CBS News
Democrats in Congress are planning for the next Jan. 6
In a nondescript office a few floors above the cafeteria and a Dunkin’ in the Longworth U.S. House Office Building, Democratic staffers on a low-profile U.S. House committee have been gaming out what they say are some political nightmare scenarios.
They’re discussing the perils of Jan. 6. But not Jan. 6, 2021.
Democrats on the House Committee on Administration, which has oversight of the U.S. Capitol campus and federal election laws, have been meeting and designing a plan against any attempt to interfere with the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6, 2025.
Keeping in mind the memories of the violence and chaos that engulfed Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and the worsening political fractures that followed, the committee’s Democrats have researched and discussed plans to ensure security is tight, and they’ve begun efforts to debunk emerging conspiracy theories about undocumented migrants voting in federal elections.
One vulnerability is proving particularly difficult to measure: What happens if the U.S. House fails to select a speaker by Jan. 6, 2025? It wasn’t an issue in 2021.
But the uncommon scenario happened just two years ago, amid an internal Republican battle over who should lead the party in the House after the midterm elections.
The standoff paralyzed most of the operations of the House for days. A recurrence after this year’s elections could add a fog of uncertainty and risk to how Congress will certify the winner of the presidential race on Jan. 6, 2025 when it reconvenes to begin the year.
The new Congress will be seated Jan 3, 2025, days before Jan. 6.
“Those are the types of questions we are exploring,” Rep. Joe Morelle, a New York Democrat who serves as ranking member on the House Administration Committee, told CBS News. Morelle said the panel’s Democrats are researching precedent and undertaking tabletop exercises to prepare for efforts by supporters of former President Donald Trump to use such a scenario to overturn election results.
Morelle told CBS News, “I don’t want to get into a lot of specifics because it’s pretty sensitive. And frankly, I don’t want to give people ideas.”
A group of constitutional law experts told CBS News there’s no specific prescription for such a political standoff in the Constitution itself.
“The Constitution assumed a certain level of normality in our politics. But ‘normal’ may not describe our current politics,” said University of Maryland constitutional law professor Mark Graber.
Graber, who authored the 2013 book “A New Introduction to American Constitutionalism,” told CBS News the drafters of the Constitution likely “assumed Congress would get organized and elect its officers,” he said. “What happens if Congress can’t get organized? We really don’t know.”
“I don’t think whether there’s a speaker or not is going to or should upend the (Jan. 6) process,” Paul Berman, a law professor at the George Washington University, told CBS News. “The rules of the House shouldn’t overrun a constitutional mandate.”
“The 12th Amendment of the Constitution requires Congress to certify the vote,” Berman said. But it’s unclear whether a House speaker must be chosen — or formal House rules be approved — for the House to fulfill its responsibility.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law expert who represents Maryland as a Democrat in the House, said the mandate of the Constitution cannot be derailed by House procedures or internal House political impasses. Raskin told CBS News, “The House rules cannot override the constitutional directives. And we just need to make sure that the Constitution is being followed.”
Congress sought to eliminate some of the uncertainty and potential vulnerabilities surrounding the Jan. 6 electoral certification process by passing a law in 2022 to tighten standards and codify some of the rules of the process.
The law reaffirms that the vice president’s role in the process of counting the electoral votes is “ministerial” and that he or she has no power to reject electors or resolve disputes about the electors.
The law also raised the threshold necessary for dissenters in the House and Senate to formally object to the electors submitted by states on Jan. 6. Instead of permitting a single member of each chamber of Congress to object to a state’s electors, one-fifth of the House and Senate must vote to do so.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate Rules Committee and helped draft the law, told CBS News the Electoral Count Reform Act prevents “the electoral count process from once again being used as a trigger point in an insurrection and to ensure that the votes for President accurately reflect the election results in each state.”
Supporters of the new law, including the Washington, D.C.-based Campaign Legal Center, have argued that the House speaker has no meaningful role in certifying the presidential election, which should insulate the process on Jan. 6, 2025.
But some Democrats told CBS News they fear that any uncertainty can be exploited, and point to a failure to prepare for subterfuge on Jan. 6, 2021.
Some of the dynamics that stalled House action in 2023 are at risk of recurring. Election forecasts and polling indicate the majority in the House could be very narrow again in 2025, after the 2024 elections — the margin was 221-212 at the beginning of the 118th Congress in January 2023. A very slim majority increases the risk of a protracted House speaker leadership battle and standoff.
Raskin said, “There are undoubtedly lots of things that we will want to be prepared for out of an abundance of caution.”
Morelle said the meetings and research are ongoing in his committee’s offices. He told CBS News the panel’s Democrats want “to make sure that none of the challenges we had last time are present and that we’re thinking about eventualities.”
MIAMI – Miami Beach police have confirmed that a human head discovered on Key Biscayne earlier this week belonged to Victor Castaneda Jr., a 19-year-old swimmer who disappeared while saving his younger sister.
The grim discovery was made Tuesday morning by a worker on the beach behind the Key Colony II Ocean Sound condominium at 251 Crandon Blvd.
Authorities identified the remains as Castaneda, who went missing Saturday after being caught in a rip current at South Pointe Beach.
According to police, Castaneda and his younger sister were swimming when they were pulled out by the current.
Castaneda managed to help his sister to safety, but he was unable to escape the powerful waters himself. Attempts by nearby Good Samaritans to reach him were unsuccessful.
The family announced on social media that a memorial service for Castaneda will be held at 4:30 p.m. Saturday at South Pointe Beach.
Police are continuing their investigation into the circumstances surrounding the discovery of Castaneda’s remains.
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In her new collection of columns from the Wall Street Journal, “A Certain Idea of America” (to be published November 19 by Portfolio), Pulitzer Prize-winner Peggy Noonan writes about the history and character of our nation, the remarkable figures who personify the best of America, threats to the social fabric, and the “better angels” of our democracy.
Read the foreword below, and don’t miss Robert Costa’s conversation with Peggy Noonan on “CBS Sunday Morning” November 17!
“A Certain Idea of America” by Peggy Noonan
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Foreword
This is not a book about the day to day of our national political life. It is simply about loving America and enjoying thinking aloud about it.
The columns gathered here are varied in terms of subject matter. They are about the things that endure, and things that deserve to be encouraged. A number of them are about spectacular human beings. As my editor and I read through the past few years of Wall Street Journal columns, if I said, “I really enjoyed writing that,” or she said, “I loved this,” or I said, “This was important to me,” it was in. If not, out. We chose about eighty from more than four hundred. We found ourselves most attracted to themes of history and its pleasures.
The book is divided into seven parts.
“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men” is mostly about great figures and artists of the twentieth century, from Billy Graham to Oscar Hammerstein, from Queen Elizabeth II to Senator Margaret Chase Smith of the state of Maine, and from Tom Wolfe to Bob Dylan, with some side trips to the nineteenth century and the generals of the American Civil War. Looking back on a career of now fifty years, I see that from the beginning what I have loved most, what has most moved me, is writing honest praise.
“I Don’t Mind Being Stern,” on the other hand, is about having fun, as a public writer, taking as big a stick as you can to people and things you are certain deserve it. The U.S. Senate changing its dress code to accommodate a senator who enjoys dressing like a child? Get the stick. Vengeful Prince Harry? Ditto. We were certain a recent Broadway production of Cabaret deserved our stern attention, in a piece whose last line is its summation: “Life Isn’t Merde.” We castigate men who aren’t gentlemen, and admonish parents who, as their personal vanity product, wind kids up to become mindless status robots. Also receiving fire are woke academics who speak garbage thoughts with garbage words. (I am sorry to use the word “woke,” which is boring and sounds merely sarcastic, but the thing is that when you say it, everyone pretty much knows what you mean.) I believe we were the first to compare contemporary social justice warriors with the practitioners of the struggle sessions of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We enjoyed pointing out that the leaders of the French Revolution were, largely, sociopaths. There’s a piece written in the hours after January 6, 2021.
In “Try a Little Tenderness” we turn to love, which we posit as a very good thing. We call for artists to enter politics. We meditate, after the fire that swept the Cathedral of Notre Dame, in Paris, on the enduring presence and power of religious faith. We unabashedly love, we swoon over and wish to marry, Leo Tolstoy and War and Peace. We mourn for Uvalde, Texas. We talk about the endless drama of men and women, and instruct America that more happens every day in the office than business. Also we declare Taylor Swift an American phenomenon, and if you don’t like it you can just shake it off.
“It Appears He Didn’t Take My Advice” is two columns long. The first, on Joe Biden, was so spectacularly wrong in its central prediction that it made us laugh. Yet looking back five years, it seemed to me in its reasoning to be still oddly pertinent. The second, on Donald Trump, on the eve of the 2016 election, seems to me to have some prescience as to his central problems as a historical figure. Also in the writing of it I remember a feeling of poignance.
“On America” is about the foibles, troubles, and triumphs of our country. It includes the story of my great-aunt Jane Jane, and how, as an Irish immigrant, she came to love her new country. I’d say the general theme of this section is about keeping your poise under pressure. It includes recent college graduates, the Normandy invasion, and the spirited, against-the-grain testimony of an old-fashioned capitalist. Also included, a portrait of the dynamics that produced a political sea change: “The Protected Versus the Unprotected.”
“Watch Out” contains columns about the worries that preoccupy my mind: the dark potentials of AI, skepticism as to the character and motives of its inventors; the possible use of nuclear weapons, and the ongoing dramas in Ukraine and the Mideast.
“We Can Handle It” is about working our way, as a nation, through things that roil us, from the #MeToo movement to the abortion wars, from the creation of a sane foreign policy, to the low state of the American presidency.
This collection draws its title from the famous first sentence of Charles de Gaulle’s “War Memoirs,” most happily translated as “All my life I have had a certain idea of France.” It struck me when I read it many years ago and stayed with me because all my life I have had a certain idea of America, and from the beginning it shaped my thinking and drove my work.
What is that idea? That she is good. That she has value. That from birth she was something new in the history of man, a step forward, an advancement. Its founders were engaged in the highest form of human achievement, stating assumptions and creating arrangements whereby life could be made more: just. In the workings of its history I saw something fabled. The genius cluster of the Founders, for instance—how did it happen that those particular people came together at that particular moment with exactly the right (different but complementary) gifts? Long ago I asked the historian David McCullough if he ever wondered about this. He said yes, and the only explanation he could come up with was: “Providence.” That is where my mind settles, too.
De Gaulle said his thoughts on France were driven as much by emotion as reason, and the same for me. A piece in here dated July 3, 2019, speaks of both:
I’m not really big on purple mountain majesties. I’d love America if it were a hole in the ground, though yes, it’s beautiful. I don’t love it only because it’s “an idea,” as we all say now. That strikes me as a little bloodless. Baseball didn’t come from an idea, it came from us—a long cool game punctuated by moments of high excellence and utter heartbreak, a team sport in which each player operates on his own. The great movie about America’s pastime isn’t called Field of Ideas, it’s called Field of Dreams. And the scene that makes every grown-up weep is when the dark-haired young catcher steps out of the cornfield and walks toward Kevin Costner, who suddenly realizes, That’s my father.
He asks if they can play catch, and they do, into the night.
The great question comes from the father: “Is this Heaven?” The great answer: “It’s Iowa.”
Which gets me closer to my feelings on patriotism. We are a people that has experienced something epic together. We were given this brilliant, beautiful thing, this new arrangement, a political invention based on the astounding assumption that we are all equal, and that where you start doesn’t dictate where you’ll wind up. We’ve kept it going, father to son, mother to daughter, down the generations, inspired by the excellence and in spite of the heartbreak. Whatever was happening, depression or war, we held high the meaning and forged forward. We’ve respected and protected the Constitution.
And in the forging through and holding high we’ve created a history, traditions, a way of existing together.
We’ve been doing this for 243 years now, since the first Fourth of July and in spite of all the changes that have swept the world.
It’s all a miracle. I love America because it’s where the miracle is.
I would say of the above, welcome to my deepest heart.
You’ll see some of the U.S. Civil War here. It has been a lifelong preoccupation and followed my interest in Abraham Lincoln, whose life has gripped me since childhood. He is the only American president who was both a political and literary genius—literally, genius—and about him clung an air of the mystical. He was completely human (homely ways, off-color jokes, depressions, a writer of angry letters) and yet there was something almost supernatural in his ability to be fair, to be just, to be merciful toward his tormentors (the angry letters were thrown in a drawer). What a figure. Tolstoy thought him the greatest man in history.
Religious faith is a constant subtext here because it’s my constant subtext.
Anyway, America. With all her harrowing flaws (we have always been a violent country, for instance) she deserves from us a feeling of profound protectiveness. Our great job as citizens is to shine it up a little, make it better, and hand it on, safely, to the generation that follows, and ask them to shine it up and hand it on. I think that is often what I was trying to do. When you see this I will have been a weekly columnist in The Wall Street Journal for just shy of a quarter century. I am grateful I haven’t run out of opinions.
Excerpted from “A Certain Idea of America” by Peggy Noonan, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2024 Peggy Noonan.
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