CSPAN - Washington Journal Kevin Kosar

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 6, 2025 10:32-11:01 - CSPAN

28:55

Washington Journal Kevin Kosar

Participants

Main

john mcardle

cspan 05:37

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Show episode speakers

Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		After the other, I mean, I will be following pretty closely how these confirmation hearings kick off next week, whether we see any Republicans who decide to kind of say no on any of these voices.
unidentified		Early on in the process, it seemed like there was some pushback to some of these picks, but lately it seems like many Republicans are kind of on board and willing to give Trump the people that he wants in these top positions.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Donald Trump on Truth Social just about an hour ago, quoting Elon Musk, saying, Had this election not been won by Donald Trump, civilization would be lost.
		That's the latest from the president-elect in his Truth Social page.
		Steph Kite, you can get the latest from her and her colleagues at axios.com.
		She's a political reporter there at Steph W. Kite on X. Thanks for your time.
unidentified		Thank you.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Kevin Kosar joins us now.
		He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and host of the Understanding Congress podcast.
		Joining us to help understand today's electoral vote counting and certification process in that joint session of Congress.
		Kevin Kosar, before we get to the why of what's going to be happening today, just explain what is going to happen in this joint session today at 1 p.m. Eastern.
unidentified		Good morning, John.
		Good to see you.
		Well, today's an important day.
		It's the second to last step in the process we use in America to select a president.
		The process began back in November with the general election.
		After that, we had the Electoral College.
		Now we move on to the process by which Congress receives from the states their reports of who voted for which candidate.
		And then Congress proceeds to count them out loud and to officially declare who won.
		This is a rare joint session of Congress.
		So we'll see the House enter session today around one o'clock.
		And then we'll see the senators file into the chamber and join their legislative colleagues.
		And then one by one, they will open the envelopes and see who each state voted for and officially announce the results.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Is there any surprises in this process?
unidentified		Hopefully there will not be any surprises.
		But as we saw four years ago, anything is possible.
		We have a recent history where there frequently are members of Congress who want to object to particular states' electoral votes.
		They want to claim that there is something wrong with them and therefore that Congress should consider not actually counting them.
		But I'm hoping that we're not going to see any of that today.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		These state reports, these envelopes that you talk about being opened, explain their path to Capitol Hill today.
unidentified		Sure, sure.
		So we have a very decentralized system here.
		It's not the federal government who runs our elections and who mans polling places or anything like that.
		Rather, this is a state-driven process.
		So states conduct elections.
		It is they who select individuals called electors who represent the public and who convene in the Electoral College.
		And at the end of that Electoral College process, that's where you get generation of this thing called a certificate of ascertainment.
		And for those of you who are on Twitter or X.com as it is called today, I tweeted out and tagged Washington Journal a couple examples of what these certificates look like, where the governor and other officials sign and say, here are the individuals who received our state's electoral votes.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And then how did they get to Capitol Hill?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		And what happens to them after they're counted today?
unidentified		Yeah, multiple copies have to be produced by the demand of the Constitution.
		Some have to go directly to the U.S. Senate.
		That's because the Vice president, who is also the president of the Senate, is the person who actually presides over the counting.
		So another set of copies also go to the National Archives where they will be kept along with all of our other precious historical records.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		You mentioned the vice president presiding over today's joint session.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Who are the other key players?
unidentified		Well, you need a Speaker of the House to get this session up and running.
		And fortunately, late last week, we were able to do that.
		You also need just everybody in Congress to show up and to participate in this process.
		Because on the one hand, yes, this is a sort of formality.
		We already know that Mr. Trump and Mr. Vance won the presidential and vice presidential race.
		But it's a ceremony in which we officially deem the race done and decided, and we accept the victors.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		The certificate of ascertainment, there's a couple of examples, as you mentioned, on your X page.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		We can show them to viewers, including a very elaborate one from the state of Ohio, signed by who in the state of Ohio.
unidentified		You'll usually see a governor's signature on there.
		That's one of the things that the Electoral Count Act was adopted to do.
		You know, we have a Constitution that lays out the basic process saying that Congress has to come to this joint session and has to take states' electoral slates and to count them up and declare who won.
		But the question is, like, well, where do these certificates come from and how do you know they're official?
		And, you know, more than a century ago, the Electoral Count Act was adopted after the contested 1876 election precisely because there were dueling certificates sent in.
		And interestingly enough, back in 2020, we also saw that.
		We had some unofficial certificates being sent in claiming that Mr. Trump had won when he hadn't.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Could that happen today?
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Dueling certificates.
unidentified		Could.
unidentified		It could, but I've not heard any reports of alternate certificates being submitted.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What happened with the Electoral Count Act in the wake of the events of January the 6th, 2021?
unidentified		Well, Congress finally woke up and realized that this very old law, which was written in very antique and stilted language, needed to be updated.
		There had been scholars for 30 years saying, hey, Congress, this law is poorly written.
		The words can be difficult for a modern audience to understand, and they can be easily exploited by crafty lawyers.
		Unfortunately, Congress did not take action, and it took the events of January 6, 2021 to spark action.
		And Congress did good work.
		It was bipartisan work.
		You had multiple groups working on new drafts to amend the statute.
		And the changes were significant.
		They basically took these rules around the process of clarifying who won the presidency and they tightened them up.
		So it's a lot harder for crafty attorneys and partisan politicians to manipulate the process and to try to throw it off the rails.
		You know, one thing we'll see today in the chamber is that any attempt to pause the proceedings by objecting to the state's electoral votes is going to have to meet a lot higher threshold.
		It used to be that you only needed one representative and one senator to pause the counting and to force the joint session to split into the House and the Senate debating separately.
		Now you need to get one-fifth of all senators to agree to object and one-fifth of all members of the House.
		The law also further limited the grounds on which you can object.
		You could have to limit your objections to two very technical things, which I won't elaborate on and bore listeners, but you can no longer get away with saying, I have suspicions that there's fraud here, and derail the process.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Did that happen in the past?
unidentified		Oh, yeah, most certainly.
		One of the things I put out there on X this morning are both examples of Democrats and Republicans rising and making allegations.
		For example, in 2016, I've got a video up there of Representative James McGovern of Massachusetts, a Democrat, standing up and saying, you know, I object to this particular state's electoral slate, I believe it was Alabama's, because, you know, the Russians were engaged in propaganda and misinformation, so we can't trust these results.
		He was joined by a number of other Democrats that year.
		Obviously, Republicans did their own thing in 2021, and many, many of them, far more than any in history, got up and raised objections to various states' electoral slates.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Are objections just limited to modern political history, or was this happening in the 19th century and previous elections?
unidentified		Yeah, the first modern example was in 1960 where we had this weird situation where Hawaii declared Richard Nixon the victor over John F. Kennedy, and the official certification was sent to Congress.
		But in the course of doing a recount, they declared that Kennedy had beat Nixon.
		In the meantime, the Democrats electors had sent in their own separate certificate to Congress.
		And weirdly enough, Richard Nixon was the sitting vice president and had to preside over the chamber.
		And so he had multiple certifications in his hand and was kind of a little befuddled for a time on what to do about it.
		And ultimately, they hashed it out, and it was agreed that Hawaii's votes would go to Mr. Kennedy.
		But yeah, it was, you know, disputes go way back, and it was the toxicity and the intractability of the 1876 dispute between Rutherford Hayes and Samuel Tilden, which was just paralyzing for a while, that ultimately led to trying to develop these rules in the Electoral Count Act that would clarify who wins and what was an adequate basis for objecting.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		This image of a sitting vice president counting votes in an election that they lost and announcing the winner and that they themselves has lost an election.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Is this a uniquely American thing that happens?
unidentified		So far as I know, it certainly is an episodic and it is a remarkable thing.
		I mean, we are going to have to see today Ms. Harris, our vice president, standing before the chamber and going through this process.
		You know, previously in 2016, we had Vice President Biden who was atop the chamber, and he was fighting off various objections from Democrats and saying, no, this is not in order.
		No, you do not have somebody in the Senate who agrees with you, so we cannot entertain your complaint about the process.
		I think it's a very healthy thing.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Kevin Kosar is our guest, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
		His podcast is Understanding Congress, helping us understand the electoral vote counting and certification process.
		Again, it's set to take place in a joint session today, 1 p.m. Eastern.
		You can watch here on C-SPAN for the next 30 minutes.
		We're taking your phone calls, though, if you have questions or comments about this process.
		202-748-8000 for Democrats to call in.
		Republicans, 202-748-8001.
		Independence 202-748-8002.
		Kevin Kosar, as folks are calling in, do you think the events of January the 6, 2021 fundamentally changed this process or how this day is viewed in America?
unidentified		Yeah, I think previously it was something that was largely done on autopilot.
		Your average American certainly paid very little attention to it, the sole exceptions being the dedicated folks who watch C-SPAN and who are engaged deeply in our civic life.
		2021 just shattered that, and it created a sense of anxiety about something that could be trusted to come off well, could go completely off the rails.
		You know, and just to make a kind of more broader point about that date and what's happened since then, you know, law is something we use to try to coordinate ourselves as human beings, right?
		We try to pass a law and say, this is what you can do, this is what you can't do, on a whole range of topics.
		And we can't all remember what laws are in force all the time.
		We can't understand fully what laws were adopted for or what the people who wrote them meant.
		And when Congress did not pay close attention to the Electoral Count Act and just kind of let it sit for 130, 140 years, everybody sort of forgot why we had the process and how it was supposed to work.
		And it took that terrible day four years ago to remind us that it's an important process and that we have to follow it and we have to be faithful to it.
		And we have to have a shared understanding of why we do it and how we do it.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		I mean, let's chat with some callers.
		This is Harold in Rosewood Heights in Illinois, line for Democrats.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		Well, I don't even know why we need an electoral college to start off with, but that's a whole different thing.
		I was wondering over the however long we've been doing this, how many times people have voted against the certification of the votes.
		And I'd like to know if maybe since I've been listening to the program all morning, everybody's confused about what happened on the 6th, four years ago.
		Maybe we could go ahead and have that trial that Trump's been putting off.
		And instead of going after the king, we've already got all the pawns.
		There's a bunch of them in prison already.
		And we can't get the king because they've already certified that he's king and he can't be touched.
		Why don't we go after the senators or the House representatives that voted against it after they hid underneath the Capitol because of the riot and they knew that it was wrong?
		Mitch McConnell came out the next day, said it was wrong.
		And why we can't get them in a conspiracy theory, have it televised on TV to where the whole public can take it in, and then we'll have the truth.
		Because in court, you can't just come up with some kind of theory or something.
		You have to have facts.
		And that's what the country is lacking right now is facts.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Kevin Kosar, where do you want to get to?
unidentified		Sure.
		Let me speak to the issue of when has Congress voted on the voted to reject or not reject electoral slates?
		We certainly saw that in 2021.
		The House and the Senate separated to vote on at least two states, electoral slates.
		In each case, they voted to accept them by overwhelming majorities.
		We also saw it in 2005, I believe it was 2005, where George W. Bush was reelected.
		There was an allegation raised that Ohio's electoral votes were in some way corrupted, that voting machines had been rigged by Republicans.
		And so Democrats in the chamber objected.
		And we had both a Democratic representative and a senator.
		And so they had to break and they had to go separately debate Ohio.
		That, again, Ohio slate was accepted.
		The votes were not rejected.
		And then there was the peculiar 1960s situation where you had two different certificates that came in and they had to decide it.
		The good news is we have not had an instance where a state's electoral slate has been thrown out and therefore votes have been taken away from a presidential candidate or vice presidential candidate and the ultimate result of the election corrupted.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		This is Mike in Ohio, Akron, Independent.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Yes, good morning.
		Thank you for C-SPAN.
		As an independent, I feel completely free to compliment people in both parties as well as to criticize them.
		I'll start off with the compliments.
		I have to compliment Harry Dunn, the police, the Capitol Police.
		He risked his life the entire time.
		He had five or six protesters biking him up these steps.
		He led them away from where the voting was taking place.
		Harry Dunn to me was the ultimate patriot that day.
		He put his life on the line.
		The Republican who was a patriot that day was none other than Mike Pence.
		So those are my two heroes.
		Now we've got a question for C-SPAN, if you don't mind.
		I believe Mike Pence revealed his tax returns before he was elected vice president.
		Everybody has done that since Richard Nixon.
		The only one not to do that, a guy named Donald Trump.
		I haven't criticized the Democrats for trying to impeach him a second time after that.
		What they should have done instead is tell the Republicans, we will not prosecute him.
		We will not put him in prison.
		There's not a single prison who can take him.
		But we need to pass a law that says nobody can run for president unless they reveal their tax returns.
		And the reason why that is not to make sure they pay their taxes, because if they don't, you can pay what they owe and move on.
		It's for a conflict of interest.
		And Donald Trump has traveled around the globe many times.
		He's met many world leaders.
		If anybody needs to have their taxes examined, it will be Donald Trump.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Mike, got your point.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Mike, Kevin Kosar, any thoughts on tax returns and presidents?
unidentified		Not so much on the tax returns and the presidents.
		I mean, I think there's legitimate concern about you want to know whether officials are in hockey to foreign powers or something like that.
		It might be manipulable.
		But just to go back to the caller's initial point, I'd like to mention that some of the heroes on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021 were the congressional staff, the people who were involved in helping Congress carry off this process and who also critically protected the state's electoral certificates.
		I mean, today, when you watch on C-SPAN, you will see these boxes being carried in by staff, and these boxes contain the official certificates.
		You know, those certificates could have ended up lost or trashed, burnt, who knows what, when the protesters stormed the Capitol.
		And congressional staff rose to the moment and protected them last time around.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		A question from Dan in Pennsylvania via our text messaging service.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		What role does the Supreme Court have in certifying the election of a president of the United States?
unidentified		Thankfully, they have no direct and immediate role.
		Under the modified updated Electoral Count Act, it is possible that a dispute at the state level about the certification of the election can be appealed to the federal courts and certainly could get its way all the way up to the Supreme Court.
		But if the process is working properly, the Supreme Court stays on the sidelines.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		The caller a minute ago said Mike Pence is one of his heroes from that day.
		This from Politico magazine, some new reporting about an interaction between Al Gore and Mike Pence, Michael Cruz on it.
		I don't know if you've read it yet.
		This is just the first two paragraphs or so.
		Last summer, in a private moment at the memorial service for ex-sender Joe Lieberman at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, two former vice presidents had a conversation.
		Al Gore thanked Mike Pence, according to people close to both men, in an interaction that's never been reported for his actions at the Capitol the day it was attacked by a mob.
		Pence, on the opposite side, the political party, but in the same set of pews, said something surprising in response.
		He suggested to Gore that he had done what he had done on January the 6th, 2021, in part because of what he had seen as a newly sworn-in member of Congress on January 6, 2001.
		He had witnessed a vice president like him stand up to pressure from his own party to defy the Constitution, even though doing so by definition meant personal defeat.
		I never forgot it, Pence said to Al Gore in the recollection of a Pence ally.
		You don't know how much that means, Gore said, coming from you.
		What do you think about that interaction?
unidentified		Well, it's terrific, and thank you for sharing that with me.
		And yeah, it speaks to a real truth about Congress, which is that you do have these moments where members all the time rise above naked partisan self-interest and just play by the rules or do the right thing.
		And when they do that, you hope it rubs off on some other members and that everybody can kind of lift their game.
		I mean, there's nothing wrong with competing fiercely.
		There's nothing wrong with disagreeing and debating.
		But the rules are the rules.
		And for this representative government scheme to work, it means that we all have to be willing to play by the rules.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		About 20 minutes left with Kevin Kosar this morning of the American Enterprise Institute, his podcast, again, Understanding Congress.
		This is Ray in Syracuse, Republican.
		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning.
		A previous caller, back two or three, brought up what he thought the solution should be, or part of the solution on this January 6th issue, is that the Democrats should present the facts in front of Congress.
		And my first thought is they'll never do that.
		And the reason is because that would require them to also put the Democrat Bad things that they did and what they did to cause January 6th.
		And it would be significant.
		It would probably be more illegal and against the rules than what the Republicans may have done.
		And another caller right after that asked about, shouldn't people that want to run for president divulge their financial information in detail so that they don't actually they're not allowed to run if they have these, these problems with the, with how they earn their money, and the same principle would would follow with that.
		The Democrats would never agree to that, because they also are doing illegal and nearly illegal things to make their money and they're using their office, just like the Republicans are, to get things that they want and it.
		They would not want to have to divulge their bad things.
		So it would never be allowed.
		They'll never do that.
		That's why they don't do it now.
		You almost never see head-to-head.
		I did bad, you did bad almost it's so rare that I can't even remember the last time that happened.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		That's right, Kevin Kosar, what do you want to pick up on?
unidentified		Uh yeah, two points.
		Uh first, the concern about corruption in congress is uh, eternal.
		Um, we've just never had a moment in in history where uh voters could feel fully confident that Congress was not in some ways on the make or the take.
		Um, you know, 150 years ago the corruption was brazen.
		Uh, you know, you could have lobbyists and and plutocrats walk onto the floor of Congress and simply, you know, hand cash or sock certificates over to members of Congress.
		Uh, now it's uh a lot more subtle, what with uh campaign donations and the like uh, and the concerns about using insider information, uh legislators using that to trade stocks, uh.
		So, trying to get to a fully trustworthy Congress is just something that we we keep pursuing, but it's it's not easy.
		As for the discussion around uh january 6th 2021 yeah, it doesn't feel to me like either Democrats or Republicans are, for the most part, in a place where they can they can have a sober conversation about it.
		Even four years later, the emotions are still raw.
		The narratives are contrasting uh, conflicting uh and, you know, hopefully we will get to a point where we can have an honest conversation at some point in time.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Gregory's next out of Massachusetts Democrat.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Good morning.
unidentified		Good morning, thank you for taking my call.
		Uh, my biggest concern about the um certification, um.
		You brought up a point about the 2016 in Alabama um.
		One member had concerns about Russian interference and I just want to say that in my experience, I feel that 90 percent of the Republicans have not taken the the information about, like the recent trial of Alexander Spirnoff, and I suggest that all of them who Who believe Democrats are lying, look up those facts about the Alexander Shmirnoff trial.
		And also, I just believe it's disgraceful that they feel Democrats are lying more.
		If you go through Trump's financial team that were clearly working with Putin in Russia back in 2016,
		just the lies told about this quote-unquote Biden crime family and everything is all you really got to look up this Alexander Shmirnoff trial and come to grips with who you feel is really lying.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Kevin Kosar, go ahead.
unidentified		Yeah, no, there's we're at a weird point in history where, you know, your average American is not particularly politically polarized.
		They tend to look at each party with a little bit of suspicion and often hold their nose and vote for one or the other when they have to.
		But then there's a portion of our population who's really divided into a kind of red shirts versus blue shirts, scrum.
		And they have a remarkable ability to look at reality and filter facts in ways that fit their preconceived notions.
		And it makes it very difficult to have sane political conversations about serious issues.
		We've seen that with the January 6th, 2021.
		We've seen it with allegations of corruption, whether it's by Mr. Trump or Mr. Biden.
		It just seems like we can't focus on the facts.
		Everything gets run through these kind of prefab mindsets that are partisan and motivated to reason in a way that always is self-justifying.
john mcardle ▲ ● ▼		Just about 15 minutes left this morning with Kevin Kosar as the snow is really starting to come down here on Capitol Hill, a snowy day in Washington, D.C. for this electoral vote count and certification.
		You can almost not see the Capitol Dome, and we're just about a block and a half away here in our studios.
		A question from a viewer saying, as a New Yorker, I feel disenfranchised as a voter.
		Like my vote doesn't count.
		Has there been any serious debate about reforming the Electoral College process?
		And why do different states count their votes differently?
unidentified		Sure.
		Yeah, there's been long-standing complaint about the Electoral College, that it's really a vehicle for having Americans vote as states as opposed to voting as individuals.
		And so, yes, we've seen instances where a person will be elected president, they have the electoral votes to win, more than 270, and yet they lost the popular vote.

▲