The Bar for Obstruction to Election Results: A Four-Year Watchdog for the 2021 Democratic National Referendum and the Defense of the American Dream

Four years ago, there were a lot of protests against the certification of states’ election certificates, but on this day, there were no complaints at all.

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.

After the certification Harris told reporters on Capitol Hill that the ceremony was “what should be the norm and what the American people should be able to take for granted — which is one of the most important pillars of our democracy is that there will be a peaceful transfer of power.”

We fight like we’re dead. During his rally outside the White House hours before the certification process was to start, President Trump warned his supporters that if they didn’t fight like hell, he wouldn’t have a country anymore.

Four years ago, chants of “hang Mike Pence!” rang out in the Capitol, as then-President Trump told his supporters that the vice president had the power to overturn the will of the voters.

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.

In the run-up to the ceremony, many Democratic lawmakers said they were worried about Trump’s actions in the future and that the process would move forward without interruption. The GOP was attempting to rewrite history about that day, argued several people.

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.

The bar for objecting to election results has been raised by the ECRA. The law says an objection can only be valid if it is signed by one-fifth of the Congress.

And the law significantly narrows the reasons a lawmaker may object to results, essentially making clear that partisan differences over election policies in a certain state aren’t a valid reason to object to the state’s results.

The Day of Jan. 6, 2021: An Example of the New Laws and the Trump’s Laws in a Crucial Role of the Capitol

The Department of Justice on Monday said it has charged 1,583 people with crimes in federal court in connection with the events of Jan. 6, 2021. There are charges for assaults against more than 140 Capitol and District of Columbia police officers. The FBI is trying to locate other people wanted for violent assaults that day.

Separately, lawyers for convicted Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio on Monday renewed their request for a pardon from Trump. Tarrio was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in the attack.

Tarrio has been held in special housing units during his incarceration, limiting his interactions with other prisoners and his movements outside his cell. His lawyer says that kind of isolation can lead to mental health problems.

The change has made a huge change to the post- election period. The election offices don’t get the same phone calls. The majority of Americans trust the results. There is no better example of this cycle than the proceedings on Monday.

“January 6th is the date, if there is one date, at which we witness the peaceful transfer of power in the United States,” said Rick Pildes, an election law expert at New York University. “In many ways it is the most important moment of democracy. … In the background this January 6, will be the resonances of what happened in the wake of 2020. This election.

Experts think the certification at the Capitol should return to what it was before the year 2020: a simple bureaucratic step that makes a result that Americans already know official.

Congress responded to the chaos four years ago with new rules for the presidential certification process. After the last election, Trump’s legal team had attempted to exploit the previous framework, which legal experts had widely considered to be full of ambiguities.

“It was very badly drafted,” said Pildes, who was one of the key legal voices advising a bipartisan group of lawmakers as they crafted the update, known as the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA). “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.”

The presidential election is the first to be certified by the new law that explains how states finalized their results. The changes that will affect the proceedings on Monday are listed here.

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. “It is designed to put that genie in the bottle again.”

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.

Predicting the Capitol Reheating: The New ECRA and a “Non-Presidential” Cybersecurity Event (Review)

Jamie Raskin, a Trump foil and a Democrat, told NPR that he’s proud of the Democrats for accepting the election results, even if Trump is certified as the winner.

But the new ECRA clarified that point even further, saying explicitly that the vice president “shall be limited to performing solely ministerial duties” and that the VP has “no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors.”

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).

Officials across the U.S. government have admitted that security on the day of the Capitol riot was not commensurate with the risk of a mass violence event.

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.