Reform Electoral Count Act? Yes. Now. -- March 31, 2022 column

By MARSHA MERCER

President John F. Kennedy said what any smart homeowner knows: “The time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.”

Kennedy used the line in his 1962 State of the Union address to urge Congress to pass his anti-recession economic legislative agenda. Sixty years later, it’s time to repair the roof of our democracy after the manmade disaster of Jan. 6, 2021, and to prevent another assault on the electoral process.

The violent mob that stormed the Capitol – with some protesters chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” – wanted to overturn the presidential election. They were misinformed and misled by a president who could not accept defeat.

Donald Trump still falsely claims the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which sets timetables and rules for counting electoral votes, allowed Vice President Mike Pence to ditch state election results and install Trump for another four years. Pence did the right thing by refusing to bow to Trump’s power grab.

The Constitution “constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not,” Pence wrote that day in a letter to Congress. Under the 12^th Amendment, the vice president, as president of the Senate, opens the certificates of electoral votes from each state, which are then counted.  

More than a year late, Pence rebuked Trump publicly.

“And I heard this week President Trump said I had the right to `overturn the election.’ President Trump is wrong,” Pence said in February in a speech to the conservative Federalist Society. “I had no right to overturn the election.”

Our system held, but one shudders to think what would have happened IF . . . if Pence had agreed with Trump and others who wanted to run roughshod over the will of the people.

So, what now? To ensure the peaceful transfer of power in the future, we must update and clarify the antiquated Electoral Count Act, once described in a Washington Post story as a “confusing word salad of run-on sentences.”

The Democratic staff of the House Administration Committee studied the law for months and concluded in a 31-page report in January the law is “badly in need of reform” to remove ambiguity about the vote count process. Ambiguity is the leak in democracy’s roof.

Sen. Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, announced in late January a bipartisan group of 16 senators, including Democrat Mark Warner of Virginia, is working on legislation to clarify the law, including the vice president’s role as purely ceremonial.

Trump showed his hand in a statement that said in part: “how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?”

Better question: Why should a vice president have the power to overturn the votes of millions of Americans and the hard work of thousands of local and state election officials?

A group of Senate Democratic leaders also is involved in “discussion drafts” of reform.

One likely change would make it harder for members of Congress to challenge a state’s electoral votes and raise the bar for sustaining challenges. Currently, if only one senator and House member object to a state’s results, they can draw out the counting process. Also, the timetable for recounts and lawsuits in the states could be lengthened.

Updating the count act would make counting the votes more fair, but there’s concern that it would do nothing to make voting itself more fair.

Republican candidates still insist the 2020 election was stolen as GOP-run state legislatures tighten election rules and ballot access. House Democrats have tried to pass major voting rights legislation only to see it stalled in the Senate.

Some liberals fear updating the count act alone could make it more difficult to stop Republican state officials from negating elections their favored presidential candidate lost, leaving Congress locked into certification.  

The White House is “open to and a part of conversations about the Electoral Count Act,” but that reform should not replace larger voting reforms, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said.

Congress needs to address these valid concerns now -- and reform the Electoral Count Act while the sun shines.

©2022 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.

When tweets fly in face of culture change -- Feb. 25, 2021 column

 By MARSHA MERCER

On his first day in office, President Joe Biden told White House staff to treat others with respect -- or else.

“I’m not joking when I say this: If you’re ever working with me and I hear you treat another with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot. On the spot,” the president said. “No if, ands or buts.”

A few weeks later, a deputy White House press secretary was forced to resign after reports he spoke abusively to a reporter who was writing a story about his romantic relationship with a reporter for another news organization.

“We are committed to striving every day to meet the standard set by the President in treating others with dignity and respect, with civility and with a value for others through our words and our actions,” Press Secretary Jen Psaki said in a statement.  

But where to draw the line? What about mean tweets?

Biden’s choice of Neera Tanden as director of the Office of Management and Budget shows how challenging it will be to change the culture and tone of Washington in the age of political warfare on social media.

A former top aide to Hillary Clinton, Tanden is president of the liberal Center for American Progress. She stood to become the first woman of color and Indian American to lead OMB, the office that develops the president’s budget and sets out his legislative agenda.

She brings a compelling personal story and perspective. After her parents divorced when she was a child, her mother relied on food stamps and public housing.

"Now, I'm being nominated to help ensure those programs are secure, and ensure families like mine can live with dignity. I am beyond honored," Tanden tweeted.

But her history of aggressive, political tweets apparently doomed her chances for the OMB job. The White House is considering her for other positions that do not require Senate confirmation.

Which job Tanden lands, if any, will test Biden’s commitment to turning the page and setting a new tone of calm and civility.

Tanden has tweeted more than 87,000 times since 2010 -- more than Biden’s predecessor. And like the former president’s, Tanden’s tweets often have been personal and scathing.

Social media encourages quick and nasty hits. Returning fire with fire seemed appropriate when the president was continually on Twitter to bash his opponents. Tanden, though, managed to antagonize those on the left as well as the right. Progressives and conservatives were her targets.

“Your attacks were not just made against Republicans. There were vicious attacks made against progressives. People who I have worked with – me, personally,” Sen. Bernie Sanders, now the Budget Committee chairman, told her at a committee hearing Feb. 10.

Sen. John Kennedy, Republican of Louisiana, told Tanden at a budget hearing Wednesday he was “very disturbed” by the personal nature of her tweets. “I mean you called Senator Sanders everything but an ignorant slut,” he said.

“That’s not true, senator,” Tanden shot back.

Some Democrats rightly argue it’s hypocritical for tweets to disqualify someone for a job after Republicans ignored the White House tweet storm of the last four years. In addition, several OMB directors have come from the political world.

Tanden said she regrets her tweets, deleted more than a thousand of them and promised a “radically different” approach.

It’s too late. With Democrats and Republicans tied 50-50 in the Senate, Biden must move forward to cultivate a new spirit of cooperation and bipartisanship. He has less than two years until the mid-term elections to get things done. Republicans already are working to regain the Senate and add to their numbers in the House.

No president should saddle himself with any appointees who have alienated half the Senate and much of the House. Democrats hold a razor-thin majority of just 10 votes in the House.

That said, there’s no guarantee ditching Tanden means Republicans will show up waving olive branches in support of Biden’s agenda.

But if the president genuinely wants a new era, he must live up to his own high standards. Keeping Tanden will make that impossible.

©2021 Marsha Mercer. All rights reserved.