Senators Introduce Legislation To Prevent Tyrants From Trying To Steal Elections

A bipartisan group of senators, led by Susan Collins and Joe Manchin, have introduced two pieces of legislation designed to prevent another attempt at stealing a presidential election. The legislation would clarify the role of the vice president in the electoral count certification, as well as raise the bar for Congressional challenges to vote counts. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains why this legislation is necessary.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

A bipartisan group of senators have proposed two different pieces of legislation to basically prevent any future coup from someone like Donald Trump from taking place. The two pieces of legislation are the electoral count reform and presidential transition improvement act. And the second one is the enhanced election security and protection act. Now the second one, uh, doesn't have to do with the electoral college. What that does is it actually strengthens the protections against, uh, or force, excuse me, election workers in the United States. It doubles the penalties. If you threaten any of these people, like we have seen at an unprecedented rate since the 2020 election at the hands of Donald Trump's supporters. So if this passes, these Trump supporters keep harassing or intimidating election workers, they're gonna be in for a world of hurt with that second piece of legislation. So there's that one, the other one, the big one, right?

What this does, is it codifies the vice president's role in the electoral college certification? The previous legislation, right from the 18 hundreds. Isn't exactly clear about the role of the vice president. So what this legislation does is it clarifies it, it says that the vice president's role is purely ceremonial. He is just there to oversee it. He does not have the authority to throw out electors from certain states. He does not have the authority to do anything other than to, uh, basically call it to order and bang the gavel. That's it, that's all the vice president could do getting rid of that gray area that Donald Trump attempted to exploit by begging Mike Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 election. So that's a great start. That is definitely something we need. And the two big sponsors of this, believe it or not Susan Collins and Joe mansion.

And as I said, they do also have a bipartisan group supporting them as well. So it is likely that we can get this thing passed and go ahead and prevent Donald Trump or any other future Republican from trying to carry out a coup another great thing that it does is it raises the bar on members of Congress objecting to certain states' electoral college votes. So now again, if it passes, instead of just having one individual who is able to object and then launch into the two hour debate, it will take one fifth of the body to object. So we're talking about one fifth of 535 individuals in that joint session of Congress that would have to object to a state in order to go to the two hour debate period. Well, in 2020, we actually had 147 Republicans who did object. So if you had that number, I do believe that would hit that one fifth threshold. However, it's extremely

Unlikely that you would be able to hit that again in the future, not impossible, just unlikely, but then again, who the hell knows with the way Congress is today. So again, this piece of legislation and it's accompanying piece of legislation, penalizing people harshly for, uh, threatening election workers it's needed. It's unfortunate that it's needed, right? It's very sad that we even have to do this as a country, but Donald Trump and his supporters prove to us that both of these pieces of legislation are 100% necessary, not just for the protection of the country, but apparently for the protection of some of its citizens as well.