When Congress certifies the results of the 2024 election on Monday, Kamala Harris will join a small and rather miserable club: vice presidents who have had to oversee the formal confirmation of their own defeat.
Under the Constitution, the vice president is the head of the Senate, who has been entrusted with the process of declaring the election result to the White House.
That arrives on January 6.
And it means that Harris, who lost all seven key battleground states to a candidate she called a fascist, must face the final humiliation of declaring Donald Trump the winner.
He will follow in the footsteps of Al Gore, Bill Clinton’s vice president, who had to certify his defeat to Republican George W. Bush in 2001 after weeks of legal wrangling over outstanding issues and small margins in Florida.
Before him, Richard Nixon (then Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president) had to approve the results of his loss to John F. Kennedy after the 1960 election.
But there is an evasion. Just don’t show up.
In 1969, Democratic Vice President Hubert Humphrey recused himself and skipped certification. Instead, it fell to the president pro tempore of the Senate (usually the ranking member of the majority party) to announce that Humphrey had lost to Nixon’s second bid.
On Monday, Vice President Kamala Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress that will formally certify her defeat in the 2024 election.
Donald Trump will be sworn in for his second term as president in January 2020
On Friday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that she expected Harris to attend the joint session of Congress.
“I think that’s their plan,” he said.
Trump supporters have expressed joy at the idea that Harris will have to formally declare her Republican opponent the winner.
‘Kamala has to certify the results of Monday’s election…’ Conservative comedian Tim Young posted on X. “It will be must-see television.”
Someone calling herself MAGA Michelle wrote: “The best part of this is that Kamala has to certify her own electoral drubbing, which brings back all the shame she must have felt.”
Marc Short, who was Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, said: “No one is excited about certifying their own loss, but I think it’s integral to all democracies that there is a peaceful transfer of power.”
He said Harris was not alone in having to play the role.
“It’s happened to a lot of vice presidents,” he said.
Vice President Mike Pence on January 6, 2021, while presiding over a joint session of Congress before lawmakers were evacuated when a mob attacked the Capitol. The session reconvened that same night to declare Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 election.
Certification is usually a formality, a final round of vote counting and the last step in the process of electing a new administration.
“Only once in 250 years of our republic was it claimed that that person had unilateral authority to change the results.”
The process is usually a formality, a final round of vote counting and the last step in the process of electing a new administration.
The events of January 6, 2021 changed all that. Trump refused to accept defeat and pressured Pence to overturn the results and declare his boss the winner.
Pence refused, and the result was an angry mob that ransacked the Capitol and forced members of Congress to flee.
The vice president reconvened the session in the early hours of the morning and confirmed the election results shortly after 3:30 in the morning.
That experience led Congress to update the Electoral Count Act to clarify that the vice president does not have the power to resolve disputes over electors and is instead there to announce the result.