Q&A of the Day – Kamala Harris’s Role in Certifying Donald Trump's Presidential Win
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Today’s Entry: Hi Brian, What do you think Harris has up her sleeve??????
They are NOT going away quietly... She is in charge of the proceeding. VP
Bottom Line: I understand that after a decade of shenanigans by the left aimed at attempting to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president, impeaching him multiple times once president, prosecuting him after having been president, and multiple assassination attempts – some are skeptical about how the presidential certification may play out today. Thankfully, Vice President Kamala Harris is a bigger threat to thwart the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance than she is to thwarting Donald Trump’s presidential certification today.
For most of our lives, and our country’s history, the presidential certification vote was little more than a formality. For that reason, very little attention was paid by most to the constitutional process that takes place when a joint session of congress is called for the certification vote...until four years ago. As most will recall, in contesting the election results in multiple states, President Donald Trump called on Vice President Mike Pence to hold up the certification of Joe Biden as president – seeking to send contested state election results back to those states for the legislatures to reconsider. It of course didn’t happen, and as Pence repeatedly stated – he lacked the authority to make it happen. He was right. Just as Pence lacked the authority to interfere with the presidential certification vote four years ago, Harris lacks that authority today.
The key in understanding how the process works comes through both the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, but also the 1887 Electoral Count Act which streamlined the contestation process. The Electoral Count Act was enacted to avoid future chaos after the 1876 contested presidential election. That was an election in which the leader in Electoral College votes at the time of Congressional certification, Democrat Samuel Tilden – eventually lost to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in the most contested Presidential election in American history. This happened after four states – Louisiana, South Carolina, Oregon and yes, Florida had contested outcomes. Over the next decade Congress created the Electoral Count Act to prevent another like contestation from taking place. Without getting into the weeds of the law, it made three meaningful changes to election disputes in Congress. Those were:
- To limit the power of the Vice President to that of only the President of the Senate
- To limit Congress’s ability to challenge state results by requiring full Congressional support to overturn any state’s election results
- To empower states to produce their own election results
The Act’s reforms were and are critical in understanding the role of the Vice President in the process. As president of the senate, the only instance in which a vice president can alter the outcome of any process is if a tie breaking vote is required. That leaves the VP role in the presidential certification process as effectively a ceremonial one. Since the onset of Act in 1887, we’ve never had contested results resulting in a state’s certified electoral college votes (a process that took place in December), overturned. What’s more is that in the wake of January 6th 2021, congress passed, and President Biden signed into law, an update to the Electoral College Vote Act adding further clarity to the VP’s role in the process.
The changes were these:
- Specifies that the role of the Vice President during the joint session shall be ministerial (meaning administrative) in nature
- Raised the objection threshold in Congress to at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate
There are two important points to the update to the law. First, it now explicitly states the VP doesn’t have an active role in determining the outcome of the presidential certification process. Second, as mentioned, there had not been a successful contestation to a state’s results since the original act was enacted, and now the threshold for attempting to achieve that outcome has been raised even higher.
President-elect Donald Trump won a clear and convincing victory over Kamala Harris. The largest by a Republican since 1988. It will be awkward for Harris as she presides over her loss today, however she’s far from the first to have done it and in fact the last time it happened is especially instructive within this conversation.
The most recent time a VP presided over their presidential election loss (meaning the VP was at the top of the ticket) was Al Gore in 2000. If ever there was a time that you would have seen a VP attempt to pull out all of the stops (if there were any to pull), it would have been in that election. Of course, Al Gore and the Democrat Party did pull out all the stops in attempting to overturn Florida’s election results when only 537 votes separated George W. Bush and Al Gore. And that’s the point – Gore, as VP, wasn’t able to stop the certification of Bush in January of 2001. There’s certainly no way for Harris to be able to do it today.
The only drama in the leadup in today’s vote was whether the House would have a speaker and thus be able to convene as scheduled today. With that having been decided on the first vote on Friday – today's certification of Trump as president and Vance as vice president isn’t at all in doubt.