedly losing in court.
      The senators followed Josh Hawley of Missouri – like Cruz thought likely to run for president in 2024 – in pledging to object to the electoral college result. A majority of House Republicans are also expected to object, after staging a Saturday call with Trump to plan their own moves.
      Democrats control the House and senior Senate Republicans are opposed to the attempt to disenfranchise millions – many of them African Americans in swing states – seemingly guaranteeing the attempt will fail. Nonetheless, Vice-President Mike Pence, who will preside over the ratification, welcomed the move by Cruz and others.
      A spokesman for Biden, Michael Gwin, said: “This stunt won’t change the fact that President-elect Biden will be sworn in on 20 January, and these baseless claims have already been examined and dismissed by Trump’s own attorney general, dozens of courts, and election officials from both parties.”
      Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee now a senator from Utah, said: “The egregious ploy to reject electors may enhance the political ambition of some, but dangerously threatens our democratic republic.
      “…More Americans participated in this election than ever before, and they made their choice. President Trump’s lawyers made their case before scores of courts; in every instance, they failed.
      “…Adding to this ill-conceived endeavour by some in Congress is the president’s call for his supporters to come to the Capitol on the day when this matter is to be debated and decided. This has the predictable potential to lead to disruption, and worse.”
      Encouraged by Trump, far-right groups including the Proud Boys are expected to gather in Washington on Wednesday. More

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      Healthcare to the electoral college: seven ways 2020 left America exposed | Robert Reich

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      If America learns nothing else from these dark times, here are seven lessons it should take from 2020:1 Workers keep America going, not billionairesAmerican workers have been forced to put their lives on the line to provide essential services even as their employers failed to provide adequate protective gear, hazard pay, or notice of when Covid had infected their workplaces. Meanwhile, America’s 651 billionaires – whose net worth has grown by more than $1tn since the start of the pandemic – retreated to their mansions, yachts and estates.Amazon’s chief executive, Jeff Bezos, sheltered in his 165,000-acre west Texas ranch while Amazon warehouse workers toiled in close proximity, often without adequate masks, gloves or sanitizers. The company offered but soon scrapped a $2 an hour hazard pay increase, even as Bezos’ wealth jumped by a staggering $70bn since March, putting his estimated net worth at roughly $186bn as the year came to an end.2 Systemic racism is killing Black and Latino AmericansBlack and Latino Americans account for almost 40% of coronavirus deaths so far, despite comprising less than a quarter of the population. As they’ve borne the brunt of this pandemic, they’ve been forced to fight for their humanity in another regard: taking to the streets to protest decades of unjust police killings, only to be met with more police violence.Among Native American communities, the coronavirus figures are even more horrifying. The Navajo Nation has had a higher per-capita infection rate than any state but cannot adequately care for the sick, thanks to years of federal underfunding and neglect of its healthcare system.Decades of segregated housing, pollution, lack of access to medical care, and poverty have left communities of color vulnerable to the worst of this virus, and the worst of America.3 If we can afford to bail out corporations and Wall Street, we sure as hell can afford to help peopleThe Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, continues to insist the nation cannot “afford” $2,000 survival checks for every American. But the latest relief legislation doled out more than $220bn to powerful business interests that could have been used for struggling working families.Another way of looking at it: the total cost of providing those $2,000 checks ($465bn) would be less than half the amount America’s 651 billionaires added to their wealth during the pandemic ($1tn).4 Healthcare must be made a rightEven before this crisis struck, an estimated 28 million Americans lacked health insurance. An additional 15 million lost employer-provided coverage because they lost their jobs. Without insurance, a hospital stay to treat Covid-19 cost as much as $73,000. Remember this the next time you hear pundits saying Medicare for All is too radical.5 Our social safety nets are woefully brokenNo other advanced nation was as unprepared for the pandemic as was the US. Our unemployment insurance system is more than 80 years old, designed for a different America. We’re one of the few countries in the world that doesn’t provide all workers some form of paid sick leave.Other industrialized nations kept unemployment rates low by guaranteeing paychecks. Americans who filed for unemployment benefits often got nothing, or received them weeks or months late. Under new legislation they get just $300 a week of extra benefits to tide them over.6 The electoral college must be abolishedJoe Biden won 7m more votes than Trump. But his winning margin in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin totaled just 45,000. Had Trump won those three states, he would have gained 37 electoral votes, tying Biden in the electoral college. This would have pushed the election to the House of Representatives, with each state delegation getting one vote. Even though Democrats have a majority in the House, more state delegations have Republican majorities. Trump would have been re-elected.The gap between the popular and electoral college vote continues to widen. The electoral college is an increasingly dangerous anachronism.7 Government mattersFor decades, conservatives have told us government is the problem and we should let the free market run its course. Rubbish. The coronavirus has shown yet again that the unfettered free market won’t save us. After 40 years of Reaganism, it’s never been clearer: government is in fact necessary to protect the public.It’s tragic that it took a pandemic, near-record unemployment, millions taking to the streets and a near-calamitous election for many to grasp how broken, racist and backwards our system really is. Biggest lesson of all: it must be fixed. More

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      Ted Cruz and other Republican senators oppose certifying election results

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      Ted Cruz of Texas, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and nine other Republican US senators or senators-elect said on Saturday they will reject presidential electors from states where Donald Trump has contested his defeat by Joe Biden, “unless and until [an] emergency 10-day audit” of such results is completed.
      The move is largely symbolic and unlikely to overturn the presidential election. Nonetheless, it adds to a sense of deepening crisis affecting US democracy.
      Trump has refused to concede, though Biden won more than 7m more votes nationally and took the electoral college by 306-232, a margin Trump called a landslide when he won it over Hillary Clinton in 2016.
      The Trump campaign has lost the vast majority of more than 50 lawsuits it has mounted in battleground states, alleging electoral fraud, and before the supreme court.
      On Friday, a federal judge dismissed a suit lodged by a House Republican which attempted to give the vice-president, Mike Pence, who will preside over the certification of the electoral college result on Wednesday, the power to overturn it.
      Nonetheless, the senators and senators-elect who issued a statement on Saturday followed Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri in committing to challenging the result.
      Objections are also expected from a majority of House Republicans. Objections must be debated and voted on but as Democrats control the House and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and other senior Republicans have voiced opposition, the attempt to disenfranchise a majority of Americans seems doomed to fail.
      On Saturday, Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska said she would vote to certify the results, writing: “The oath I took at my swearing-in was to support and defend the constitution of the United States, and that is exactly what I will do.”
      But Cruz and Johnson were joined by Senators James Lankford (Oklahoma), Steve Daines (Montana), John Kennedy (Louisiana), Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee) and Mike Braun (Indiana). Senators-elect Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming), Roger Marshall (Kansas), Bill Hagerty (Tennessee) and Tommy Tuberville (Alabama) also signed on.
      “The election of 2020,” they said, “like the election of 2016, was hard fought and, in many swing states, narrowly decided. The 2020 election, however, featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities.”
      No hard evidence for such claims has been presented. Federal officials including former attorney general William Barr and Christopher Krebs, a cyber security chief fired by Trump, have said the election was secure.
      Regardless, the senators said Congress “should immediately appoint an electoral commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states. Once completed, individual states would evaluate the commission’s findings and could convene a special legislative session to certify a change in their vote, if needed.”
      The senators made reference to the contested election of 1876, which ended in the appointment of such a commission.
      “We should follow that precedent,” they said.
      Most well-informed observers would suggest otherwise, given that process put an end to post-civil war Reconstruction and led to the institution of racist Jim Crow laws across the formerly slave-owning south.
      In August, the Pulitzer-winning historian Eric Foner told the Guardian: “The election of 1876 would not have been disputed at all if there hadn’t been massive violence in the south to prevent black people from voting and voter suppression like we have today. Now, voter suppression is mostly legal.”
      Presciently, given baseless claims that voting under a pandemic was abused by Democrats, he added: “Today, I can certainly see the Trump people challenging these mail-in ballots: ‘They’re all fraudulent, they shouldn’t be counted.’ Challenging people’s voting.”
      Cruz, like Hawley, is prominent among Republicans expected to run for president in 2024, and thus eager to appeal to supporters loyal to Trump. On Saturday, Christine Pelosi, daughter of House speaker Nancy Pelosi and a member of the Democratic National Committee, referred to the bitter 2016 primary when she tweeted: “Ted Cruz is defending Trump’s assaults on democracy with more energy than he defended his own family against Trump’s assaults on his wife and father.”
      The Democratic strategist Max Burns wrote: “The exact same Senate GOP that refused to allow a single witness during President Trump’s impeachment trial now wants to … call a bunch of witnesses to ‘investigate’ Joe Biden’s 2020 victory.”
      Biden did not immediately comment. In Congress, the Connecticut senator Richard Blumenthal branded the statement “pathetic”, “un-American” and “an attack on our democracy”. Amy Klobuchar, from Minnesota, said Biden “will be inaugurated on 20 January, and no publicity stunt will change that”. More

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      What to expect when Congress meets to certify Biden's victory

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      US Congress meets on 6 January to certify Joe Biden’s election victory – here’s what to expect.
      A joint session of the US Congress meets at 1pm on Wednesday formally to count the votes cast by the electoral college – 306 for Biden, 232 for Donald Trump – in the last step of the process for certification of the new president.
      Under the Electoral Count Act of 1887, members of the House of Representatives and the Senate meet in the Capitol. Mike Pence will preside in his role as president of the senate.
      The vice-president opens certificates of the electoral votes delivered from each state – whose electors met to cast their ballots on 14 December – and hand them to party “tellers” to read aloud. As they read each state’s certification, Pence will ask if there are official objections.
      Any such objections are then read out, resulting in a suspension of the session and members of the two legislative houses considering them separately.
      Discussion on each objection is limited to two hours. Both houses then vote on the objection, with a simple majority required to toss out that state’s votes. After all votes are counted, the vice-president declares the winner of the election. More

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      Republican plan to challenge election signals ‘cult of Trump’ will live on in Biden era

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      Maverick super-loyalists to Donald Trump are set to make an audacious spectacle in Washington next week by voting against the formal counting of electoral college votes certifying Joe Biden’s victory.While the tactic by outliers won’t be enough to stop Biden becoming the 46th president, it will serve to disrupt Congress, bolster Trump and establish an acidic tone to political co-operation with the incoming Democratic administration.Two Republican members of the House of Representatives are reported to have told CNN, without releasing their names, that they expect around 140 GOP colleagues to vote against a procedural certification vote in a joint session of Congress on 6 January. The strategy speaks to the continuing stranglehold the outgoing president maintains over a significant faction of the party, political observers said on Friday.Peter Wehner, vice-president at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative thinktank, and speech writer for three Republican presidents, called the prospect of many Republican lawmakers voting against certification “a disturbing sign”.“It’s an indication that this is a secession-from-reality caucus,” Wehner told the Guardian.“It’s illiberal, anti-democratic, pernicious and widespread in the Republican party. It’s not just a closing act for the Trump-era but an opening act for the post-Trump era. It’s virtue-signaling to the base that after Trump leaves, these people still consider themselves to be Trump acolytes and part of the cult of Trump.”Democratic consultants concurred.“This is still the Trump party,” said strategist Hank Sheinkopf. “They may see this as an act of survival, and may not even believe in the reality of what they’re doing. What they do believe in is getting re-elected in [midterm elections in] 2022. If we had a president who was prepared to leave quietly, this would not be a discussion.”The looming spectacle comes despite the failure of Trump’s legal team to win any of at least 40 lawsuits involving allegations of voter fraud in November, an election officials called the most secure in American history.On Wednesday, Trump ally and Missouri Republican Senator Josh Hawley announced he would object to certifying the electoral votes during the joint session on 6 January .In an essay published Wednesday in the conservative commentary magazine The Blaze, editor Mark Levin backed up Hawley, claiming that states failed to follow their own election laws.But in a conference call on Thursday, Senate majority leader and Kentucky Republican Mitch McConnell reportedly said that his 6 January vote certifying Biden’s victory will be “the most consequential I have ever cast”.McConnell has told senators not to join any attempt to delegitimize the electoral votes, believing that the effort could cause Republicans to lose two Senate seats being contested in the run-offs in Georgia on 5 January.Wehner believes McConnell opposes Hawley’s effort because it forces Republicans to go on record and potentially threatens his control of the Senate. “If they go on the record against what Hawley is doing it’s going to inflame the Republican base; if they agree it with it, it’s so transparently ludicrous that it’s going to hurt some Republicans in more moderate states,” Wehner said.In a blistering open letter on Wednesday, Nebraska Republican Senator Ben Sasse also opposed Hawley, warning that “all the clever arguments and rhetorical gymnastics in the world won’t change the fact that this January 6th effort is designed to disenfranchise millions of Americans simply because they voted for someone in a different party”.“We have a bunch of ambitious politicians who think there’s a quick way to tap into the president’s populist base without doing any real, long-term damage,” Sasse wrote. “But they’re wrong … adults don’t point a loaded gun at the heart of legitimate self-government.”According to Jim Sleeper, retiring professor of political science at Yale University, the House Republicans’ rebel plan aspires to assist the kind of McConnell-led obstructionism he practiced against the Obama administration.“Beyond January 20, we’re looking at a Republican party that is gearing up to make sure – assuming Democrats don’t win control of the Senate – that McConnell will be able to repeat his act of stymying almost everything that Democrats could hope to do.”Any effort to block certification goes along in tandem to suppress voting, Sleeper believes, that springs from organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).He said it was part of a larger operation to restrict mechanisms that an open, democratic process make possible.“It’s part of a creeping coup d’etat that we’ve seen Trump going along with in his own loopy-minded way,” he said. More

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      US judge dismisses suit filed against Pence seeking to overturn election result

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      A US judge has rejected a lawsuit from a Republican congressman that sought to allow vice president Mike Pence to reject electoral college votes for Joe Biden when Congress meets on Wednesday to certify his victory over president Donald Trump.The latest long-shot attempt by Trump’s Republican allies to overturn the November election result was dismissed by one of Trump’s own appointees to the federal bench, Jeremy Kernodle.He ruled that representative Louie Gohmert of Texas and a slate of Republican electors from Arizona could not show they suffered any personal harm “fairly traceable” to Pence’s allegedly unlawful conduct and, therefore, lacked legal standing to bring the case.The standing requirement “helps enforce the limited role of federal courts in our constitutional system. The problem for plaintiffs here is that they lack standing,” Kernodle wrote.A spokesman for Trump referred questions to Pence’s office. A spokesman for Pence declined to comment.Gohmert and his fellow plaintiffs said they would appeal. In an interview with the broadcaster Newsmax, the congressman said the ruling was “an example of when the institutions that our constitution created to resolve disputes so that you didn’t have to have riots and violence in the streets, it’s when they go wrong.”“All this stuff about it [election fraud] being debunked, unsubstantiated, those are absolute lies,” he said, without evidence. “Basically in effect the ruling would be that you got to go to the streets and be as violent as antifa and BLM [Black Lives Matter].”Trump has refused to concede defeat and has repeatedly falsely claimed the election was tainted by widespread fraud. He and his allies have lost dozens of court efforts seeking to reverse the election results.Biden beat Trump by a 306-232 margin in the electoral college and is set to be sworn in on 20 January.Under the electoral college system, electoral votes are allotted to states and the District of Columbia based on their congressional representation.Some Republicans have said they plan to object to the count of presidential electors next week in Congress. The effort could trigger a lengthy debate in the Senate but has virtually no chance of overturning the results.A justice department lawyer representing Pence on Thursday had urged Kernodle to dismiss the lawsuit, saying they had sued the wrong person because they raised “a host of weighty legal issues about the manner in which the electoral votes for president are to be counted”.“The Senate and the House, not the vice president, have legal interests that are sufficiently adverse to plaintiffs to ground a case or controversy,” Pence’s filing said. More