No Jan. 6 disruptions are expected as Trump’s win boosts Republicans’ faith in elections — for now
This January 6 will not be the same.
Four years ago, then president Donald Trump called on his supporters to go to the Capitol to protest Congressional Certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 elections.
“It’ll be wild!” Trump promised it a few weeks earlier on Twitter January 6, 2021. And it was.
Trump gave one vicious speech for thousands of people who gathered at the Ellipse behind the White House, after which many marched to the Capitol And stormed the building in one try to stop the previously routine final step in formalizing the winner of the presidential election. Even after the rioters dispersed, eight Republicans in the Senate and 139 in the House of Representatives voted against ratifying Biden’s victory in certain swing states, despite no proof of problems or misconduct that could have affected the outcome.
This year, the only turbulence ahead of the quadrennial presidential ratification came from Republicans in the House of Representatives fighting among themselves about who should be speaker.
“There will be no violence. There will be no attempt to incite an insurrection against the Constitution,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “It will be much more like what we have seen throughout the rest of American history.”
Last time, Trump urged his vice president, Mike Pence, who presided over the certification, to intervene to keep him in the White House. This time, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate against Trump, has done just that recognized her loss and is not expected to try to change the long-standing procedures for certifying the elections. No other prominent Democrat has urged the party to contest Trump’s victory.
Congress has also since updated the law governing the procedure, clarifying the process in the states and specifying the vice president’s role as purely ministerial.
After the 2020 election, many Republicans claimed there were signs of massive voter fraud that made it impossible to certify Biden’s victory, even though there are never been an indication of widespread fraud. After Trump won in November, many of those same Republicans no longer raised such objections, saying they trusted the accuracy of the vote count. It was a change in sentiment shared by Republicans throughout the country.
“As citizens, we should all be happy when things go smoothly,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. “It is always better not to have major discussions about elections, especially when there is no reasonable position for it.”
Yet the peace can be an illusion.
Trump and the Republicans had indicated that if Harris had won, they would have done so too prepared to contest her victory. Vice President-elect J.D. Vanceargued as a senator from Ohio that Pence should have acted to overturn Biden’s election.
Vance himself is expected to be in a position to preside over the next important one January 6 – in 2029, when Congress will accept the electoral votes for the winner of the 2028 presidential election.
“The most dangerous event on January 6 is not January 6, 2025. It is January 6, 2029 and beyond,” said David Weinberg of Protect Democracy, which defends against what they call authoritarian threats to the country. “It creates a huge problem if only one side of the aisle withdraws when it loses an election.”
The Constitution lays out some basic steps needed to elect the next president, and congressional legislation has filled the procedural gaps. After states choose their winning candidates on Election Day, electors who have pledged to vote for those candidates meet as the Electoral College and formally cast their votes for president.
Congress will then count the votes on January 6 in a joint session led by the vice president to formally determine who has won the Electoral College majority.
In 2021, Trump urged Pence not to read out the numbers of the swing states that Biden won, forcing Congress to vote for a list of states where Trump won the Electoral College majority. This ploy was something that Pence and countless legal scholars said was an unconstitutional act.
A year later, Biden signed the treaty bipartisan bill that updated the 1887 law governing the joint session to clarify that the vice president must read all state numbers. The Electoral Count Reform Act also makes it harder to object to the vote in Congress.
Still, many Republicans in the House of Representatives continue to oppose that law.
House Speaker Mike JohnsonR-La., was one main proponent of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss and had not ruled out trying to change the election outcome if Trump lost in November. Republicans spent the final weeks of the election arguing that Democrats would do the same if Trump won, citing an effort by some to disqualify the former president from the ballot under the country’s once-ambiguous “insurrection clause.” the constitution. That attempt was ultimately rejected by the US. Supreme Court.
Republicans say the size of Trump’s election victory is the reason there is no potential unrest. He won the presidency by about 230,000 votes in swing states and the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points, after losing in 2020 by about 44,000 votes in swing states and 4.5 percentage points nationally.
“This time, I think the victory was so decisive that — for better or for worse, depending on which side you’re on — it suppressed most of it,” said Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican who led the objections on Jan. 1. August 6, 2021, due to baseless allegations of voter fraud.
Foley, author of the book “Ballot Battles” about electoral challenges in American history, advised Congress on changes to the law governing the joint session and the certification of the presidential election. He said he hoped the 2024 elections will mark the end of baseless challenges to Congress’ certification, even if the candidate who led the way in the last challenge won.
That’s because Trump has said he will not run for office again and that he is constitutionally barred from a third term. Foley noted that a number of Republicans in 2022 tried to emulate Trump’s distrust of the election results and lost on a large scale in swing states. Denying an election, he said, may not be feasible if it is not tied to Trump.
“Since Trump will never be a candidate again,” Foley said, “I hope this goes over our heads.”
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AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.
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