| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| The following message from the Secretary of the Senate on January the 6th, 2025 at 11.09 a.m. that the Senate agreed to Senate Resolution 2, Senate Resolution 5, Senate Resolution 10, Senate Resolution 13. | ||
| Signed sincerely, Kevin F. McCumber, Clerk. | ||
| Pursuant to Senate Concurrent Resolution 2, 119th Congress, and the order of the House of January 3, 2025, the Chair announces the Speaker's appointment of two members as tellers on the part of the House to count the electoral votes. | ||
| The gentleman from Wisconsin, Mr. Stile, and the gentleman from New York, Mr. Morrell. | ||
| Pursuant to clause 12A of Rule 1, the House stands in recess until approximately 1255 p.m. | ||
|
unidentified
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Welcome to C-SPAN's live coverage of the 2025 Electoral College Vote Count. | |
| Every four years, the House and Senate meet in a joint session where the electoral votes for President and Vice President are officially tallied and recorded. | ||
| In the November election, former President Donald Trump defeated Vice President Kamala Harris, receiving 312 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. | ||
| Vice President Harris, in her role as President of the Senate, will preside over today's joint session that confirms Donald Trump's historic re-election. | ||
| Today's proceedings convene amidst a significant winter storm in Washington and also with significantly increased security. | ||
| For the first time, the Department of Homeland Security has designated today's vote count as a national special security event, adding additional federal and local protection measures. | ||
| This designation was requested by Washington, D.C. Mayor Muriel Browser in response to the 2021 breach of the Capitol by a group of Donald Trump supporters attempting to stop the vote certification. | ||
| This morning, Vice President Harris released a short video about her constitutional role in today's certification. | ||
| The peaceful transfer of power is one of the most fundamental principles of American democracy. | ||
| As much as any other principle, it is what distinguishes our system of government from monarchy or tyranny. | ||
| Today at the United States Capitol, I will perform my constitutional duty as Vice President of the United States to certify the results of the 2024 election. | ||
| This duty is a sacred obligation, one I will uphold, guided by love of country, loyalty to our Constitution, and my unwavering faith in the American people. | ||
| As we have seen, our democracy can be fragile. | ||
| And it is up to then, each one of us, to stand up for our most cherished principles and to make sure that in America, our government always remains of the people, by the people, and for the people. | ||
| May God bless you and may God bless the United States of America. | ||
|
unidentified
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And we will be here until the top of the hour when the House scables into session and then moves into the joint session for the counting of the electoral votes. | |
| We're going to use that time to learn more about this process, both its constitutional mandates and also some of the atmospheric ones. | ||
| We're going to start with Billy House, who is joining us from Capitol Hill. | ||
| He covers Congress for Bloomberg News. | ||
| Mr. House, well, let's start with the weather because that's kind of one of the big stories today. | ||
| How much difficulty are members going to have getting to the Capitol? | ||
| Well, most of the Republicans stayed through the weekend after Speaker Mike Johnson's re-election to that post. | ||
| So the Republican side seems, the bed checks seem pretty good there. | ||
| Democrats were doing bed checks as late as this morning, and they will show up in great numbers too. | ||
| So it looks like it's going to be a pretty good turnout. | ||
| Maybe not a complete turnout, but a pretty good one for this. | ||
| What evidence are you seeing of the increased security? | ||
| Oh, it's everywhere. | ||
| Combined with the fewer staffed members and other traffic in the building from rank and file staffers and other people, you do have thousands, literally hundreds of ATF officers, Capitol Police officers, bomb squads, help from other locales nearby, D.C., and even the units from the New York City Police Department. | ||
| So it is this strange combination of echoing kind of empty halls, except for this sort of, and I'm not being pejorative here, but militaristic presence. | ||
| Since 2021, Jan 6 has really become its own noun. | ||
| I'm wondering what you are ascertaining about the mood today on Capitol Hill. | ||
| So I was here four years ago in the building, and it was about this time of day when the crowds that were allowed to gather outside started pulsing or moving toward the building. | ||
| That didn't happen today because of the fencing perimeters that have been put up further out from the building and limited entrance. | ||
| But the mood here is sort of anticipatory, but for what, nobody really knows. | ||
| There does not appear to be any open aggression occurring right now from any quarters. | ||
| There certainly are probably have been threats through that police agencies and intelligence agencies have picked up, but that occurs 24-7 all year round against lawmakers. | ||
| So the mood here is pretty kind of calm and actually kind of an empty building for the most part. | ||
| Have any of the lawmakers indicated that they plan to object to any of the individual states' certification? | ||
| I am not aware of any such plans by anybody. | ||
| Of course, they could do so. | ||
| Let's keep in mind there's a higher bar for any objection to go anywhere though in this new process. | ||
| A reform bill passed about two years ago requires now for one-fifth of the members in each chamber to approve further exploring that objection before the two chambers would break up and go into their separate ways to discuss those claims. | ||
| So right now one member or two objecting to something doesn't do it. | ||
| It won't undo the process. | ||
| One of the interesting things is that the vice president-elect as a member of the Senate will be in the chamber as the vote certification happens. | ||
| Has he released any statements about this or have you picked up anything about this actual aspect of today's certification? | ||
| Well as you know she said she will not do anything on her own to undo the certification. | ||
| It's kind of bittersweet obviously. | ||
| Well maybe not even bittersweet, kind of awkward for her to be running this process but it's been done before by presidential candidates who have been defeated. | ||
| Al Gore comes to mind certainly. | ||
| But yeah, right now we see her doing nothing but her constitutional duty. | ||
| That's what she says she will do. | ||
| How about JD Vance still a member of the Senate representing Ohio being in the chamber for the certification? | ||
| Yes and elevated during this process from his Senate seat to the well at least being certified as vice president. | ||
| Of course the inauguration is on January 20th and much of the security you see around today will be replicated that day. | ||
| Yeah and on top of what's happening today, tomorrow President Carter's body will be transferred to the Capitol. | ||
| Really very unusual week historically because of these two big events happening on top of one another. | ||
| What are your thoughts about both of those happening simultaneously and what that does to the lawmakers on Capitol Hill? | ||
| And the Speaker election Friday, all of these things occurring just within days of each other, and then, of course, the inauguration. | ||
| Very solemn here in some regards. | ||
| This rotunda of the Capitol is already decked out in dark, solemn drapery stands, and in preparation for the former president's body to come lie in state starting tomorrow. | ||
| And people will be allowed to come into the Capitol and pay their respects. | ||
| Well, thank you for setting the day off for us. | ||
| I know you have, where will you be actually watching it? | ||
| From the front row, I got a front row seat. | ||
| How did you manage that? | ||
| The stars aligned, I guess. | ||
| Well, we'll be looking for you. | ||
| C-SPAN has three cameras of its own in the chamber today. | ||
| Unusual because it's not a legislative session and the Speaker granted us access. | ||
| We'll be seeing some different pictures than you normally see with the House Produce feed. | ||
| And we'll look for you, Mr. House, in some of those shots. | ||
| Okay, great. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks so much for being with us. | ||
| And as we've noted several times, Vice President Kamala Harris will be presiding over today's Electoral College vote. | ||
| And certainly an awkward thing for people who have wanted to ascend to the presidency themselves to be presiding over the certification of their defeat. | ||
| The last time that this happened was 24 years ago with Al Gore in the chamber and in that chair, the presiding role. | ||
| Let's listen into what it was like back then. | ||
| Gentlemen and gentlewomen of the Congress, the certificates of all the states have now been opened and read, and the tellers will make the final ascertainment of the results and deliver the same to the President of the Senate. | ||
| Mr. Vice President, the undersigned Christopher J. Dodd and Mitch McConnell, tellers on the part of the United States Senate, William M. Thomas and Shaka Fatah, tellers on the part of the House of Representatives, report the following as the result of the ascertainment and counting of the electoral vote for President and Vice President of the United States for the term beginning on the 20th day of January, 2001. | ||
| The state of the vote for President of the United States as delivered to the President of the Senate is as follows: The whole number of the electors appointed to vote for President of the United States is 538, of which a majority is 270. | ||
| George W. Bush of the state of Texas has received for President of the United States 271 votes. | ||
| Al Gore of the state of Tennessee has received 266 votes. | ||
| The state of the vote for Vice President of the United States, as delivered to the President of the Senate, is as follows. | ||
| The whole number of the electors appointed to vote for Vice President of the United States is 538, of which a majority is 270. | ||
| Dick Cheney of the state of Wyoming has received for Vice President of the United States 271 votes. | ||
| Joe Lieberman of the state of Connecticut has received 266 votes. | ||
| 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 the term beginning on the 20th day of January 2001, and shall be entered together with a list of the votes on the journals of the Senate and the House of Representatives. | ||
| May God bless our new president and our new vice president, and may God bless the United States of America. | ||
| Al Gore | ||
| presiding over the Electoral College count in 2001, which certified his defeat as a presidential candidate. | ||
| There were some other times in recent history when sitting vice presidents who had wanted to become president were in similar positions. | ||
| Richard Nixon presided over the electoral vote in 1961, certifying John F. Kennedy as the winner. | ||
| And in 1977, then Vice President Walter Mondale, who was seeking re-election with Jimmy Carter, presided over Ronald Reagan's certification. | ||
| Sorry, 1980, sorry about that. | ||
| And an other interesting note, Vice President Hubert Humphrey opted not to be in the chamber when the vote count happened in 1969. | ||
| He went to a state funeral for a United Nations official instead of being in that somewhat awkward role. | ||
| Next up, we're going to introduce you to Tom Wickham, who served as the House parliamentarian from 2012 to 2020. | ||
| And he's going to help us understand some of the formalities of today's session. | ||
| Mr. Wickham, so this has a number of ceremonial things that have become both custom and requirements. | ||
| Why don't you walk us through what's going to happen that is part of the tradition of the Electoral College count? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The tradition is based in the 12th Amendment to the Constitution, which provides rather briefly that the Vice President, in the presence of the House and the Senate, shall open the certificates and that the result, the votes shall be counted. | ||
| From that rather brief constitutional authority has come a series of statutory changes through the past two centuries, 1876 being a key point, and then 2000 and then 2020 being real milestones in the procedure. | ||
| But largely the custom has remained unchanged that we will see the House and Senate assemble in the House chamber. | ||
| The Vice President as President of the Senate will preside and at one o'clock they will go through each of the certificates and votes from the individual 50 states, count them, and then announce the winners of the presidency and the vice presidency. | ||
| There is a real structure required for the counting of the votes. | ||
| Can you walk us through that? | ||
|
unidentified
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There are tellers appointed from the House and Senate, but there's a process that they must go through. | |
| Will you explain how that works? | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| This is a very intricate process. | ||
| The statute that was first enacted after the Hayes-Tilden race in 1876 lays out that the states will provide individual certificates and votes to the Secretary of the Senate. | ||
| Those votes and certifications are overseen by the parliamentarians of both bodies and then the Senate with the Vice President leading them and introduced by the Sergeant at Arms of the House will come into the chamber with those certificates in mahogany boxes that have been curried by the Senate pages. | ||
| The Vice President will take the chair. | ||
| Tellers will be appointed. | ||
| Those tellers are customarily from the House Administration Committee and the Senate Rules Committee. | ||
| Those tellers will take each and every certificate, announce that the results from each state, and then at the conclusion of the announcement of all of the state totals, the Vice President will then announce the results of that vote. | ||
| And then what happens to those certificates after this session today? | ||
| Those certificates are then placed into the National Archives along with the certificates going back to our very early electoral counts. | ||
| As I said, this is something that is an intricate procedure that starts in the states, then comes to the House and Senate, and then rightfully ends up in the archives. | ||
| With the snowy weather today, is there a necessity for a quorum? | ||
|
unidentified
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And if so, what would those numbers be? | |
| Well, a quorum is presumed in this situation because of the assembly of the two houses and because of the way the rules are written into the Electoral Count Act and the Electoral Count Reform Act, it's very challenging to object to the absence of a quorum. | ||
| So I foresee that there will be a quorum present under the rules and that we will see this ceremony proceed and conclude hopefully within an hour to 90 minutes. | ||
| And what happens after the Vice President announces the results? | ||
| After the Vice President announces the results, that then sets the stage for the inauguration of the President and Vice President happening on January 20th. | ||
| What is the role of the House parliamentarian on a day like this? | ||
| The House parliamentarian consults very closely with the Senate parliamentarian in advising the Vice President and the Speaker of the House on the proper procedures that are going to take place, ones that only take place once every four years. | ||
| So there's a lot of research that goes into it, a lot of consulting between the two offices on the 50 separate submissions that come in and then making sure that there is a proper procedure and that the results are announced. | ||
| In your long tenure as House parliamentarian, you were in the chamber for a couple of these certifications. | ||
| Do you have any particular memories? | ||
| Yes, I am very proud to have been at the last seven electoral counts and Vice President Gore's role in taking the chair and announcing the results of the 2020 election that was bitterly contested. | ||
| At one point, there were a number of challenges that were being issued, and one of the participants said to the Vice President that she did not care about having the requisite signature of a senator as required by the rules. | ||
| And Vice President Gore said very forcefully, well, the rules do care. | ||
| And then Vice President Biden, when responding to a similar challenge, basically said at one point, this is over. | ||
| Really forceful testimonies to the power of the rule of law and the importance of this constitutional procedure. | ||
| And as someone whose job was overseeing the rules, what was your reaction to those two events? | ||
| It was just something that indicated that this is something that is important, that is part of the fabric of our democracy, and needs to be carried out with seriousness and commitment every four years. | ||
| Tom Wickham, a former House parliamentarian in that role from 2012 through 2020 and in the Congress, as he said, for quite many years before that. | ||
| Thank you so much for being with C-SPAN on this historic day of Electoral Vote Certification 2025. | ||
| Thank you, Susan, and thank you, C-SPAN. | ||
| Let me introduce you to our next guest. | ||
| Casey Burgott is a professor at George Washington University and legislative affairs director at that school. | ||
| And, you know, I wanted to start with actual process because people tend to think there's Election Day and then there's today, but there's actually quite a few steps. | ||
| Yeah, too many. | ||
| Why too many? | ||
| No, there's not too many. | ||
| It's just a process that we don't often think about when we're voting for president and vice president. | ||
| We think that we get our ballot, we go to the ballot box and make our check, count the ballots, it's done. | ||
| But actually, that's just the first step in a process that plays out across the states and then ultimately ends today and January 6th with the actual certification of the results and we get our ultimate winner that we thought we knew on election night. | ||
| Right, so we've actually got the timeline laid out for you. | ||
| December 11th is the date that the states had to issue their certificates of ascertainment of what happened in their particular state. | ||
| December 17th, the electors vote in their individual states. | ||
| They cast their votes. | ||
|
unidentified
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Those votes have to be in Washington by this year, December 25th, Christmas Day. | |
| Then on or before January 3rd, they're transferred to Congress and then again today to the Electoral College vote count and then on from here to Inauguration Day. | ||
| There's, as you well know, lots of debate about the Electoral College and what role it serves. | ||
| And so we're seeing it all play out today. | ||
| Encapsulate some of the pros and cons of this system that we have. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, this is the Electoral College count is something that's really hard to explain to folks who didn't grow up in this system. | |
| I often travel to developing democracies and the number one question that they have is, what is it and why do you have it? | ||
| And so for pros and cons, this was a huge compromise bashed out between the folks at the Constitutional Convention about how can we protect small states relative to big states, that if you just did a popular vote, then obviously the big states are going to win. | ||
| How can we protect these smaller states and get them to buy into a system where they feel a stake in it too? | ||
| And this was the big compromise that they came out where that The Electoral College count is subject to not only your population, but the amount of senators combined with your representatives. | ||
| And it's just one of those compromises that they had to detail out all the way back in 1787, and it's stuck around until today. | ||
| How many times have presidential candidates won the popular vote and lost in the Electoral College? | ||
| We could do this before, but it's more than a handful. | ||
| And in fact, in my students' generation, that is more common than not in that they've had presidents lose the popular vote and ultimately be sworn in as commander-in-chief as a result of the Electoral College count. | ||
| But there's been a few, including the one that precipitated the Electoral Count Act that Wick mentioned. | ||
| And isn't Wick the best? | ||
| He's just the man. | ||
| Talking about a really contentious election between Hayes and Tilden, where there was a popular vote winner who ultimately lost the Electoral College count, which led to some disputes because that was a really frustrating thing for folks. | ||
| Yeah, in fact, I have crib notes, so I'm going to tell you. | ||
| Yeah, okay, thank you. | ||
| You're welcome. | ||
| So it's five times that a candidate has won the popular vote but lost the election at Electoral College. | ||
| Andrew Jackson in 1824 to John Quincy Adams. | ||
| Samuel Tilden, as we just heard, in 1876 to Rutherford B. Hayes. | ||
| In the end, with compromise, he won by a single electoral college vote. | ||
| And that led to the legislation you referred to. | ||
| Grover Cleveland to Benjamin Harrison in 1888, but as we know, he came back again to the White House on a second try. | ||
| And then Al Gore in 2000 to George W. Bush, and Hillary Clinton in 2016 to Donald J. Trump. | ||
| So when people watching that from outside the United States see this disparity between the two, how do they react? | ||
|
unidentified
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With questions, mostly if they just don't outright shake their head and say, you guys do it wrong. | |
| And so it's really tough to explain to folks that, yes, you can have, I mean, theoretically, dozens more millions of votes than the other person and ultimately not have the power come January 20th. | ||
| So it is a system that takes some explanation. | ||
| And even when you get down to explaining exactly how it plays out, let alone the steps you just brought up on the screen of how many steps it takes to actually be sworn in, it really is a difficult system to explain to folks who just say, this is the one national representative we have. | ||
| Shouldn't it just be the one who gets the most votes? | ||
| I looked to see whether or not there were ever any serious challenges to the Electoral College, the constitutionality of it. | ||
| And what popped up was in 1970 was the closest that we've ever come when the House actually passed a constitutional amendment, but it went nowhere in the Senate. | ||
| Is there any serious discussion about amending the Electoral College at this point in time? | ||
| Not in the Capitol. | ||
| Or if it is, it's on one party right now. | ||
| But we've seen some pendulums swing back and forth of which party this favors more. | ||
| And in recent history, obviously, it's favored Republicans much more than Democrats. | ||
| These smaller states getting more than their proportions warrant when you talk about California with its multi, multi-multi-millions of people. | ||
| And you end up basing the election on the seven swing states. | ||
| I mean, you asked me three years ago which states are going to matter most. | ||
| I can tell you really confidently which ones they're going to go to. | ||
| And what that ends up with, you have presidential candidates vying to be the national representative, the leader of the country, not even stepping foot in states because it's simply not worth their resources to go there. | ||
| So again, some pros and cons to the systems, but it's recently favored Democrats or Republicans more than Democrats much more. | ||
| And so that's why you've seen a lot of discussions about throwing out the Electoral College from Democratic circles. | ||
| As you saw, we put the phone numbers on the screen, and we have about a half an hour to go until the joint session gavels in and the electoral college vote count gets underway. | ||
| So we have some time to mix in your calls. | ||
| Either a comment about what's happening today is most welcome. | ||
| Or if you have some questions for our guest about the process and about the politics of it all, we're happy to take that. | ||
| I wanted to, before we go to calls, talk about objections. | ||
| So there have been some recent objections. | ||
| 1969, objection to the North Carolina electoral vote by Senator Muskie and Representative O'Hara at the time. | ||
| And then in 2005, Representative Tubbs-Jones, who is from Ohio, always a very key state, and it was seconded in the Senate by Senator Barbara Boxer of California, who ultimately voted against the certification of that vote in the Senate. | ||
|
unidentified
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After the last election four years ago, there were changes. | |
| The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. | ||
| What did it do? | ||
|
unidentified
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Big deal. | |
| This was a big deal. | ||
| And so, depending on how much history you want, the 1876 election really put the first pen to paper within Congress to modify the 12th Amendment, which is what Wick talked about, that structures our electoral college count and how we actually count these electoral college votes. | ||
| And so what's important for folks to understand is that they took for granted the founders when writing the Constitution and then again with the 12th Amendment that these are iterative fixes to things that they didn't anticipate being problems but then retroactively responded to once they were clear problems. | ||
| And with the original Electoral College Count Act, it modified the 12th Amendment that just said the Electoral College counts must be voted in Congress. | ||
| That's basically all it said. | ||
| They didn't say who did it, what the form was, what happens if and when there were objections. | ||
| So then they passed the Electoral College, the Electoral College Count Act in the original 1887 form. | ||
| And that was an improvement on what was existing before in response to that contentious election within 1876. | ||
| And then it went a century where we didn't have, despite us showing these small objections, where we basically dodged a lot of these bullets where there was a lot of loopholes within this Count Act that could be exploited for partisan purposes, which we obviously came to a head in 2020 when we saw all this go down, or 2021 on the last January 6th with presidential elections. | ||
| So there's a lot of changes there. | ||
| If you want to go through them, we can. | ||
| But we can dig in a little bit farther. | ||
| I actually wanted to show Tom Wickham referred to 2017 when then Vice President Joe Biden dismissed objections. | ||
| And we've got a clip of that we're going to show you now. | ||
| Mr. President, I object to the certificate from the state of Alabama on the grounds that the electoral votes were not, under all of the known circumstances, regularly given and that the electors were not lawfully certified, especially given the confirmed and illegal activities engaged by the government of Russia designed to interfere with our election and the widespread violations of the Voting Rights Act that unlawfully suppressed thousands of votes in the state of Alabama. | ||
| Made aloud. | ||
| Section 15 and 17 of Title V of the United States Code required that any objection be presented in writing, signed by both members of the House of Representatives and both member of the House of Representatives and a senator. | ||
| Is the objection in writing and signed not only by the member of the House of Representatives, also by a senator? | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, the objection is in writing, signed by a member of the House of Representatives, but not yet by a member of the United States. | |
| In that case, the objection cannot be entertained. | ||
| For what purposes, member writers? | ||
|
unidentified
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I have an objection because 10 of the 29 electoral votes cast by Florida were cast by electors not lawfully certified because they violated Florida's prohibition against dual office holding. | |
| The debate is out of order. | ||
| Is the objection in writing and signed not only by the member of the House of Representatives, but also by a senator? | ||
|
unidentified
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It is in writing, Mr. President. | |
| Is it signed by a senator? | ||
| Not as of yes, Mr. President. | ||
| In that case, the objection cannot be entertained. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, I object to the certificate from the state of Georgia on the grounds that the electoral votes were. | |
| There is no debate. | ||
| There's no debate. | ||
| Is the objection in writing and not only signed by the member but by a United States senator? | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, even as people waited hours. | |
| There's no debate. | ||
| There is no debate. | ||
| And if there's not signed by a senator, the objection cannot be entertained. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mr. President, the objection is signed by a member of the House, but not yet by a member of the Senate. | |
| It is over. | ||
|
unidentified
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Are there any objections to counting the certificate of vote of the state of Arizona that the teller has verified appears to be regular in form and authentic? | |
| President, I, Paul Gosar, from Arizona. | ||
| What purpose does the gentleman from Arizona rise? | ||
|
unidentified
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I rise for myself and 60 of my colleagues to object to the counting of the electoral ballots from Arizona. | |
| Is the objection in writing and signed by a senator? | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| An objection presented in writing and signed by both a representative and a senator complies with the law, chapter one of Title III of the United States Code. | ||
| Are there further objections to the certificates from the state of Arizona? | ||
| The chair hears none. | ||
| The two houses will withdraw from joint session. | ||
| Each house will deliberate separately on the pending objection and report its decision back to the joint session. | ||
| The Senate will now retire to its chamber. | ||
| So we now have two recent examples of objections made in the Electoral College vote. | ||
| What's your reaction to how they were handled? | ||
| By the book. | ||
| By the book. | ||
| That's how the law was written at that time, which was a big change with this Electoral College Reform Act, or Electoral College Count Reform Act in 2022, in response to how easy it was to basically create chaos within the chamber on something that we had taken for granted for so long. | ||
| And a lot of my academic nerd friends, a lot of election lawyers, a lot of constitutional law experts were shouting from the rooftops that though we haven't had major problems with the electoral certification process, it doesn't mean that we can't. | ||
| There are big Swiss cheese holes in this law that we need to rectify. | ||
| And it took January 6th last time to kind of spur that movement. | ||
| And they ultimately did in big bipartisan measures, passing that new law, which changed the objection threshold from that one. | ||
| You only saw Ted Cruz and Paul Gosar trigger that election or that objection, which then made them retreat into their individual chambers, debate whether that objection should be heard and carried forward, and ultimately those votes thrown out. | ||
| One of the big changes in the new law is that it can't just be one in one from each chamber. | ||
| It has to be 20% or one-fifth of each chamber, obviously raising the threshold to 87 representatives, 20 senators, a much bigger threshold to reach to object to certified election results and ultimately throw them out, and that's how it should be. | ||
| If they wished, though, they could employ the tactic that was done in 2017 to simply stand up and then say that they don't meet the requirements. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And it would take someone presiding in the chair, which we have luckily had of good, strong vice presidents do that. | ||
| And we say right then, this is not a place to make a political statement. | ||
| There is no debate here. | ||
| You either have a challenge that meets the statutory requirements or you don't, and we're going to move on. | ||
| We're going to go to some calls and get your questions or your reaction to the events happening today. | ||
| Beginning with Darrell, who's watching us in Los Angeles, a Democrat, you're on, Darryl. | ||
| Happy New Year, everyone. | ||
| I had a question about the electoral voting, and I understand that a lot better now. | ||
| But the thing that I did want to know is you had a bipartisan vote to do the border, and yet the Republicans threw it out. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| And I think a lot of Democrats and some Republicans are shaking their head too, where we had a negotiated agreement on something that both sides of the aisle recognizes a major problem with the border crossings. | ||
| And so James Lankford went out on a limb, a Republican, very conservative senator from Oklahoma, negotiated a deal, one of the most conservative bills to tackle the border problem. | ||
| And then at the last minute, his rug was pulled out from under him, not by Democrats, who you would think object to a lot of this stuff, but by Donald Trump, the president nominee in waiting, saying that this is a problem that shouldn't be fixed until after the election. | ||
| We can get much more. | ||
| So this is where people shake their heads, rightfully so, that this is where politics get in the way of actual process. | ||
| And a lot of Republicans and Democrats up on the Hill were saying this was a chance for us to get something good done, and politics got in the way. | ||
| Next is a call from Miles, who is in North Andover, Massachusetts, on our independent line. | ||
| Hey, Miles. | ||
| Hi, yeah. | ||
| Good afternoon. | ||
| First of all, I want to thank CCPN for all that you guys do. | ||
| Very informative. | ||
| And I'd like to ask your guests, I understand that the Electoral College very much in favor of keeping it, particularly because it's codified in the Constitution. | ||
| But my question is, it's based on the population of the various states. | ||
| Isn't that de facto a popularity type of equation? | ||
| Get away. | ||
| I will take your answer offline. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you again. | ||
| Thank you for the question. | ||
| I think that most people against the Electoral College would say if it was true popularity, then the person who got the most votes should win. | ||
| And the reality is, is that we have multiple elections most recently where you have millions and millions of people who voted for one candidate who ultimately didn't get their president. | ||
| And so if it were true democracy for the people by the people, then count the votes and win. | ||
| Whoever has the most, that's your commander-in-chief. | ||
| This is obviously not that. | ||
| It is a popularity contest filtered through state elections and then adding up all those independent elections in the end to get your winner. | ||
| Here's a little more electoral college history. | ||
|
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The term electoral college does not appear in the Constitution, but it was established during the Constitutional Convention of 1787 to address disagreements over how to select the president and vice president. | |
| The original system outlined in Article 2 of the Constitution allowed each elector to cast two votes for president, with the candidate who received the most votes becoming president and second place finisher becoming vice president, which led to some serious complications. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| And it was a big challenge where, again, this is the founders were genius. | ||
| Obviously, they created a system of lasting democracy when a lot of others folks have struggled. | ||
| But they weren't perfect. | ||
| They weren't infallible. | ||
| And the compromises that they had to reach ultimately led to some situations where they had to rectify what they put down to paper. | ||
| And one of these was with the 12th Amendment that you basically cast your votes, even though you might be thinking you're voting for VP and president as separate entities on paper. | ||
| They weren't separated. | ||
| And we ultimately had a situation where two people ended up with the exact same amount of votes and everyone kind of shrugged their shoulders and went, oh no. | ||
| Two very famous voters. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| We had Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr. | ||
| And if you've seen Hamilton, you know who these folks are. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So what happened in that election? | ||
|
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It went contentious, and they ultimately had to go back to the states of that House of Representatives to ultimately decide, as the Constitution prescribes, one vote per state, which is another dynamic where California, there obviously wasn't California then, but the biggest state in the land had the equal amount of votes within the Electoral College count within the House as the smallest number. | |
| And so they, again, saw this as a problem once it presented itself and then took steps to fix it with the 12th Amendment that then had its limitations too. | ||
| The other election decided in the House was in 1824. | ||
| And then the Hayes-Tilden one, which we've talked about, was not officially a contingent election, but it did actually have a complicated commission created. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah, there were four states that challenged. | ||
| They sent multiple states of electors. | ||
| So if you think back to the 2020 election, one of the big problems is that states sent in multiple slates of electors to be counted. | ||
| So you had to have a presiding officer or Congress decide which ones these we count, which led to a problem. | ||
| So they created an ad hoc commission of 15 people to say, we got multiple states here. | ||
| Who do we decide? | ||
| You guys go hammer out some deal for us to do this, which ultimately led to Hayes winning the presidency by a single electoral college vote. | ||
| People on the Tilden camp obviously were calling this corrupt, and they had a case to make there. | ||
| And it ultimately was decided for Hayes because he promised not to continue Reconstruction. | ||
| So this is an election on the back end of the Civil War, which for a lot of folks says that we continued the Reconstruction era for longer than it should because of this compromise that existed out of a commission that didn't exist a month ago. | ||
| The United States Senate is gathering right now in their chamber in the Capitol. | ||
| We're going to just listen in for a second and see what it's like in there. | ||
| We heard earlier that the House had appointed two tellers to count the votes for their chamber. | ||
| In the Senate side, Senator Deb Fisher and Senator Amy Klobuchar will serve as the tellers. | ||
| So there's actually four sets of people watching to make sure the vote is certified. | ||
| Why so many steps of people keeping an eye on this? | ||
| Because it matters. | ||
| Redundancy really matters here, and it's just a formalized process to make sure we'll check each other's work. | ||
| Nothing can go wrong. | ||
| This is something where you don't want to have an accounting era. | ||
| Things can go wrong. | ||
| Everything's on paper. | ||
| Everything is on paper and sealed, signed expeditiously across all 50 states in D.C. | ||
| It's something they take very seriously, and we know why. | ||
| Johnny is up next in Canton, Ohio, a Democrat. | ||
| Hi, Johnny. | ||
| Welcome. | ||
| Hi, how are you, Mr. Burgade? | ||
| So far, so good. | ||
| I've got a question. | ||
| The Congress, under the 14th Amendment third clause, is required to remove the liability for someone breaking an oath to the Constitution, a la insurrection, which Donald Trump did, by a two-thirds majority of both houses. | ||
| And so given the state of where things are with Colorado and January 6th, and how can the certification be constitutional if that constitutional requirement to remove the liability is not performed? | ||
| And so I'm wondering how this is going to unfold for folks that see somebody that has broken an oath to the Constitution and yet they're going to be certified to be president. | ||
| So please let me know what your thoughts are about how this is going to unfold. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| So two different things there, Johnny, and you're going to get me in trouble with one of them, so I'm going to ignore it. | ||
| But the reality is that the court case you're talking about didn't make its way through and it wasn't certified or decided in a way that obviously disqualified him. | ||
| And under the amendment, the Congress has to act. | ||
| And unless they don't, unless they pass a resolution, pass something that registers their discontent and makes someone ineligible for office, and usually impeachment and disqualification is their only route to do so, then that person, so long as they meet the other constitutional requirements to be commander-in-chief, which Donald Trump obviously did, then he's eligible to be on those ballots unless courts say that they won't. | ||
| He wasn't. | ||
| And he ultimately got enough Electoral College counts. | ||
| And to your other question about how the process will play out, I suspect and knock on wood here that it will be pretty quiet, that it will be the antithesis of what we saw on January 6th, and that the pro forma session that we took for granted for too long will come back again and we can always breathe a deep sigh of relief that the peaceful transfer of power exists yet again in America. | ||
| I want to go back to more details on the recently passed Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022. | ||
| We talked about the increased threshold of 20% of both chambers to object. | ||
| Two other provisions worth noting, codifies the ministerial role of the vice president. | ||
| This is in direct response to the expectation that somehow Mike Pence could have denied certification. | ||
| Bingo, this is a big, big deal. | ||
| So the threshold is clause number one. | ||
| That was a big change in clause number two that they put right out front with the ECRA is saying that the VP doesn't have discretion about whether to reject a state's vote count, that he is, and they say it explicitly, performing only ministerial duties. | ||
| He's just an administrator, a paper pusher, if you will, of probably a very powerful one, but still he has no authority or she has no authority with Kamala Harris today. | ||
| And then they even went further to make sure that everyone knows that we're playing by the same rules here, that they created a subsection saying powers explicitly denied the VP. | ||
| And that was one of them, that they cannot reject unilaterally any state vote counts, which Donald Trump was obviously saying Mike Pence had the power to do. | ||
| And one last provision. | ||
| Congress must defer to the slates as determined by the states. | ||
| What's that saying? | ||
| It's saying that Congress, you don't get to decide who the electors are. | ||
| The states decide. | ||
| This is the culminating process of them running their individual state elections. | ||
| They get their certificate of ascertainments that says very explicitly who these people are. | ||
| Those people are then sent to Congress once those electors are actually counting in Congress. | ||
| You don't get to say boo about it because once we certify those elections in their states, they have to treat those as binding. | ||
| So Congress, get out of the way. | ||
| Have about 10 more minutes until we expect this process to get underway. | ||
|
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Our next call is from Andrew in Falkville, Alabama on the Independent Line. | |
| Hi. | ||
| Yes, Mr. Bargate. | ||
| I was wondering, what's stopping all states from counting their electoral votes like Maine and Nebraska, where it's gone by congressional district instead of a winner-take-all vote? | ||
| Great question. | ||
| And this is where it's really helpful to keep in mind that we think we're running a national election for presidency, but we're not. | ||
| We're running 51 independent elections, and they're different by states about ballot access, about how long polls stay open, early balloting. | ||
| Every variable out there according to how states run their elections are decided by the states. | ||
| And the states you mentioned, Maine and Nebraska, have decided that they're going to allocate their electoral college differently, where that it's by congressional district rather than a winner-take-all system where if you get the most votes in your state, you win. | ||
| And so, we might see a movement towards that direction to kind of give more states some flexibility or at least create more buy-in for voters where they don't already know right now who's going to win the election in 2028. | ||
| But right now, only those states do it. | ||
| But if you want to see changes in your states about how they conduct these elections, then you got to lobby state legislators to get those changed. | ||
| Ignore Congress, they have no power over it. | ||
| Kevin is in Cheyenne, Wyoming, Republican. | ||
| Hi, Kevin. | ||
| Am I on? | ||
| Christine in Goshen, New York. | ||
| Christine, go ahead, please. | ||
| Hi. | ||
| I know this has been talked about already, but I just want to say that according to Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, Donald Trump is already disqualified from holding office for having engaged in insurrection. | ||
| He was impeached for it. | ||
| He did it. | ||
| January 6th wasn't a riot. | ||
| It was an insurrection led by and paid for by him. | ||
| The Supreme Court said he couldn't be taken off the ballots, but they didn't explicitly say that he was not disqualified. | ||
| I'd like to see our lawmakers actually have a spine and use the powers given to them by the Constitution and prevent this fascist from taking over our country and selling it to the highest bidder. | ||
| Thanks very much. | ||
| You want to let that stand as a comment or do you have any reactions? | ||
| I didn't hear a question there. | ||
| We'll let it pass. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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I wanted to ask about the number of electoral college votes: 535 members of Congress, but there are 538 electoral college votes. | |
| When did D.C. get the right to participate? | ||
| God, Jeopardy, again. | ||
| I don't know, actually, but as a D.C. resident, I'm thankful that they do, that we at least have buy-in, given that we don't have a representative in Congress that has voting powers. | ||
| I'm not trying to put you on the screen. | ||
| You are too, and that's okay. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| Well, it was in the 20th century. | ||
|
unidentified
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It was a more recent-year gap. | |
| You're right. | ||
| I'm going to go back to calls at this point. | ||
| This is Crystal in North Dakota, who is a Republican. | ||
| Crystal, you are on the air. | ||
| Let's see right here. | ||
| Go ahead, please. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| I also come from a state of only three electoral votes, but we combine with Montana, which now has four. | ||
| And I appreciate your guest talking about how this is set up because our founders were worried about mob rule. | ||
| And if anybody didn't like January 6th, 2021, that's an example of mob rule. | ||
| We've got to have level heads. | ||
| We need paper. | ||
| We need rules. | ||
| We need to follow those rules and lower the temperature. | ||
| You've already had two phone calls already about, you know, anyway, I'm not going to go into that. | ||
| But through the examples that you've shown on C-SPAN already, you are invaluable to us who are watching. | ||
| The world is watching. | ||
| And we see common sense. | ||
| We see rule of law, paper trail, and the history. | ||
| And again, it's representative government. | ||
| Our representatives that we elect go to Washington, D.C. for our business. | ||
| So would your guest comment about the mob rule? | ||
| And does he know anything about the mob rule that worried our founding fathers? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Yeah, it was a major concern for them that they feared the tyranny of the majority, especially on the House side, where they can have a lot of passions of people ultimately resulting in legislation that wasn't necessarily good for the long term, but people wanted to see right now. | ||
| And they put in a lot of checks and balances, as we're taught from our earliest days in schools, to prevent anyone or any one chamber culminating too much power to end up running shop when a lot of other people should be involved in the process. | ||
| And that has resulted in a lot of legislation not being passed because they couldn't get those votes in those chambers. | ||
| And the checks and balances that we appreciate and say we love can also be incredibly frustrating at the same time. | ||
| So you're right on the money that that was a fear of the founders and they baked a system that prevented a lot of that tyranny majority from overwhelming the system. | ||
| We have, as our time with you is beginning to wind down here, I want to take just a minute to hear about your new book coming out in the spring. | ||
| Ah, thank you for that. | ||
| Yes, I do have a book coming out next month, February 4th. | ||
| It's called We Hold These Truths. | ||
| And the truths are in quotes because the book is all about political myths. | ||
| Things that we think are true, things that we're told are true about the system, institutions, people, the media, a lot of things from soup to nuts about our government that we assume to be true that just simply aren't. | ||
| And so after being around Capitol Hill and federal politics for so long, we just keep having these same conversations that are built on false premises. | ||
| And I want to break down those false premises so that we can move on to the things that actually matter: things that are true, things that are debatable, and things that can make our democracy stronger for longer. | ||
| And this is hopefully my contribution to that. | ||
| We are now watching live pictures from Statuary Hall, where the members of the Senate are making their way across the Capitol to the House chamber for this joint session of Congress. | ||
| When you watch, just from as a political scientist's perspective, these two bodies coming together in joint session, what does that indicate to you symbolically? | ||
| It's good. | ||
| I mean, these places have very different powers, very different incentive structures, different sizes, different constituencies, but at the same time, they're ultimately responsible to the same people. |