Judge tosses suit against VP seeking reversal of election
A judge has tossed out Rep. Louie Gohmert's effort to overturn the results of the presidential election by forcing Vice President Mike Pence to override the electors when votes are finalized by Congress on Jan 6.
"The problem for Plaintiffs here is that they lack standing," Judge Jeremy Kernodle wrote in rejecting the case against Gohmert and several alternate Arizona electors Friday evening. "Plaintiff Louie Gohmert, the United States Representative for Texas’s First Congressional District, alleges at most an institutional injury to the House of Representatives. Under well settled Supreme Court authority, that is insufficient to support standing."
He also said that the intervening electors "allege an injury that is not fairly traceable" to the vice president.
Pence had argued that Gohmert should have sued the House and the Senate, not the vice president in his presiding role.
![](https://s.abcnews.com/images/Politics/pence_hpMain_20210101-211259.jpg)
"The other Plaintiffs, the slate of Republican Presidential Electors for the State of Arizona (the “Nominee-Electors”), allege an injury that is not fairly traceable to the Defendant, the Vice President of the United States, and is unlikely to be redressed by the requested relief," Kernodle wrote.
Kernodle also wrote that Gohmert didn't allege any harm done to himself as an individual.
"He does not identify any injury to himself as an individual, but rather a 'wholly abstract and widely dispersed' institutional injury to the House of Representatives," the judge wrote.
Following the ruling, Gohmert and the alternate Arizona electors filed a notice of appeal to the Fifth Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals.
-ABC News' Meg Cunningham