It’s being remarked upon far and wide that this January 6 is unfolding in a very different manner from the events on this day four years ago, when Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and temporarily interrupted the confirmation of Joe Biden’s 2020 electoral-vote majority. Kamala Harris’s supporters in Congress, and for the most part in the country, have accepted Trump’s narrow 2024 victory as legitimate and didn’t plan any official or unofficial protests in a snowy Washington today.
But a wrinkle in the once-again-routine ritual of counting and confirming electoral votes is that the candidate Trump defeated in November, Vice-President Kamala Harris, has the unpleasant chore of presiding over the joint session of Congress in which her loss (as well as that of her running-mate, Tim Walz) is made official. Watch here as she make the final announcement of the results:
.@VP Kamala Harris: "This announcement of the state of the vote by the President of the Senate shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons elected president and vice president of the United States, each for a term beginning on the 20th day of January 2025." pic.twitter.com/ePBAZ9i08q
— CSPAN (@cspan) January 6, 2025
As it happens, Harris is the fifth vice-president who has had to play this role in confirming defeat in a presidential contest. Three were in living memory: Richard Nixon in 1961, Hubert Humphrey in 1969, and Al Gore in 2001. The fourth, in 1861, was in circumstances more dire even than 2021, as John C. Breckenridge (who finished second in the 1860 Electoral College vote) confirmed Abraham Lincoln’s election not that long before he fled Washington and became a Confederate general.
We’ll see what Kamala Harris’s political future holds, but it is very likely that she’ll confine it to the United States of America.
