And here is the final stand. The President asserts that the Vice President has authority (presumably unreviewable) to determine which electoral votes count. This is dangerously incorrect, and it's worth going into detail about why. A thread:

This is what @lessig and I have called the "VP Super Power Theory" in our course on disputed presidential elections @Harvard_Law. We do a deep dive into it on the Another Way to Elect a President podcast

What's the backstory of this radical theory of the VP's power? Poor drafting of the Twelfth Amendment, which says: "The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted."

Note the passive voice: the VP opens the certificates, but who does the counting? (Writing tip: avoid the passive voice, especially when drafting a constitutional provision that allocates critical powers among political actors.)

So, the VP Super Power Theorist argues, the VP is the only actor mentioned in the sentence so it *must* be the VP who does the counting (and thus can reject electors' votes). Wrong. Every single method of interpretation demonstrates otherwise. Let's go through them: