Jan. 6 is set to be different this year — in a big way and more subtle ways too
The biggest difference between Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2021, will be obvious.
Instead of falsely claiming he won the election in a speech 2 miles from the U.S. Capitol, stoking a mob of his supporters to violently disrupt the counting of electoral votes, Donald Trump will be certified the winner by Congress.
That change has radically impacted all aspects of the post-election period. Election officials say their offices aren't getting the same nasty phone calls. Surveys find that the majority of Americans trust the results. But there may be no greater contrast this cycle than during the proceedings on Monday.
"January 6th is the date, if there is one date, at which we witness the peaceful transfer of power in the United States," said Rick Pildes, an election law expert at New York University. "In many ways it is the most important moment of democracy. … And of course, this January 6, in the background, will be the resonances of what happened in [the wake of the] 2020 [election]."
In many ways, experts expect the certification at the Capitol to return to what it looked like before 2020: a simple bureaucratic step that makes a result that Americans have long known official.
But there will be subtle ways this year's proceedings will be different too.
In response to the chaos four years ago, Congress passed new rules to govern and clarify the presidential certification process. After the last election, Trump's legal team had attempted to exploit the previous framework, which legal experts had widely considered to be full of ambiguities.
"It was very badly drafted," said Pildes, who was one of the key legal voices advising a bipartisan group of lawmakers as they crafted the update, known as the Electoral Count Reform Act (ECRA). "The one thing you want in a legal framework for resolving a disputed election — and this is true of any election, but especially the presidential election — you want a clear legal framework that's established in advance so that it can't be manipulated for partisan purposes at the moment of crisis."
This is the first presidential election to be certified under the new law, which also clarified how states finalized their results in December. Here are some of the key changes that will affect Monday's proceedings.
Objections need merit — and more support
Previously, it took just a single member of the House and one from the Senate to sign off on an electoral objection to send the issue to a potentially days-long debate period with no clear resolution if the two chambers then disagreed with each other on their respective votes on the objection.
The previous law also wasn't clear about what sort of questions could motivate a challenge.
The ECRA, however, significantly raises the bar on objections to election results (which have already been certified by each individual state). Now, an objection is only valid if it is signed by one-fifth of each chamber of Congress.
And the law significantly narrows the reasons a lawmaker may object to results, essentially making clear that partisan differences over election policies in a certain state aren't a valid reason to object to the state's results.
Even before 2020, which saw more than 100 Republican members of the House and Senate object to the results in response to Trump's false claims, objections had started to become more common as the electoral processes in 2000, 2004, and 2016 all involved some element of controversy.
"Congress had started sort of sliding into this practice of having at least some members object to receiving votes from a state because of their disagreements with how the voting process had played out in those states," Pildes said. "The [ECRA] is designed to put that genie back in the bottle."
Pildes added that he thinks the violence last election cycle will also make members of Congress more hesitant to object to results for purely political reasons.
Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Trump foil who served on the Jan. 6 investigative select committee, told NPR he's proud that Democrats have accepted the 2024 election results, even if certifying Trump as a victor after all his election lies has created "a very frustrating situation."
"I think that we can feel proud of the fact that despite our profound disappointment and frustration about what happened in the 2024 presidential election, we're standing by the results," Raskin said.
The ECRA also clarified that for an objection to be sustained, it requires a majority vote in both the House and the Senate.
A clearer role for Harris
Four years ago, chants of "hang Mike Pence!" rang out in the Capitol, as then-President Trump told his supporters that the vice president had the power to overturn the will of the voters.
At the time, legal experts said that wasn't true, that the vice president's role in certification, even according to the original Electoral Count Act, was purely ministerial.
But the new ECRA clarified that point even further, saying explicitly that the vice president "shall be limited to performing solely ministerial duties" and that the VP has "no power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate or resolve disputes over the proper certificate of ascertainment of appointment of electors, the validity of electors, or the votes of electors."
The vice president's role in the process will still present an extraordinary moment, as Kamala Harris will oversee the certification of the election in favor of her opponent in the race (as Al Gore did in 2001).
"Special Security Event"
The final change doesn't have to do with the ECRA, but will still be felt throughout the day at the Capitol: heightened security.
Officials across the U.S. government have admitted that security on the day of the Capitol riot was not commensurate with the risk of a mass violence event.
That will not be the case this year.
In September, the Department of Homeland Security announced that the counting of electoral votes on Jan. 6 would be designated a "National Special Security Event," putting it on par with a presidential inauguration and freeing up more federal resources for security.
U.S. Capitol Police have been carrying out drills with officers from 16 different agencies ahead of Jan. 6, according to WJLA in Washington, and temporary fencing has also gone up around the Capitol.
