Wednesday, January 6th in the Capitol and in a joint session of the newly elected Congress will be the last constitutional step and “rule of law” of the election of the President of the United States. The process is opening, credentialing, and counting the Electoral College’s votes. This step actually reflects the basic premise of this democracy and our constitutional republic that “We the People” are sovereign and this representative official step is the “Rule of Law”, not man [or woman] as “The People” through their vote bestow a temporary “consent to be governed”. That is why people say the vote is sacrosanct, it is the very basis of how the government gains its authority. So as January 6th approaches Trump, his regime, and his Republican rightwing, xenophobic autocrats are being exposed to being in absolute opposition to this basic principle of the American democracy. Wednesday on MSNBC with Andrea Mitchell, Senator Christ Murphy (D) CT discussed framed this succinctly:
Andrea Mitchell: “And your Republican colleague, Josh Hawley (R) of Missouri, announcing today he’s going to object to the Electoral College vote certification on January 6th. It is not likely not to change the result, not going to happen, but it’s going to cause delay, lengthy debate, both houses in joint session.
Chris Murphy: It's a complicated process that’s set off Let us be clear, Josh Hawley, and anyone who supports his effort is engaged in the attempted overthrow of democracy. There is no evidence that there was any fraud. Senator Hawley apparently believes that if a Democrat wins the Presidential race, it must be illegitimate by definition even absent of any evidence of misbehavior. And while you are right there Senator Hawley’s efforts here are not going the results of the election,
Joe Biden is going to be President, there are not enough votes to overturn the Electoral College, what he is doing and those who support him are doing is breeding in the American public and certainly in the hard-core Trump supporters this belief that the election itself was illegitimate and any time a Democrat wins it must be illegitimate. That is ultimately going to potentially end in the overthrow of democracy. At some point, there will be a successful attempt by Republicans at the State or National level to throw out just because a Democrat won. We put country before party and our personal beliefs. Senator Hawley’s efforts are not going to change the results of the election. But they pose a grave threat to the American Democracy, maybe not this year, but two years from now, four years from now, absolutely.
Dyer warning, for the future no doubt. So this is the promotion, what is in the program’s order of service for Wednesday.
At 1 PM EST, a joint session will be gaveled into a session of Congress by Vice President Mike Pence, Counting the Electoral Votes
Venue for Counting Electoral VotesThe electoral votes are counted at a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives,meeting in the House chamber. (The U.S. Code refers to the event as a joint meeting; it also has been characterized in the Congressional Record as a joint convention.) The joint session convenesat 1:00 p.m. on that day. The President of the Senate is the presiding officer (3 U.S.C. §15). The President pro tempore of the Senate has presided in the absence of the President of the Senate.
More detail: From Cornell Legal Information Institute
Two tellers shall be previously appointed on the part of the Senate and two on the part of the House of Representatives, to whom shall be handed, as they are opened by the President of the Senate, all the certificates and papers purporting to be certificates of the electoral votes, which certificates and papers shall be opened, presented, and acted upon in the alphabetical order of the States, beginning with the letter A;
and said tellers, having then read the same in the presence and hearing of the two Houses, shall make a list of the votes as they shall appear from the said certificates; and the votes having been ascertained and counted according to the rules in this subchapter provided, the result of the same shall be delivered to the President of the Senate, who shall there upon announce the state of the vote, which announcement shall be deemed a sufficient declaration of the persons, if any, elected President and Vice President of the United States, and, together with a list of the votes, be entered on the Journals of the two Houses.
Upon such reading of any such certificate or paper, the President of the Senate shall call for objections, if any. Every objection shall be made in writing, and shall state clearly and concisely, and without argument, the ground thereof, and shall be signed by at least one Senator and one Member of the House of Representatives before the same shall be received. When all objections so made to any vote or paper from a State shall have been received and read, the Senate shall thereupon withdraw, and such objections shall be submitted to the Senate for its decision; and the Speaker of the House of Representatives shall, in like manner, submit such objections to the House of Representatives for its decision;
From there the chambers go off and debate no longer than two hours:
The joint session does not act on any objections that are made. Instead, the joint session is suspended, the Senate withdraws from the House chamber, and each house meets separately to debate the objection and vote whether, based on the objection, to count the vote or votes in question. Both houses must vote separately to agree to the objection by a simple majority. Otherwise, the objection fails and the vote or votes are counted. (3 U.S.C. §15 provides that “the two Houses concurrently may reject the vote or votes.”)
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Section 17 lays out procedures for each house to follow when debating and voting on an objection. These procedures limit debate on the objection to not more than two hours, duringwhich each Member may speak only once and for not more than five minutes. Then “it shall bethe duty of the presiding officer of each House to put the main question without further debate.”Under this provision, the presiding officer in each house held in 1969 that a motion to table theobjection was not in order.20
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The general grounds for an objection to the counting of an electoral vote or votes would appear from the federal statute and from historical sources to be that such vote was not “regularly given” by an elector, and/or that the elector was not “lawfully certified” according to state statutory procedures. The statutory provision first provides in the negative that “no electoral vote ...regularly given by electors whose appointment has been lawfully certified ... from which but one return has been received shall be rejected” (3 U.S.C. §15). The provision then reiterates for clarity 22 that both houses concurrently may reject a vote when not “so regularly given” by electors“so certified” (3 U.S.C. §15). It should be noted that the word lawfully was expressly inserted by the House in the Senate legislation (S. 9, 49th Congress) before the word certified.23 Such addition arguably provides an indication that Congress thought it might, as grounds for an objection, question and look into the lawfulness of the certification under state law.
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When the two houses disagree, then the statute states that the votes of the electors whose appointment was certified by the governor of the state shall be counted. It is not precisely clear whether this provision for resolving cases in which the House and Senate vote differently appliesonly to the last two situations (that is, when either two determinations have allegedly been madeunder state contest law and procedure, or no such determination has been made); or, instead, also when only one such determination is present. Although this section of the statute is not free from doubt, its structure and its relationship to §5 (and to give effect to §5) seem to indicate that when there is only one determination by the state made in a timely fashion under the state’s election contest law and procedures (even when there are two or more lists or slates of electors presentedbefore Congress), then Congress shall accept that state determination (3 U.S.C. §15) as“conclusive” (3 U.S.C. §5). By this interpretation, the language providing that if the House and Senate split, the question shall be decided in favor of the choice certified by the governor, may not have been intended to be applicable to cases covered by the first clause in the statute in which only one slate or group has been determined, in a timely fashion, to be the electors through the state’s procedures for election contests and controversies.
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Congress established the timetable for certification, transmission, review, and approval of theelectoral votes to avoid a repetition of the extraordinary delay incident to the electoral votecontroversy surrounding the 1876 presidential election.
Now it's been my humble self-important (self sarcasm) that I always hoped and held that Trump and his regime would expose all the failings of the Electoral College system in electing our national leader and he has done a great job doing so. “We the People” spoke decidedly that we want him out and Biden in by over seven million votes in a record turnout. But that is a belief in a democracy that the Republicans are clearly demonstrating they don’t have. A majority of Republican voters in polling believe, without evidence, that the election was stolen. As Murphy said: “if a Democrat wins the Presidential race, it must be illegitimate by definition.”
- 82 percent of Trump voters believe Biden is not the legitimate winner of the election (CBS News/YouGov)
- 68 percent of Republicans say the election was not free and fair, and 37 percent say Trump should never concede no matter what (Politico/Morning Consult)
- 66 percent of Republicans say Trump has been sending the right message to the country since the election (Pew Research Center)
A national poll conducted early this year found that a stunningly large share of self-identified Republicans endorsed antidemocratic proposition as: “The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.” The New Georgia Project stated that the proposals by Republicans to suppress turnout in a state electorally evolving away from them. After 2020 seeing an unprecedented participation Republican legislators’ reaction “is to say, That worked too well. Let’s construct additional hurdles to participation. It’s ridiculous,” she said.
Back to the upcoming political theater: Washington Post:
Yet while irresponsible, Hawley’s move is not necessarily a terrible development. It forces a vote that will have the salutary effect of requiring his Republican colleagues to decide — and to put on the record —whether their loyalty is to President Trump or to the Constitution. Better to know than to guess. Better to inflict some accountability rather than to enable dodging.
Put another way: Any vote that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) fervently wishes to avoid is one I’m for. Put every member of the House and Senate on the record, and let them reap the consequences, for good and for ill, in the short term of political fallout and in the long view of history. Those who vote against certifying Biden’s victory can explain it to their grandchildren.
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In pre-butting criticisms of his conduct, Hawley proffers a fallback excuse: Democrats did it, too. True. In 2005, Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-Ohio) and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) objected to certifying Ohio’s electoral votes; their complaints were rejected by a majority of both chambers. In 2001 and again in 2017, Democratic House members lodged complaints but could not find a single senator to join them, as the law requires. Their objections were gaveled down by the sitting vice presidents, Al Gore — the losing presidential candidate — and Joe Biden. “It is over,” Biden announced, as he rejected the challenges to Trump’s election.
So now we will know who the Republicans are and those who are autocrats opposed to the American Democracy. Here is a picture of who they are across America again from the Washington Post: