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:
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.
More on Politics
- Pope Francis Makes Trump Critic New Washington Archbishop
- The Hard Right Isn’t Mike Johnson’s Biggest Problem Anymore
- Trump Is Wrong: Jimmy Carter Didn’t Lose Due to Panama Canal
