Politics

WASHINGTON (AP) — Jimmy Carter and the man he beat for president, Gerald Ford, got so tight after office that their friendship became a kind of buddy movie, complete with road trips that were never long enough because they had so much to gab about.

Carter did not get along nearly so well with the other living presidents. The outsider president was an outlier after his presidency, too.

Nevertheless, past and present occupants of the office will attend Carter’s state funeral this week in what could be the largest gathering of the presidents club since five attended Washington services for George H.W. Bush in December 2018.

As a member of that elite, informal club, Carter was uniquely positioned to do important work for his successors, whether Democrat or Republican. He achieved significant results at times, thanks to his public stature as a peacemaker, humanitarian and champion of democracy and his deep relationships with foreign leaders, troublemakers included.

But with Carter, you never knew when he’d go rogue. This was a man so self-confident, he described himself as “probably superior” to the other ex-presidents who were still knocking about. Ornery about taking orders, he could be invaluable to the man in office, exasperating, or both at once.

The others often bonded over “what an annoying cuss Carter could be,” Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy wrote in their book “The Presidents Club.”

“Carter was the driven, self-righteous, impatient perfectionist who united the other club members around what seemed like an eternal question: was Jimmy Carter worth the trouble?”

He was, in the mind of Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth College historian of religion and Carter’s rise to the presidency. Balmer points to the violence averted in the last hours before a U.S. invasion of Haiti in 1994, when Carter, to the benefit of Democratic President Bill Clinton and countless lives saved, brokered a deal with Haiti’s military coup leader to step aside and restore democracy.

“Any time you can avoid military conflict you score that as a win,” Balmer said.

Four years earlier, for the benefit of Republican President George H.W. Bush and the lives at stake in the region, Carter secured peace in Nicaragua at the brink of bloodshed when he persuaded the leftist leader Daniel Ortega to accept the electoral defeat that had so shocked the Sandinistas.

John Danforth, former Republican senator from Missouri, joined Carter on missions to lay the groundwork for the 1990 Nicaragua election and then monitor it. In the first, the Carter entourage came upon Ortega’s motorcade on a dusty road through the town of Rivas.

The two men retired to the backyard of the nearest house for an impromptu negotiation over the government trucks Carter wanted Ortega to send around the country to deliver election material.

“Often when we envision former presidents, the picture is distant, even stuffy: men in dark suits and neckties captured in formal poses as though engaged in deep thoughts,” Danforth wrote in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in February 2023. “My picture of Carter is quite the contrary. He is in a back yard in Rivas. A crowing rooster is at his feet. An earnest expression is on his face. He’s not talking statecraft; he’s talking trucks.”

Yet he could infuriate those in power. Years after the U.S.-led Gulf War rolled back Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, it emerged that Carter had lobbied U.N. Security Council members and foreign leaders to reject the elder Bush’s request to authorize the use of force.

After being mostly sidelined by the man who defeated him in 1980, Ronald Reagan, Carter was given several missions by Bush until the Gulf War episode, after which he was cut off, Gibbs and Duffy write.

His relationship with Clinton was limited and uneasy, bookended by Clinton’s reluctance to call on a figure who symbolized humiliating election defeat for Democrats and by Carter’s disapproval of Clinton’s behavior outside his marriage.

But after Clinton won the White House in 1992, he sent Carter to North Korea to take the measure of dictator Kim Il Sung. Clinton aides were livid when Carter went beyond his brief, engaging in an unauthorized negotiation with Kim and, what’s more, talking about it on TV.

But then, Carter was always a step apart from the rest. He was also one to wag a finger at the political establishment, if not to pulverize it like Donald Trump did.

In January 2009, President George W. Bush invited other members of the presidents club to the White House for lunch and Oval Office photos. Bush, his father, Clinton and President-elect Barack Obama are seen clustered in front of the Resolute Desk. Carter is conspicuously off to the side — outlying.

The images spoke volumes about Carter’s place in the club, Balmer said. “Jimmy Carter didn’t fit in with a lot of people. He was really an introvert, not somebody who warms up easily.”

If politics makes strange bedfellows, though, post-politics makes even stranger ones. The embedded hostilities of Democrat-versus-Republican can melt in the presidents club as former rivals become unlikely mates.

Except with Trump. Regardless of party, the club members disdained Trump in his first term, and he had no use for them.

When Carter turned 100 in October, Trump marked the occasion by declaring that Joe Biden is so bad a president that Carter must be “the happiest man because Carter is considered a brilliant president by comparison.”

Trump was more sober in response to Carter’s death, saying “the challenges Jimmy faced as president came at a pivotal time for our country and he did everything in his power to improve the lives of all Americans. For that, we all owe him a debt of gratitude.”

Democrat Lyndon Johnson leaned frequently on Republican predecessor Dwight Eisenhower, telling him “You’re the best chief of staff I’ve got.” On the night of John Kennedy’s assassination, LBJ sought Ike’s advice on what to say to Congress, adding: “I need you more than ever now.”

Reagan once pulled Clinton aside to tell him the military salute he was executing during the campaign was too lame for the presidency. He taught him how to make it snappy. Clinton in turn cherished his long and frequent phone calls with Richard Nixon, confiding in the disgraced but savvy Republican on foreign policy problems of the era.

Clinton also became close to the Republican he vanquished in 1992, joining the elder Bush in Maine for golf, zippy boat rides and nights by the sea.

More consequentially, the younger Bush asked his dad and Clinton to lead a fundraising mission for countries devastated by the 2004 tsunami, giving rise to a bipartisan pairing that pitched in on more endeavors, like Hurricane Katrina relief. “I just loved him,” Clinton said upon Bush’s death in 2018.

So, too, Obama and the younger Bush have teamed up on occasion and Bush enjoys an especially good-natured relationship with Michelle Obama.

But the Jimmy-Jerry friendship was one for the ages.

Carter took it as a point of pride when two historians, speaking separately at a commemoration of the 200th birthday of the White House, said his friendship with Ford was the most intensely personal between any two presidents in history.

Carter said it began in 1981, when the two were sent by Reagan to represent the U.S. at the funeral of Anwar Sadat, the assassinated Egyptian leader. Nixon was on the trip, too, somewhat awkwardly. The other two took to each other, commiserating over how tough it could be to raise money for a presidential library when you’ve been booted out of office.

They were both Navy men, had three sons, a strong religious faith that Ford was quieter about than Carter, and independent spouses who bonded as well. “The four of us learned to love each other,” Carter said.

Carter and Ford spoke regularly, teamed up as co-leaders on dozens of projects and decided together which events they’d attend and skip in tandem.

“When we were traveling somewhere in an automobile or airplane, we hated to reach our destination, because we enjoyed the private times that we had together,” Carter said.

That’s what he told mourners in January 2007, at a service for Ford the month after he died at age 93.

The Democrat and the Republican he so cherished had made a pact, one hard to imagine in this time of partisan poison: Whoever died first would be eulogized by the other.

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PLAINS, Ga. (AP) — When Jimmy Carter chose branding designs for his presidential campaign, he passed on the usual red, white and blue. He wanted green.

Emphasizing how much the Georgia Democrat enjoyed nature and prioritized environmental policy, the color became ubiquitous. On buttons, bumper stickers, brochures, the sign rechristening the old Plains train depot as his campaign headquarters. Even the hometown Election Night party.

“The minute it was announced, we all had the shirts to put on — and they were green, too,” said LeAnne Smith, Carter’s niece, recalling the 1976 victory celebration.

Nearly a half-century later, environmental advocates are remembering Carter, who died on Dec. 29 at the age of 100, as a president who elevated environmental stewardship, energy conservation and discussions about the global threat of rising carbon dioxide levels.

President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to abandon the renewable energy investments that President Joe Biden included in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, echoing how President Ronald Reagan dismantled the solar panels Carter installed on the White House roof. But politics aside, the scientific consensus has settled where Carter stood two generations earlier.

“President Carter was four decades ahead of his time,” said Manish Bapna, who leads the Natural Resources Defense Council. Carter called for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions well before “climate change” was part of the American lexicon, he said.

Former Vice President Al Gore, whose climate advocacy earned him the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, called Carter “a lifelong role model for the entire environmental movement.”

As president, Carter implemented the first U.S. efficiency standards for passenger vehicles and household appliances. He created the U.S. Department of Energy, which streamlined energy research, and more than doubled the wildnerness area under National Park Service protection.

Inviting ridicule, Carter asked Americans to conserve energy through personal sacrifice, including driving less and turning down thermostats in winter amid global fuel shortages. He pushed renewable energy to lessen dependence on fossil fuels, calling for 20% of U.S. energy to come from alternative sources by 2000.

But laments linger about what 39th president could not get done or did not try before his landslide defeat to Ronald Reagan.

Carter left office in 1981 shortly after receiving a West Wing report linking fossil fuels to rising carbon dioxide levels in Earth’s atmosphere. Carter’s top environmental advisers urged “immediate” cutbacks on the burning of fossil fuels to reduce what scientists at the time called “carbon dioxide pollution.”

“Nobody anywhere in the world in a high government position was talking about this problem” before Carter, biographer Jonathan Alter said.

The White House released the findings, which drew forgettable news coverage: The New York Times published its story on the 13th page of its front section. And with scant time left in office, there were no tangible moves Carter could make, beyond the energy legislation he had already signed.

The report recommended limiting global average temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. Thirty-five years later, in the 2015 Paris climate accords, participating nations set a similar goal.

“If he had been reelected, it’s fair to say that we would have been beginning to address climate change in the early 1980s,” Alter told the AP. “When you think about that, it adds a kind of a tragic dimension, almost, to his political defeat.”

Reagan ended high-level conversations about carbon emissions. He opposed efficiency standards as government overreach and rolled back some regulations. His chief of staff, Don Regan, called the solar panels “a joke.”

Despite Carter’s emphasis on renewable sources, the fossil fuel industry benefited from his push toward U.S. energy independence.

Collin O’Mara, CEO of the National Wildlife Foundation, pointed to coal-fired power plants built during and shortly thereafter Carter’s term, and his deregulation of natural gas production, a move O’Mara called “a precursor” to widespread fracking. Bapna noted Carter backed drilling off the coasts of Long Island in New York and New England.

Steven Nadel, executive director of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, pointed to Carter’s Synthetic Fuels Corporation, a short-lived effort to produce fossil fuel alternatives that “would have meant much higher carbon emissions.”

But Carter had the right priorities, especially on research and development coordinated through the Energy Department, Nadel said. “He allowed us to have a national approach rather than one agency here and another there.”

Carter’s environmental interests had deep roots going back to a a rural boyhood filled with hunting and fishing and working his father’s farmland.

“Jimmy Carter was an environmentalist before it was a real part of the political discussion — and I’m not talking about solar panels on the White House,” said Dubose Porter, a longtime Georgia Democratic Party leader. “Just focusing on that misses how early and how committed he was.”

His early years influenced Carter as governor, Porter said, when he boosted Georgia’s state parks system and opposed Georgia congressmen who wanted to dam a river. Carter paddled the waterway himself and decided its natural state trumped the lucrative federal construction proposal.

In Washington, Carter continued sometimes unwinnable fights against funding for projects he deemed damaging and unnecessary. He found more success extending federal protection for more than 150 million acres (60.7 million hectares), including redwood forests in California and vast swaths of Alaska.

Randall Balmer, a Dartmouth College professor who has written on Carter’s faith, said he saw himself as a custodian of divinely granted natural resources.

“That’s a real connection that young evangelicals still have with him today,” Balmer said.

Carter won the presidency amid energy shortages rooted in global strife, especially in the oil-rich Middle East, so national security and economic interests dovetailed with Carter’s religious beliefs and affinity for nature, Nadel noted.

Carter compared the energy crisis to “the moral equivalent of war,” and as inflation and gas lines grew, he called for individual sacrifice and sweeping action on renewable energy.

“Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns,” Carter warned in 1979. “But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning.”

That “malaise” speech — dubbed so by the media despite Carter not using the word — was unique in presidential politics for its condemnation of unchecked American consumerism. Carter celebrated that more than 100 million Americans watched. By 2010, Carter acknowledged in his annotated “White House Diary” that his speech was a flop, but said it proved to be prescient for advocating bold and direct action on energy.

“You can say the Carter presidency is still producing results today,” said Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, whose 2020 presidential run focused on climate action. “I’ve learned in politics that timing is everything and serendipity is everything.”

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Former Associated Press reporter Drew Costley contributed from Washington, D.C.

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President Joe Biden is decrying what he calls an “unrelenting effort” to downplay a mob of Donald Trump supporters overrunning the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to block certification of the 2020 election — seeking to contrast that day’s chaos with what he promises will be an orderly transition returning Trump to power for a second term.

In an opinion piece published Sunday in The Washington Post, Biden recalled Jan. 6, 2021, writing that “violent insurrectionists attacked the Capitol.”

“We should be proud that our democracy withstood this assault,” Biden wrote. “And we should be glad we will not see such a shameful attack again this year.”

Congress will convene amid snow in Washington on Monday to certify Trump’s victory in November’s election — in a session presided over by the candidate he defeated, Vice President Kamala Harris. No violence, or even procedural objections, are expected this time, marking a return to a U.S. tradition that launches the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

That’s despite Trump continuing to deny that he lost to Biden in 2020, already musing publicly about staying beyond the Constitution’s two-term White House limit, and promising to pardon some of the more than 1,250 people who have pleaded guilty or were convicted of crimes for the Capitol siege.

In his opinion piece, Biden says of the certification process, “After what we all witnessed on Jan. 6, 2021, we know we can never again take it for granted.” He doesn’t mention Trump directly but says “an unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite — even erase — the history of that day.”

“To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes,” Biden wrote. “We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”

He vowed that the “election will be certified peacefully. I have invited the incoming president to the White House on the morning of Jan. 20, and I will be present for his inauguration that afternoon,” even though Trump skipped Biden’s inauguration in 2021.

“But on this day, we cannot forget,” Biden added. “We should commit to remembering Jan. 6, 2021, every year. To remember it as a day when our democracy was put to the test and prevailed. To remember that democracy — even in America — is never guaranteed.”

The published piece followed Biden telling reporters at the White House earlier Sunday that the history of what occurred on Jan. 6, 2021, “should not be rewritten” and adding, “I don’t think it should be forgotten.”

Biden spent much of 2024 warning voters that Trump was a serious threat to the nation’s democracy. And this past week, the president awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson, leaders of the congressional investigation into the Capitol riot.

As he did with his opinion piece, Biden used his Sunday comments to reporters to stress that his administration is overseeing a peaceful handover of power — unlike the last one.

”I’ve reached out to make sure the smooth transition,” Biden said of Trump’s incoming administration. “We’ve got to get back to basic, normal transfer of power.”

Asked if he still viewed his soon-to-be successor in the White House as a threat to democracy, Biden responded, “I think what he did was a genuine threat to democracy. I’m hopeful we’re beyond that now.”

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By Richard Cowan

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. Congress is set to meet on Monday to formally certify Republican Donald Trump’s election as president, exactly four years after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in a failed bid to block the certification of his 2020 election loss.

President-elect Trump continues to falsely claim that his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud, and had warned throughout his 2024 campaign that he harbored similar concerns, until his Nov. 5 defeat of Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

Unofficial results show Trump winning 312 electoral college votes to Harris’s 226. His Republicans also captured a majority in the U.S. Senate and held a narrow edge in the House of Representatives, which will give Trump leeway in implementing his agenda of tax cuts and a crackdown on immigrants living in the country illegally when he is sworn in on Jan. 20.

Trump has also said he plans to pardon some of the more than 1,500 people charged with taking part in the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, when a mob fought with police, smashing its way in through windows and doors and chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” referring to Trump’s then-vice president, in a failed bid to stop Congress from certifying Democratic President Joe Biden’s victory.

In the Jan. 6, 2021, melee at the Capitol, rioters surged past police barricades, assaulting about 140 officers and causing more than $2.8 million in damage. Multiple police officers who battled protesters died in the weeks that followed, some by suicide.

As a result of that day’s violence, Congress passed legislation late in 2022 bolstering guardrails to ensure the certification process is administered in a legal manner.

Many of the changes were directly in response to Trump’s actions leading up to and including Jan. 6, 2021.

For example, the new law makes clear that the vice president’s role is largely ceremonial.

Any objections to a state’s results must now be submitted by at least one-fifth of the members of the House and the Senate before triggering debates over the objections. The House has 435 members and the Senate has 100.

Previously, it had required just one member from each chamber to object to a state’s certification.

Meanwhile, the law specifies that the choice of electors must occur according to state laws enacted prior to Election Day, with governors of the states submitting lists of electors.

Trump and his surrogates in 2021 had attempted to recruit alternate electors sympathetic to his cause.

A large security fence has been erected around the Capitol complex, ahead of Inauguration Day on Jan. 20.

(Reporting by Richard Cowan in Washington; Editing by Scott Malone and Matthew Lewis)

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By Andy Sullivan

WASHINGTON – President-elect Donald Trump on Sunday urged his fellow Republicans in Congress to combine his priorities into one massive bill that would cut taxes, bolster border security and increase domestic energy production.

Trump said Republicans could cover the cost – which could amount to trillions of dollars – by raising tariffs on imported goods.

“Republicans must unite, and quickly deliver these Historic Victories for the American People. Get smart, tough, and send the Bill to my desk to sign as soon as possible,” he wrote on his Truth Social platform.

Republicans who control both chambers of Congress by narrow majorities have been weighing a complex legislative strategy that could allow them to bypass Democratic opposition to boost border spending and extend Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, which are due to expire this year.

Lawmakers have been divided over whether to pass those bills separately or combine them into one package, as Trump is urging.

A single bill could potentially allow them to fulfill Trump’s campaign promises quickly, but it could also alienate lawmakers who object to specific provisions. Republicans from high-tax states such as New York and New Jersey, for example, want to change some of the 2017 tax cuts that adversely affected residents in their districts.

Trump is also urging Republicans to eliminate taxes on tipped income, which could increase the overall cost of the legislation.

Republicans plan to invoke a set of complicated budget rules to pass these bills with simple majorities, rather than the supermajority needed to advance most bills in the Senate. That would mean they would not have to appeal to Democrats, but also would limit what they could include in the package.

Republicans also face a high-wire act in the House of Representatives, where their narrow 219-215 majority means they must stay united to pass legislation.

(Reporting by Andy Sullivan; Editing by Don Durfee and Saad Sayeed)

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By Gram Slattery

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Joe Biden implored Americans in an op-ed published on Sunday not to forget the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, writing that the country has a collective obligation to remember the events of that day.

The article, published in The Washington Post, comes a day before the U.S. Congress will meet to formally certify Republican Donald Trump’s election as president and nearly four years after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in a failed bid to block the certification of his 2020 election loss.

“We must remember the wisdom of the adage that any nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it,” Biden wrote.

“We cannot accept a repeat of what occurred four years ago.”

He added that the election certification process would be peaceful this time around.

Biden has consistently portrayed Trump as a threat to democracy, and he has pointed to Trump’s failure to accept defeat in the 2020 election as proof. The president made defense of democracy a central element of his re-election campaign, which he abandoned in July after mounting concerns about his age.

Kamala Harris, who replaced Biden atop the Democratic ticket, portrayed Trump in similar terms.

Trump was federally indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, which he lost, but the case moved slowly and was nowhere near resolution by the time he won the 2024 election in November.

Trump, who will start a second non-consecutive term in two weeks, does not acknowledge his 2020 election loss as legitimate, and he and his allies have peddled false theories about the events of Jan. 6, 2021.

He has promised to issue widespread pardons of people convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6 attack. Many of the convictions related to assaulting law enforcement officers, among other felonies.

“An unrelenting effort has been underway to rewrite – even erase – the history of that day. To tell us we didn’t see what we all saw with our own eyes,” Biden wrote in the Washington Post.

“In time, there will be Americans who didn’t witness the Jan. 6 riot firsthand but will learn about it from footage and testimony of that day, from what is written in history books and from the truth we pass on to our children. We cannot allow the truth to be lost.”

(Reporting by Gram Slattery; Editing by Don Durfee and Raju Gopalakrishnan)

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Kamala Harris on Monday is set to preside over the certification of her defeat to Donald Trump four years after he tried to stop the very process that will now return him to the White House.

In a video message, Harris described her role as a “sacred obligation” to ensure the peaceful transfer of power.

“As we have seen, our democracy can be fragile,” she said. “And it is up to each of us to stand up for our most cherished principles.”

Harris will be joining a short list of other vice presidents to oversee the ceremonial confirmation of their election loss as part of their role of presiding over the Senate.

Richard Nixon did it after losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960. Al Gore followed suit when the U.S. Supreme Court tipped the 2000 election to George W. Bush.

But no other vice president has been holding the gavel when Congress certified their loss to an incoming president who refused to concede a previous defeat. In addition to spreading lies about voter fraud, Trump directed his supporters to march on the U.S. Capitol, where they violently interrupted the proceedings on Jan. 6, 2021, to formalize Joe Biden’s victory.

Harris was at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington that day. A pipe bomb was discovered nearby, and she was evacuated from the building.

During the campaign, she frequently invoked the Jan. 6 attack to warn voters of the danger of returning Trump to the White House. She described him as a “petty tyrant” and “wannabe dictator.”

After Harris lost the election and her bid to be the country’s first female president, she promised in her concession speech to honor the will of voters.

“A fundamental principle of American democracy is that when we lose an election, we accept the results,” she said. “That principle, as much as any other, distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.”

No disruptions are expected on Monday. Karoline Leavitt, a spokesperson for Trump’s transition team and the incoming White House press secretary, said there will be “a smooth transition of power.”

“When Kamala Harris certifies the election results, President Trump will deliver on his promise to serve ALL Americans and will unify the country through success,” she said in a statement.

Leavitt did not respond to a question about Trump’s attempt to use the certification process to overturn his defeat four years ago. At that time, Trump encouraged his vice president, Mike Pence, to disqualify votes from battleground states based on false allegations of fraud.

Pence refused. Trump’s supporters burst into the Capitol and halted the proceedings, forcing lawmakers to hide for their safety. Trump posted on social media that “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done.”

Police eventually cleared the rioters from the building, and lawmakers reconvened to finish their certification. Scores of Republicans still voted to support challenges to the election result.

“I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence said two years later. “And his reckless words endangered my family and everyone at the Capitol that day, and I know history will hold Donald Trump accountable.”

Trump faced criminal charges for trying to stay in power despite losing. However, special counsel Jack Smith dropped the federal case against him after Trump defeated Harris since long-standing Justice Department policy says sitting presidents cannot face criminal prosecution.

A separate case in Georgia over Trump’s attempts to subvert the 2020 election is mired in controversy over the Fulton County district attorney’s romantic relationship with a prosecutor she hired to lead the case.

The most recent example of a vice president certifying their own defeat came after the 2000 election. The battle between Gore and Bush ended up in the courtroom as the campaigns argued over whether Florida should conduct a recount.

Bush won at the U.S. Supreme Court, preventing a recount and allowing his narrow victory to stand.

Congress certified the results on Jan. 6, 2001, over the objections of some Democrats.

“I rise to object to the fraudulent 25 Florida electoral votes,” Rep. Maxine Waters of California said at the time.

Gore slammed the gavel and asked whether the objection met the requirements of being “in writing and signed by a member of the House and a senator.”

“The objection is in writing, and I don’t care that it’s not signed by a member of the Senate,” Waters responded.

“The chair will advise that the rules do care,” Gore said.

After a few rounds of objections, Congress finished the certification.

″May God bless our new president and new vice president and may God bless the United States of America,” Gore said after announcing the results.

Lawmakers gave him a standing ovation.

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This Jan. 6 won’t be the same.

Four years ago, then-President Donald Trump urged supporters to head to the Capitol to protest Congress’ certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.

“Will be wild!” Trump promised on Twitter a few weeks before Jan. 6, 2021. And it was.

Trump gave a vitriolic speech to thousands of people gathered at the Ellipse behind the White House, after which many marched to the Capitol and stormed the building in an attempt to stop the previously routine final step in formalizing the winner of the presidential election. Even after the rioters dispersed, eight Republicans in the Senate and 139 in the House voted against ratifying Biden’s win in certain swing states, despite no evidence of problems or wrongdoing that could have affected the outcome.

This year, the only turbulence preceding the quadrennial ratification of the presidential election resulted from House Republicans fighting among themselves over who should be speaker.

“There will be no violence. There will be no attempt to mount an insurrection against the Constitution,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “It will be a lot more like what we’ve seen for the rest of American history.”

The last time, Trump urged his vice president, Mike Pence, who was presiding over the certification, to intervene to keep him in the White House. This time, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee against Trump, has acknowledged her loss and isn’t expected to try to change long-established procedures for certifying the election. No other prominent Democrat has urged the party to contest Trump’s win, either.

Congress also has since updated the law that governs the proceeding, clarifying the process in the states and specifying the vice president’s role as merely ministerial.

After the 2020 election, many Republicans contended there were signs of massive voter fraud that made it impossible to confirm Biden’s victory, even though there has never been any indication of widespread fraud. After Trump won this November, many of those same Republicans had no such objections, saying they trusted the accuracy of the vote count. It was a change in sentiment shared by Republicans across the country.

“As citizens, we should all be happy when it goes smoothly,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. “It’s always better not to have major contestation over elections, especially when there isn’t a reasonable position for it.”

Still, the calm may be illusory.

Trump and Republicans had signaled that if had Harris won, they were prepared to contest her victory. Vice President-elect JD Vance, as an Ohio senator, argued that Pence should have acted to overturn Biden’s election.

Vance himself is set to be in the position to preside over the next significant Jan. 6 — in 2029, when Congress will be scheduled to accept the electoral votes for the winner of the 2028 presidential election.

“The most dangerous January 6 event is not January 6, 2025. It’s January 6, 2029, and beyond,” said David Weinberg of Protect Democracy, which defends against what it terms authoritarian threats to the country. “It creates an enormous problem when only one side of the aisle stands down when it loses an election.”

The Constitution lays out some basic steps required to choose the next president, and congressional legislation has filled in the procedural blanks. After states choose their winning candidates on Election Day, electors who are pledged to vote for those candidates meet as the Electoral College and formally cast their votes for president.

Congress then tallies the votes on Jan. 6 in a joint session presided over by the vice president to formally determine who’s won a majority of the Electoral College.

In 2021, Trump pushed for Pence not to read out the tallies from swing states that Biden won, thereby forcing Congress to vote to accept a list of states where Trump won the majority of the Electoral College. That ploy was something that Pence and numerous legal scholars said was an unconstitutional act.

A year later, Biden signed the bipartisan bill that updated the 1887 law governing the joint session to make clear the vice president needs to read all of the state tallies. The Electoral Count Reform Act also makes it harder to object to the congressional vote.

Still, many House Republicans remain opposed to that law.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., was a prime supporter of Trump’s efforts to overturn his 2020 loss and had not ruled out trying to change the election outcome if Trump lost in November. Republicans spent the final weeks of the election contending Democrats would do the same if Trump won, citing a push by some to disqualify the former president from the ballot under the Constitution’s once-obscure “insurrection clause.” That effort ultimately was rebuffed by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Republicans say the size of Trump’s election victory is why there is no potential unrest. He won the presidency by about 230,000 votes in the swing states and the popular vote by 1.5 percentage points after losing by about 44,000 votes in the swing states and 4.5 percentage points nationwide in 2020.

“This time, I think the win was so decisive that it just — for good or ill depending on which side you’re on — it’s stifled most of that,” said Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs, a Republican who led the objections on Jan. 6, 2021, over groundless allegations of voter fraud.

Foley, author of the book “Ballot Battles” about election challenges in U.S. history, advised Congress on changes to the law governing the joint session and its certification of the presidential election. He said he hoped the 2024 election marks the end of groundless challenges to congressional certification, even though the candidate who spearheaded the last challenge won.

That’s because Trump has said he won’t run again and is constitutionally barred from seeking a third term. Foley noted that, in 2022, a number of Republicans tried to mimic Trump’s distrust of election results and widely lost in swing states. Election denial, he said, may not be viable if not attached to Trump.

“As Trump will never be a candidate again,” Foley said, “I hope this is beyond us.”

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AP Congressional Correspondent Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — The congressional joint session to count electoral votes on Monday is expected to be much less eventful than the certification four years ago that was interrupted by a violent mob of supporters of then-President Donald Trump who tried to stop the count and overturn the results of an election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.

This time, Trump is returning to office after winning the 2024 election that began with Biden as his party’s nominee and ended with Vice President Kamala Harris atop the ticket. She will preside over the certification of her own loss, fulfilling the constitutional role in the same way that Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, did after the violence subsided on Jan. 6, 2021.

Usually a routine affair, the congressional joint session on Jan. 6 every four years is the final step in reaffirming a presidential election after the Electoral College officially elects the winner in December. The meeting is required by the Constitution and includes several distinct steps.

A look at the joint session:

Under federal law, Congress must meet Jan. 6 to open sealed certificates from each state that contain a record of their electoral votes. The votes are brought into the chamber in special mahogany boxes that are used for the occasion.

Bipartisan representatives of both chambers read the results out loud and do an official count. The vice president, as president of the Senate, presides over the session and declares the winner.

The Constitution requires Congress to meet and count the electoral votes. If there is a tie, then the House decides the presidency, with each congressional delegation having one vote. That hasn’t happened since the 1800s, and won’t happen this time because Trump’s electoral win over Harris was decisive, 312-226.

Congress tightened the rules for the certification after the violence of 2021 and Trump’s attempts to usurp the process.

In particular, the revised Electoral Count Act passed in 2022 more explicitly defines the role of the vice president after Trump aggressivelypushed Pence to try and object to the Republican’s defeat — an action that would have gone far beyond Pence’s ceremonial role. Pence rebuffed Trump and ultimately gaveled down his own defeat. Harris will do the same.

The updated law clarifies that the vice president does not have the power to determine the results on Jan. 6.

Harris and Pence were not the first vice presidents to be put in the uncomfortable position of presiding over their own defeats. In 2001, Vice President Al Gore presided over the counting of the 2000 presidential election that he narrowly lost to Republican George W. Bush. Gore had to gavel several Democrats’ objections out of order.

In 2017, Biden as vice president presided over the count that declared Trump the winner. Biden also shot down objections from House Democrats that did not have any Senate support.

The presiding officer opens and presents the certificates of the electoral votes in alphabetical order of the states.

The appointed “tellers” from the House and Senate, members of both parties, then read each certificate out loud and record and count the votes. At the end, the presiding officer announces who has won the majority votes for both president and vice president.

After a teller reads the certificate from any state, a lawmaker can stand up and object to that state’s vote on any grounds. But the presiding officer will not hear the objection unless it is in writing and signed by one-fifth of each chamber.

That threshold is significantly higher than what came before. Previously, a successful objection only required support from one member of the Senate and one member of the House. Lawmakers raised the threshold in the 2022 law to make objections more difficult.

If any objection reaches the threshold — something not expected this time — the joint session suspends and the House and Senate go into separate sessions to consider it. For the objection to be sustained, both chambers must uphold it by a simple majority vote. If they do not agree, the original electoral votes are counted with no changes.

In 2021, both the House and Senate rejected challenges to the electoral votes in Arizona and Pennsylvania.

Before 2021, the last time that such an objection was considered had been 2005, when Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones of Ohio and Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, both Democrats, objected to Ohio’s electoral votes, claiming there were voting irregularities. Both the House and Senate debated the objection and easily rejected it. It was only the second time such a vote had occurred.

After Congress certifies the vote, the president is inaugurated on the west front of the Capitol on Jan. 20.

The joint session is the last official chance for objections, beyond any challenges in court. Harris has conceded and never disputed Trump’s win.

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By Doina Chiacu

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -A massive winter storm moving across the United States will not keep the U.S. Congress from meeting on Monday to formally certify Republican Donald Trump’s election as president, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Sunday.

“The Electoral Count Act requires this on January 6 at 1 p.m. – so, whether we’re in a blizzard or not we’re going to be in that chamber making sure this is done,” Johnson told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures” in an interview.

Johnson said he hoped there would be full attendance despite the storm and that he had encouraged lawmakers to stay in the city.

Forecasts called for heavy snow and high winds from the Central Plains to the mid-Atlantic states, the National Weather Service said. Severe weather advisories were issued across the eastern half of the country, including blizzard warnings in parts of Kansas.

In Washington, mixed snow and sleet accumulations were expected to be between three and seven inches (7 to 18 cm), promising a difficult commute and possible closings of schools, government and businesses.

Bad winter weather can wreak havoc in the Washington metropolitan area, which has seen mild winters in recent decades and has at times been unprepared for accumulations of snow or ice. The city ordered public schools closed on Monday and school cancellations were also announced in several suburban Virginia counties. School systems in neighboring Maryland were likely to follow suit.

Members of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives returned to Washington on Friday after the winter break and Republicans gathered on Saturday with Johnson to discuss legislative priorities. Republicans won control of both the chambers in November’s election.

Other leaders stressed they were not contemplating a weather delay.

“No change to the schedule,” said Lauren Fine, communications director for Republican House Majority Leader Steve Scalise.

The certification process, usually a formality, was upended four years ago when supporters of Trump violently stormed the U.S. Capitol in a bid to halt the transfer of power to Democrat Joe Biden, who won the 2020 election.

Trump has continued to falsely claim his 2020 defeat was the result of widespread fraud. Biden and the Democrats say they will honor the 2024 election results and proceed with certification.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu, Patricia Zengerle and Richard Cowan; Editing by Heather Timmons and Chris Reese)

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