It’s the first Monday of 2025! And I’m still trying to figure out what happened to 2024. Thanks as always to Bacon Time, The Other McCain, Flappr, Pirate’s Cove, and If You’re Left You Ain’t Right for all the Rule Five links. If I missed your linkage, let me know in the comments and we’ll get you on the list.
Today, Kamala Harris joins a small club – vice presidents who failed in their presidential bids, and who will have to preside over the certification of their opponent’s election.
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, entrusted with the process of declaring the result of a White House election.
That comes on January 6.
And it means 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 victor.
She will follow in the footsteps of Al Gore, vice president to Bill Clinton, who had to certify his defeat to Republican George W. Bush in 2001 after weeks of legal wrangling about hanging chads and small margins in Florida.
Before him, Richard Nixon (then vice president to Dwight D. Eisenhower) had to sign off on the results of his loss to John F. Kennedy after the 1960 election.
She can decline to show up, though, which would make her look even more petty and childish than she already is. The Senate president pro tem would then simply certify the election and things would proceed to Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20th.
Personally, I hope she shows and struggles through it. It will serve as one more illustration of the fact that, with Kamala Harris’s defeat, America not only dodged a bullet – we dodged an entire munitions factory.
