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.”
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Sydney — Hundreds of mysterious black tar-like balls have washed up on two popular Sydney area beaches, prompting lifeguards to close the strands to swimmers.
“Mysterious, black, ball-shaped debris” began appearing on Coogee Beach in the Randwick area on Tuesday afternoon, the local mayor said, leaving flummoxed Australian authorities scrambling to find out what they might be and where they came from.
Hundreds of golf-to-baseball-sized spheres could be seen littering the coast, which is usually thronged with Sydneysiders and tourists.
SAEED KHAN/AFP/Getty
Instead, a few seagulls wandered among the spheres, pecking and examining.
The balls were also spotted at nearby Gordon’s Bay, an aquatic reserve popular for snorkeling and fishing, which was also closed.
“At this stage, it is unknown what the material is,” Mayor Dylan Parker of Randwick city said in a social media post. “However, they may be ‘tar balls’ which are formed when oil comes in to contact with debris and water, typically the result of oil spills or seepage.”
The balls on Sydney’s picturesque shores aren’t the only unidentified objects to appear on beaches lately. Officials in Canada confirmed to CBS News on Tuesday that they were investigating blobs of a white “mystery substance” that have washed up since September on beaches in the far northeast Newfoundland and Labrador province.
Canada’s environmental agency told CBS News’ Ahmad Mukhtar that samples of the hundreds of white blobs littering beaches had been taken, but that both the substance and its origins remained a mystery.
Legendary Antarctic explorer Ernest Shackleton’s ship Endurance sank more than a century ago and its wreck lay undiscovered at the bottom of the Weddell Sea until March 2022.
Now, the team behind its discovery has joined forces with an Oscar-winning film crew for a new National Geographic documentary showcasing how they located the storied vessel’s last resting place.
“Endurance” features thousands of 3D scans shot by a 4K camera deployed to a depth of nearly 10,000 feet. It premiered at the London Film Festival last weekend before its release in cinemas and then on Disney+.
The never-before-seen footage captures everything from a flare gun and man’s boot to dinnerware used by the crew and identifiable parts of the vessel.
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
“We were absolutely blown away,” Mensun Bound, the 2022 discovery team’s director of exploration, told AFP. “We didn’t expect to see the ship’s wheel — the most emblematic part of the ship — just standing there, upright.”
History broadcaster Dan Snow, an executive producer on “Endurance”, called finding it in such a “stunning state” an “astonishing achievement”.
“No one’s ever found a wooden shipwreck 3,000 metres down in one of the most remote places on earth underneath the ice,” he said.
“It’s important because it is connected with this story of Shackleton and the 1914-16 expedition, which is one of the greatest stories ever told — a story of leadership and survival like nothing else.”
The flare gun that was discovered was fired by Frank Hurley, the expedition’s photographer, as the ship was lost to the ice, the BBC reported.
“Hurley gets this flare gun, and he fires the flare gun into the air with a massive detonator as a tribute to the ship,” expedition leader John Shears said. “And then in the diary, he talks about putting it down on the deck. And there we are. We come back over 100 years later, and there’s that flare gun, incredible.”
Anglo-Irish explorer Shackleton’s Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition was meant to make the first land crossing of the frozen continent.
But its three-masted timber sailing ship Endurance fell victim to the treacherous Weddell Sea, becoming ensnared in pack ice in January 1915. It was progressively crushed and sank 10 months later.
Shackleton, who died in 1922, described the site of the sinking as “the worst portion of the worst sea in the world.”
Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic
He cemented his status as a legend of exploration by leading an epic escape for himself and his 27 companions, on foot over the ice and then in boats to the British overseas territory of South Georgia, some 870 miles east of the Falklands.
“I do believe of all the great survival stories I’ve ever heard of, this one takes the cake because it involves so many people,” said Jimmy Chin, who directed and produced the new film jointly with Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi.
The husband-and-wife team behind Oscar-winning movie “Free Solo” saw the expedition organized by the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust as a chance to “bring the story to a new generation.”
“The ultimate polar challenge”
The documentary alternates between accounts of the original and the 2022 missions, as the modern-day explorers conduct dozens of fruitless deep-sea dives using a state-of-the-art submersible as a deadline nears to leave before winter sets in.
A trailer for the film shows footage from the original 1914 expedition combined with video from the modern-day search.
Bound recounted the various challenges the latter-day team faced, including technology, research and climate, with one thing reminiscent of what Shackleton’s men confronted.
“Ice, ice and ice,” he said, adding that the documentary clearly highlights “the brutality” of the conditions they faced.
“This is probably the most difficult project I’ve ever been involved in… it wasn’t called the unreachable Endurance for nothing, was it?”
Shears also said there was a “real parallel” between the two endeavors and that like Shackleton he was drawn to “the ultimate polar challenge.”
“More people have been into space orbit than have ever walked on the surface sea ice where the Endurance sank,” said Shears, who previously led an unsuccessful attempt to find the wreck in 2019.
Chin and Vasarhelyi said combining the two stories was challenging but they were complementary.
“The two stories, even though they’re separated by 110 years, speak to each other,” said Vasarhelyi.
“They both chronicle this fundamental human condition of the audacity to dream big… have ambition, coupled with the diligence, determination, the grit and the ingenuity to see it through.”
To tell the original story, they opted to use AI to capture Shackleton and six crew members’ diary entries in their own voices, based on other recordings.
The filmmakers also used restored and colorized photographs and film expedition footage taken by Frank Hurley.
But audiences must wait until the closing stages of the documentary to see the new imagery of Endurance — a choice Vaserhelyi admitted felt “terrible” but necessary.
“This was a great story with a great payoff, but you have to earn it, right?” she explained.
“What’s nice is that the film really plays as this introduction… and it builds to this amazing moment.”