Later today, the U.S. Congress will meet in a joint session to certify the results of the 2024 election, a process that was once considered little more than a formality before Republicans tried to stop certification in 2020 and thousands of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and attacked the police who were attempting to prevent the intrusion.
While security has been beefed up for this year’s certification, questions remain about whether or not some Democrats may protest Trump being named the 47th president of the United States since he played a major role in the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection, which makes him ineligible to hold that office under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution.
However, based on what two key Democrats said Sunday, that seems unlikely.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) predicted that today’s certification will be free of violence and go off without any hitches.
“It is a very unnerving moment. I do not believe we will have a repeat of that,” Clyburn told MSNBC host Jen Psaki.
“We will have a vice president presiding on tomorrow who believes in the peaceful transition of the office, and she will preside over her own defeat,” Clyburn added. “I hope the American people will take time out to watch this tomorrow and hopefully have their faith in this great country renewed.”
During an appearance on “Meet the Press, Schiff noted, “If [Trump] goes forward with pardoning vast numbers of people involved in that violence, he will begin his new administration the way he ended his last administration, and that is by celebrating violence against our democracy,” Schiff said. “I think it would be a terrible start – send a terrible message about our democracy, about lawlessness, about people who attacked police officers. Exactly the wrong message and the wrong way to start out an administration.”
“The concern that I have, which is what I conveyed, is the precedent that it would set that you have an outgoing president giving a broad group of pardons to members of his party or others because I think the precedent could be abused,” Schiff continued. “Now, people have rightly pointed out, Donald Trump may abuse that precedent regardless. But the idea that each administration hereafter gives broad pardons to people who have worked in the administration or aligned with the administration, I don’t think that’s a road we want to go down.”
Democrats respect the Constitution and the electoral process. Too bad their counterparts in the GOP don’t.
