They claim that Trump – despite the alarms he sounded during his 107-day run until the November election – will once again assume the powers and trappings of the presidency.
The task, by statute, always falls to the vice president on January 6 after a presidential election, and this will not be the first time the role may prove unbearable.
Four other vice presidents seeking the highest office in the country – including Al Gore and Richard Nixon – had to appear in the House of Representatives, in front of hundreds of legislators, and formalize their own defeat.
But this event stands out for the sheer intensity of the warnings Harris and other Democrats issued about the dangers of the man whose victory they are poised to formalize.
The certification has additional historical significance because it comes just four years – and one presidential election – after a violent mob, enraged by Trump’s false claims that Joe Biden had stolen the election, stormed the US Capitol as the Then-Vice President Mike Pence presided over the 2020 electoral recount.
This time, Trump welcomes the result and Democrats show no signs of alleging fraud. Still, law enforcement officials are planning extensive security measures to ensure nothing disrupts the proceedings.
Harris intends to make sure the certification goes smoothly, her aides say, in part as a stark contrast to Trump’s unwillingness to do so four years ago.
Presidential historian Tim Naftali noted that from the first days after Harris’ loss, she and President Biden made clear that they would provide “the kind of transition for Donald Trump that Donald Trump refused to provide them four years ago.”
Harris promised in her concession speech to ease the new administration’s transition to power, while Biden hosted Trump – whom he had called an “existential threat” – in a White House meeting that was so cordial it upset some of Biden’s fellow Democrats.
“This is, in a sense, a way of fulfilling one of his campaign promises,” said Naftali, a senior fellow at Columbia University’s School of Public and International Affairs.
“His administration came to power to restore dignity and restore American institutions. And while they leave the Oval Office to the person they replaced, whose chaos they were elected to eliminate, they have one last chance to send a message about the importance of traditional norms.”
Donna Brazile, who was Gore’s campaign manager for the 2000 election and advised Harris during her 2024 campaign, said that while the moment will resonate with the pain of Harris’ defeat, the vice president intends to ensure that the country see “what it truly means to have a peaceful transition of power.”
“She doesn’t hold grudges. She’s not pointing fingers,” Brazile said. “Next week will be just another chapter, another chapter in his long and distinguished career.”
Brazile recalled watching Gore preside over the certification of his 2001 defeat in a much closer election, in which the Supreme Court was required to confirm George W. Bush’s victory after a bitterly contested recount in Florida.
At the time, Brazile said, Gore – who won the popular vote only to fall short in the electoral college – was a “statesman” who knew that when the Supreme Court issued its verdict, “the fight was over.”
“The same goes for what happened with Kamala Harris: After the verdict came, she accepted the verdict,” Brazile said. “Gore, like Harris and Pence, are institutionalists. They believe in the rule of law. “They believe in a peaceful transition.”
Routine event until 2021
Beyond the physical assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, some Republican senators questioned Biden’s victory in key states, although most reversed their position after the riot, which resulted in several deaths.
For decades, Congress’s counting and certification of electoral college votes was a routine event, until some Trump supporters in 2021 came up with theories and strategies to overturn it, none of which held up in court.
Although there is no dispute over the results of the 2024 election, the unexpected violence that unfolded in 2021 has cast a shadow over proceedings as law enforcement authorities face pressure to ensure that no security threats mar the day.
For the first time, the Department of Homeland Security has designated vote certification as a “special national security event,” paving the way for the Secret Service and other agencies to develop what they described as “a comprehensive security plan and integrated to guarantee the safety of this event and its participants.”
It also marks the first time the certification will take place after the 2022 revision of the Electoral Count Act, which Congress enacted to correct weaknesses in that law that were exposed by the events of January 6, 2021.
The legislation reaffirmed that the vice president only has a ministerial role in the session where electoral college votes are counted, a direct response to Trump’s false claims in 2021 that Pence could have overturned the election results. That statement prompted threats against Pence’s life from Trump supporters when he refused to do so.
The measure also raised the threshold necessary for members of Congress to object to a state’s electors. At the time, Biden called the bill a “critical bipartisan action that will help ensure the will of the people is protected.”
Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Democrat and chairwoman of the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, added after the legislation passed that “the electoral counting process was never intended to be a trigger point for an insurrection, and it is because “That is what we are reforming.”
And he added: “We are now one step closer to protecting our democracy and avoiding another January 6.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6 attack, leaders of both parties were quick to condemn it as an inexcusable attack on democracy, with many placing the blame squarely on Trump.
Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky called Trump “morally responsible,” and many participants have been convicted of crimes such as assaulting a police officer and entering a restricted federal building.
But since then, many members of the Republican Party, led by Trump, have tried to reframe the riot as a heroic act by patriots concerned about democracy.
The president-elect has committed to pardoning, within minutes or hours of taking office, those convicted of the January 6 insurrection, and has baselessly said that members of the House committee that investigated it , including former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, “should go to jail.”
Biden and others seek to challenge that rewriting of history. On Friday, the President awarded Cheney the Presidential Citizens Medal for “putting country before party.”
Biden noted during the medal ceremony that he had previously honored “the law enforcement officers who defended our Capitol on January 6 and the state and local election officials, elected leaders who defended the free and fair 2020 elections.”
Brian Fallon, a Democratic strategist who advised Harris during her 2024 bid, said he views the certification as a critical moment in reestablishing the historical norm that a presidential candidate who falls short voluntarily concedes power to his opponent.
“It is important to the vice president that the day proceed as the Constitution provides, to demonstrate that January 6, 2021, was an aberration and that the American tradition of the peaceful transfer of power is being restored,” Fallon said.
Still, it will be a difficult day for many of Harris’s supporters as they face the reality of Trump’s return to the White House on January 20.
When Gore certified the electoral votes in 2001, his supporters approached him at the Capitol to tell him that he should have affirmed his victory instead of his defeat.
“It is a surreal and humiliating moment for Kamala Harris to have to certify her own loss to a man she called a fascist,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University. “However, that is what her duty requires of her as vice president.”
