This Jan. 6 won't be the same.
Four years ago, then-President Donald Trump urged supporters to head to the Capitol to protest Congress' certification of Democrat Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 election.
“Will be wild!” Trump promised on Twitter a few weeks before Jan. 6, 2021. And it was.
Trump gave a vitriolic speech to thousands of people gathered at the Ellipse behind the White House, after which many marched to the Capitol and stormed the building in an attempt to stop the previously routine final step in formalizing the winner of the presidential election. Even after the rioters dispersed, eight Republicans in the Senate and 139 in the House voted against ratifying Biden's win in certain swing states, despite no evidence of problems or wrongdoing that could have affected the outcome.
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This year, the only turbulence preceding the quadrennial ratification of the presidential election resulted from House Republicans fighting among themselves over who should be speaker.
“There will be no violence. There will be no attempt to mount an insurrection against the Constitution,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “It will be a lot more like what we’ve seen for the rest of American history.”
The last time, Trump urged his vice president, Mike Pence, who was presiding over the certification, to intervene to keep him in the White House. This time, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee against Trump, has acknowledged her loss and isn't expected to try to change long-established procedures for certifying the election. No other prominent Democrat has urged the party to contest Trump's win, either.
Congress also has since updated the law that governs the proceeding, clarifying the process in the states and specifying the vice president's role as merely ministerial.
After the 2020 election, many Republicans contended there were signs of massive voter fraud that made it impossible to confirm Biden's victory, even though there has never been any indication of widespread fraud. After Trump won this November, many of those same Republicans had no such objections, saying they trusted the accuracy of the vote count. It was a change in sentiment shared by Republicans across the country.
“As citizens, we should all be happy when it goes smoothly,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. “It's always better not to have major contestation over elections, especially when there isn't a reasonable position for it.”
Still, the calm may be illusory.
Trump and Republicans had signaled that if had Harris won, they were prepared to contest her victory. Vice President-elect JD Vance, as an Ohio senator, argued that Pence should have acted to overturn Biden's election.
Vance himself is set to be in the position to preside over the next significant Jan. 6 — in 2029, when Congress will be scheduled to accept the electoral votes for the winner of the 2028 presidential election.
“The most dangerous January 6 event is not January 6, 2025. It’s January 6, 2029, and beyond,” said David Weinberg of Protect Democracy, which defends against what it terms authoritarian threats to the country. “It creates an enormous problem when only one side of the aisle stands down when it loses an election.”
The Constitution lays out some basic steps required to choose the next president, and congressional legislation has filled in the procedural blanks. After states choose their winning candidates on Election Day, electors who are pledged to vote for those candidates meet as the Electoral College and formally cast their votes for president.
Congress then tallies the votes on Jan. 6 in a joint session presided over by the vice president to formally determine who's won a majority of the Electoral College.
In 2021, Trump pushed for Pence not to read out the tallies from swing states that Biden won, thereby forcing Congress to vote to accept a list of states where Trump won the majority of the Electoral College. That ploy was something that Pence and numerous legal scholars said was an unconstitutional act.
A year later, Biden signed the bipartisan bill that updated the 1887 law governing the joint session to make clear the vice president needs to read all of the state tallies. The Electoral Count Reform Act also makes it harder to object to the congressional vote.
Still, many House Republicans remain opposed to that law.
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was a prime supporter of Trump's efforts to overturn his 2020 loss and had not ruled out trying to change the election outcome if Trump lost in November. Republicans spent the final weeks of the election contending Democrats would do the same if Trump won, citing a push by some to disqualify the former president from the ballot under the Constitution's once-obscure “insurrection clause." That effort ultimately was rebuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Republicans say the size of Trump's election victory is why there is no potential unrest. He won the presidency by about 230,000 votes in the swing states and the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points after losing by about 44,000 votes in the swing states and 4.5 percentage points nationwide in 2020.
“This time, I think the win was so decisive that it just — for good or ill depending on which side you’re on — it’s stifled most of that," said Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican who led the objections on Jan. 6, 2021, over groundless allegations of voter fraud.
Foley, author of the book “Ballot Battles” about election challenges in U.S. history, advised Congress on changes to the law governing the joint session and its certification of the presidential election. He said he hoped the 2024 election marks the end of groundless challenges to congressional certification, even though the candidate who spearheaded the last challenge won.
That's because Trump has said he won't run again and is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term. Foley noted that, in 2022, a number of Republicans tried to mimic Trump's distrust of election results and widely lost in swing states. Election denial, he said, may not be viable if not attached to Trump.
“As Trump will never be a candidate again,” Foley said, “I hope this is beyond us.”
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AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.
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