Democrats grin and bear it on January 6 as they set example for Republicans on peaceful transfer of power
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Four years after she found herself just 20 feet away from a “viable” pipe bomb amid the Capitol riot as her victory as vice president was to be certified, Kamala Harris stood on the dais in the House of Representatives next to one of the men who battled to overturn that election for Donald Trump.
Harris was a California senator on January 6, 2021 preparing to step up as second-in-command to Joe Biden while Mike Johnson, a backbencher Republican congressman from Louisiana, fought to keep Trump in the White House.
But Monday the two of them stood side-by-side in front of a joint session of Congress, Johnson having risen to speaker of the House and Harris defeated by Trump in the race to the White House.
“I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath I have taken many times to defend the Constitution of the United States, which included today performing my constitutional duties to ensure that the people of America will have their votes counted, that those votes matter,” she said. “I do believe very strongly that America’s democracy is only as strong as our willingness to fight for it.”
Harris, who will leave her job in two weeks, has spent the last days welcoming Republicans as they come into power as part of her official duties as president of the Senate. JD Vance, the Republican senator from Ohio who will take her job, has watched her from the audience. Trump chose Vance as his running mate instead of his one-time vice president Mike Pence, who refused to overturn the election results four years ago.
Last Friday, Harris swore in Republican Senators Josh Hawley of Missouri and Ted Cruz of Texas, who both led the efforts to object to election results when Biden won.
Harris isn’t the only Democrat making the best of the day. Democrats of all stripes have attempted to be gracious even in their defeat to show that they differ wildly from their Republican colleagues who tried to overturn the election because they were unhappy with the results.
As Harris swore in senators on Friday, Johnson scrambled to round up votes to keep his speaker’s gavel. Afterward, Democratic House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries mentioned how Trump won the election. That elicited applause from House Republicans, which led to Jeffries responding in kind.
“It’s ok, there are no election deniers on our side,” Jeffries assured them. And indeed, Jeffries and the rest of the Democratic caucus did not object.
But that did not mean their emotions were any less raw.
Four years ago, Jeffries, along with Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell of California, Colin Allred of Texas and Ruben Gallego of Arizona led a blockade to protect their colleagues as rioters began to storm the Capitol.
Now, Gallego, is a senator, having pulled in people who also voted for Trump in November. He has said he feared on January 6, 2021, that he might have to stab a rioter to survive.
“I wish four years ago, President Trump and his supporters would have shown the class that Vice President Harris and her supporters did in certifying the election and having a safe passage of democracy,” Gallego told The Independent. “It didn’t happen then. But I think we’re setting an example, and I’m hopefully going in the future to set further examples for other parties when they win or lose elections.”
When Gallego was sworn in, his son Michael told Harris he was sorry she did not win the presidency, which led Harris to comfort the younger Gallego, saying: “No, we’re not defeated.”
Gallego is joined by a handful of his other colleagues from the House who earned a promotion to the Senate. Four years ago, Elissa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, was trying to get to the House floor when she heard a bang, which she thought was a crowd-control device, but turned out to be the gunshot that killed Ashli Babbitt as she sought to force her way into the Speaker’s lobby.
“I hauled ass back to my office and barricaded myself in my office,” Slotkin told The Independent. “So I’ve actually never seen an official certification of an election.”
After the riot then, the House and Senate reconvened to certify the election in the dead of night. But this time, the certification process went smoothly and lasted less than an hour.
“It’s the same thing we teach second graders when they play tee ball: You respect the winner and you shake hands,” Slotkin told The Independent. Like Gallego, Slotkin won her race in a state that Trump won.
The January 6 riot eventually led to Trump’s second impeachment. Representative Raskin served as the lead impeachment manager. That January 6 was an intensely personal day for him, given he had just lost his son Tommy to suicide. His daughter Tabitha and Hank, his son-in-law married to his other daughter, were both at the Capitol.
Despite Raskin’s impeachment trial in the Senate, only seven Republicans voted to convict Trump. One of them, Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, fist-bumped Vance when Monday’s certification process ended.
“It’s a day of mixed emotion for me. I can feel proud that we’re acting as constitutional patriots, and this is exactly what the peaceful transfer of power should look like,” Raskin told The Independent, though he questioned why people needed to applaud during the process.
“It was a peaceful and uneventful and nonviolent transfer of power,” he noted. “But it’s undoubtedly hard for any of us to be up there without thinking about what happened four years ago when there was an attempt at a backstage political coup with coercive pressure on the vice president and insurrectionary mob violence unleashed against us on that day.”
He also warned: “We won’t know until Trump’s party loses an election whether they’re actually willing to accept the constitutional process as it’s supposed to work.”
Many Republicans, including those who objected to Trump’s actions, opposed his impeachment.
But Kevin McCarthy, then the House minority leader, said that Trump bore responsibility for the insurrection, while Mitch McConnell, then the Republican leader of the Senate, said that “the people who stormed this building believed they were acting on the wishes and instructions of their president.” But it’s the diehard Trump loyalists who are on the ascendancy.
After the attempt by Trump’s supporters to swarm the Capitol in hopes of changing the election results ended, Andy Kim, then a Democratic representative from New Jersey, cleaned up the trash that the rioters had left around the damaged Capitol. Four years later, Kim walked around the building and remembered that day.
It “reminds me is just the deep challenges that we’re facing,” he said. “It wasn’t just about Trump, isn’t just who’s in the Oval Office. It’s a deeper challenge that we face as a country right now.”
Democrats, meanwhile, have sought to show that they are willing to take out their own trash. In 2023, Kim challenged Bob Menendez, the Democratic New Jersey senator who faced a federal indictment for a corruption investigation. Menendez resigned after he was convicted.
In November, Kim won his Senate race.
