Counting the Results: The 2021 Democratic Referendum by Vice President JD Vance, N.C., U.S. Senator John McCain, and the House Speaker Mike Johnson
The election certificate was certified during the hour long joint session of Congress, a return to what’s normally a mundane bureaucratic process of members fulfilling a duty to officially oversee the counting of electoral votes.
Vice President Harris, who lost the presidential election to Trump, oversaw the proceedings certifying Trump’s win and announced the final tally: 312 to 226.
Lawmakers from either aisle politely applauded after each result was read. Vice President-elect JD Vance had a front row seat to his own election certification, standing and clapping when the tallies of his home state — Ohio — were read in his favor.
On Monday, he praised the peaceful transfer of power on social media and thanked lawmakers from both parties for the smooth process. He also praised Harris, noting “it being particularly admirable that Vice President Harris would preside over the certification of a presidential election that she lost.”
We fight like dogs. “If you don’t fight, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” Donald Trump told his supporters at a late night rally outside the White House hours before the certification process was set to begin.
Trump called on his vice president, Mike Pence, not to certify the electoral count in favor of Joe Biden. Some protesters who marched to the Capitol after Trump’s speech chanted, “hang Mike” after the fact because they were told he wouldn’t intervene.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, who authored a legal brief in support of the effort to dispute the results as a rank and file member in 2021, sat next to Harris on the dais Monday.
Ahead of the ceremony, many Democratic lawmakers issued statements marking their concerns about Trump’s actions in 2021 and declaring the process would move forward without any disruption. Some people argued that the GOP was trying to rewrite history by talking about that day.
Republicans largely didn’t acknowledge the violence or unrest following the scene that delayed the 2021 certification until early morning hours of Jan. 7, 2021.
It used to take just one member of the House and one member of the Senate to approve an electoral objection and send it to a debate period with no clear resolution if both chambers disagreed with each other.
The law makes it clear that there aren’t valid reasons for a lawmaker to object to the results of an election in a certain state.
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The Department of Justice stated that it has charged 1,583 people with crimes in federal court as a result of the events of January 6, 2021. The Capitol’s police officers were attacked and the Capitol and other government property were damaged. The FBI is also still trying to find others wanted for violent assaults that day.
Lawyers for the leader of the Proud Boys renewed their request for a pardon on Monday. Tarrio has been in prison for almost two decades for his role in the attack.
Tarrio has been held in special housing units which limits his interactions with other prisoners and his movements outside his cell. His lawyer told NPR that kind of isolation can lead to major mental health problems.
The post election period has changed dramatically because of that change. Election officials say they aren’t getting the same phone calls. The majority of Americans trust the results. But there may be no greater contrast this cycle than during the proceedings on Monday.
Rick Pildes, an election law expert at New York University, said “January 6th is the date in which we will witness the peaceful transfer of power in the United States.” It is the most important time of democracy. … And of course, this January 6, in the background, will be the resonances of what happened in [the wake of the] 2020 [election].”
Experts think that the certification at the Capitol will return to what it was before 2020: a simple bureaucratic step that makes a result that Americans have known for a long time.
The presidential certification process was chaotic four years ago and Congress enacted rules to deal with it. After the election, Trump’s legal team tried to exploit the framework that legal experts thought to be full of ambiguities.
The Electoral Count Reform Act was poorly drafted, as evidenced by the comments made by Pildes, one of the key legal voices to advise a bipartisan group of lawmakers. “The one thing you want in a legal framework for resolving a disputed election — and this is true of any election, but especially the presidential election — you want a clear legal framework that’s established in advance so that it can’t be manipulated for partisan purposes at the moment of crisis.”
This is the first presidential election to be certified under the new law, which also clarified how states finalized their results in December. Here are some of the key changes that will affect Monday’s proceedings.
Even before 2020, which saw more than 100 Republican members of the House and Senate object to the results in response to Trump’s false claims, objections had started to become more common as the electoral processes in 2000, 2004, and 2016 all involved some element of controversy.
“Congress had started sort of sliding into this practice of having at least some members object to receiving votes from a state because of their disagreements with how the voting process had played out in those states,” Pildes said. “The [ECRA] is designed to put that genie back in the bottle.”
Pildes added that he thinks the violence last election cycle will also make members of Congress more hesitant to object to results for purely political reasons.
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Even though they have accepted the election results, Democrats have created a very frustrating situation if they certify Trump as the winner.
At the time, legal experts said that wasn’t true, that the vice president’s role in certification, even according to the original Electoral Count Act, was purely ministerial.
The vice president’s role in the process will still present an extraordinary moment, as Kamala Harris will oversee the certification of the election in favor of her opponent in the race (as Al Gore did in 2001).
The risk of a mass violence event on the day of the Capitol riot was not considered to be high by officials.
In September, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 would be designated a “National Special Security Event,” putting it on par with a presidential inauguration and freeing up more federal resources for security.
U.S. Capitol Police have been carrying out drills with officers from 16 different agencies ahead of Jan. 6, according to WJLA in Washington, and temporary fencing has also gone up around the Capitol.