The House only votes by state in a contingent election, which only happens if no candidate receives the vote of a majority of the electors appointed.
EXACTLY. Lara must be reading GP or one of the hundreds of other blogs posting nonsense on the entire process since Nov 4, as what she described is NOT how it works. The whole House - all 435 members - vote. (As does the Senate, separately). And as we all know how that vote will turn out, we need to start accepting reality that the objection process, while it will likely shed further light on just how corrupt this election was - will go NOWHERE in terms of "overturning" the result. Nor will Pence be able to do diddly about it. Constitution and Electoral law, for anyone who cares to get their own info vs reading some goofy blog, describes all of this in precise, unambiguous detail.
The only question in my mind is how much debate is allowed when the houses withdraw to consider objections. 3 USC 17’s provision that “each Senator and Representative may speak to such objection or question five minutes” rather clearly denotes a maximum, not a minimum, given the two hour total time limit and the phrase “limit of debate” in the heading.
There will be a lot of pressure to keep debate at a minimum or shut it down entirely. McConnell expressly does not want Republican Senators to have to go on the record one way or the other. However, I’m not familiar enough with House and Senate rules or the extent to which they apply here to guess how that will play out.
No debate is allowed at all in the joint session, as Biden repeatedly had to remind members of his own party in 2017, to the extent where he ended up turning off Sheila Jackson Lee’s microphone. I fully expect Pence to be just as rigid in enforcing the rules.
Strange that she is being put forth as some sort of legal expert. She is a communications major, not a lawyer. I actually remember her from college.