evidence: After two months of failed efforts to pressure local election officials, state legislatures, and even his own attorney general to help overturn November’s presidential election, President Donald Trump on Tuesday set up a new scapegoat for his defeat: Mike Pence. In a late-morning tweet, Trump claimed that Pence has the unilateral authority during Wednesday’s joint session of Congress to overturn the results of the entire presidential election on the basis of fraud claims that have been universally rejected in court. [...] "The statute is structured to let the two bodies, the Senate and the House, deliberate on anything that gets submitted that purports to be a state’s electoral votes," Foley said. "But the vice president is the presiding officer, and if he were to say, ‘This is frivolous,’ or ‘This is too late,’ or ‘This is preposterous, I’m not going to bother the chambers, I’m not going to dignify this thing,’ he would have to be overruled. And there isn’t really a mechanism to overrule him." [...] Yale Law professor and leading constitutional scholar Bruce Ackerman, for one, has pushed the notion that the president of the Senate has the authority under the 12th Amendment to ignore the Electoral Count Act and unilaterally decide the outcome of the Electoral College count. In September, Ackerman and progressive Rep. Ro Khanna wrote an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times arguing that Pence could basically do whatever he wants, thanks to a precedent established by Thomas Jefferson in 1800.