Former President Donald Trump on Wednesday admonished senators aiming to pass a bill reforming the 1887 Electoral Count Act, claiming that this proves "they all lied" about the vice president's powers.
A bipartisan group of senators released a proposal to change the Electoral Count Act, which NPR notes has been criticized as vague and antiquated by legal experts for years, to clarify the vice president’s role when counting Electoral College votes as "solely ministerial," as well as preventing legislators from appointing their own electors after the election takes place in order to override the popular vote.
Trump claimed in a statement released on his social media network, Truth Social, that "Senators are meeting right now on reforming the Electoral Count Act so that a Vice President can no longer do what EVERYBODY, except for certain Conservative legal scholars, said was not allowed to be done. So they all lied. The V.P. could have sent fraudulent votes back to State Legislatures!"
Some conservatives praised the legislation. The American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin wrote in the National Review that "this is a very good set of reforms," most of which "are directed to avoiding a repeat of the sorts of problems we saw in 2020 — a situation in which the states all did their jobs but members of Congress, at the behest of the defeated incumbent president, moved to sow doubt about the outcome by capitalizing on the vagueness and looseness of the ECA."
The Cato Institute’s Andy Craig wrote that the new proposal is a "major step forward in fixing" the ECA, which he described as a "ticking time bomb and an invitation to a constitutional crisis."
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
© 2025 Newsmax. All rights reserved.