Yeah, I know, he's got some stiff competition from Gym Jordan, Matt Gaetz and others, but there's a good argument to be made that Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert really is the dumbest member of the United States House of Representatives.

Gohmert and others filed a lawsuit this week making the ridiculous claim that Mike Pence has the ability to unilaterally overturn the results of the presidential election, and decide not to count the electoral votes in swing states that Biden won:

Vice President Pence was sued Sunday by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) and several other Republicans in a far-fetched bid that appeared aimed at overturning President-elect Joe Biden's election win.

The lawsuit focuses on Pence’s role in an upcoming Jan. 6 meeting of Congress to count states’ electoral votes and finalize Biden’s victory over President Trump. Typically, the vice president’s role in presiding over the meeting is a largely ceremonial one governed by an 1887 federal law known as the Electoral Count Act.

But the Republican lawsuit, which was filed against Pence in his official capacity as vice president, asks a federal judge in Texas to strike down the law as unconstitutional. The GOP plaintiffs go further: They ask the court to grant Pence the authority on Jan. 6 to effectively overturn Trump’s defeat in key battleground states.

Election law experts were dismissive of the lawsuit’s prospects for success.

Yeah, that's the understatement of the year.

Here's more from Hunter at Kos on this madness:

The important thing to know is that lawsuit has roughly zero chance of working, because (1) the Constitution does not say that, (2) the claim that Gohmert has standing because as a congressthing, counting electors he doesn't want counted will make him officially Sad, and (3) all the rest of it. It's a broadly dishonest retread of the previous Dumbest Lawsuit in the Land, with some of the most egregious errors removed and new ones added.

The backstory here, though, is mildly more interesting. Exactly a week ago, Gohmert and a host of Republican fascism-peddlers met with both Donald Trump and Mike Pence to plot out strategies for sabotaging the acceptance of the Electoral College results. House Republicans have been strongly pressuring Pence to cause a scene at the Jan. 6 tally, Donald Trump's pseudolegal bullshitters have been hyping conspiracy theories rallying the base around the same premise, and we can gather that this lawsuit against Pence was either a planned move between House Republicans and Pence to give him plausible deniability for creating a scene or, perhaps more likely, a disgruntled loner move from Gohmert himself after Pence refused to explicitly promise House crackpots that he'd go along with their ridiculous, seditious, and doomed-to-failure plan.

So this is what they came up with. Or, at least, what Rep. Louie Gohmert and Kelli Freaking Ward came up with. We're going to no doubt see different versions appear in coming days from Jim Jordan and Trump's other most willing traitors, but all of it is meant mostly as rube fodder. It is meant to rile the far-right Republican base into believing the election was "illegitimate" based on hoaxes peddled by Republican leaders claiming all manner of conspiracy and fraud.

It's already been made clear that even conservative courts are not going to go along with Republican attempts to stage an outright coup. House Republicans and Trump are instead working to so delegitimize our elections process that the violent far right comes out to do what the courts will not.

Just because it probably won't work doesn't make it less dangerous. This is another test of the system's bounds. They will be tested again, and again, and again.

"Kraken Buster" Marc Elias shared this on Twitter about the chances of the suit prevailing and who filed it.