Pelosi elected to 4th term as House speaker

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.

"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

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) is continuing his push to reverse the results of the presidential election by trying to legally force Vice President Mike Pence to override the electors when votes are finalized by Congress on Jan 6.

In a legal brief filed this morning, attorneys for Gohmert responded to Pence's argument that they should have sued the House and the Senate, not the vice president in his presiding role. 

Gohmert's attorneys wrote that there are 140 House members who are expected to object to the congressional certification of the Electoral College vote on Wednesday. 

"On January 6th, a joint session of Congress will convene to formally elect the President. The defendant, Vice-President Pence, will preside. Under the Constitution, he has the authority to conduct that proceeding as he sees fit," they wrote. 

"He may count elector votes certified by a state's executive, or he can prefer a competing slate of duly qualified electors. He may ignore all electors from a certain state. That is the power bestowed upon him by the Constitution." 

Gohmert's attorneys say Gohmert and the "over 140" House members will object on Wednesday due to "mounting and convincing evidence of voter fraud."

"For over a century, the counting of elector votes and proclaiming the winner was a formality to which the prying eye of the media and those outside the halls of the government paid no attention. But not this time," they wrote.

"This country is deeply divided along political lines," the filing adds. "This division is compounded by a broad and strongly held mistrust of the election processes employed and their putative result by a very large segment of the American population." 

A small group of Michigan's GOP would-be electors also intervened in the case, and a Biden elector from Colorado did the same in support of Pence.

-ABC News' Meg Cunningham

The Senate voted on Friday to override President Donald Trump's veto on the defense spending bill in a rare New Year's Day session.

The stinging rebuke by members of Trump's own party represents the first time in his term that a veto has been overturned.

The vote was 81-13. A supermajority is needed to override a presidential veto.

Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, confirmed today that Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, called the upcoming joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, which will affirm the results of the presidential election, "the most consequential vote" of his lengthy tenure.

"I see that as a statement that he believes it's a -- it's a referendum on our democracy," Romney told reporters.

Sources said that McConnell asked Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., on a New Year's Eve call with Republicans to explain to his colleagues why he is planning to object to the certification of Biden’s electoral win during the joint session. McConnell had privately warned his colleagues weeks ago against doing this as it would put his conference in the position of having to oppose Trump (and thereby his base) publicly.

Hawley, in joining the last-ditch bid by Trump's House allies to overturn the election results, said he objected to states not following their election laws. 

"At the very least, Congress should investigate allegations of voter fraud and adopt measures to secure the integrity of our elections," Hawley said in a statement. There has been no evidence of widespread election fraud.

-ABC News' Trish Turner