The U.S. Senate and House of Representatives are meeting Wednesday in a joint session to certify the Electoral College vote to make Democrat Joe Biden the country’s next president, even as President Donald Trump continues to implore his vice president, Mike Pence, to thwart the public confirmation that they lost their bid for re-election. What normally has been an hour-long formality once every four years — certifying who is to be inaugurated Jan. 20 as president for a new four-year term in the White House — is likely to be a lengthy, drama-filled spectacle this time. Trump for weeks has made baseless claims that he was defrauded out of a second term even as he lost 60 court challenges to the vote. More than 100 House members and 13 senators say they will object to certifying Biden’s narrow victories in several political battleground states, setting off hours of contentious debate. And several thousand Trump supporters gathered in the streets of Washington to hear Trump speak and protest the eventual congressional vote affirming that Biden won and will become the country’s 46th president. “We will never concede,” Trump told the crowd. U.S. President Donald Trump holds a rally to contest the certification of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results by the U.S. Congress in Washington, Jan. 6, 2021.Trump has called Republicans who have refused to line up in support of his claims of fraud the “Surrender Caucus.” “I hope that our great vice president comes through for us. He’s a great guy,” Trump said at a rally in Georgia on Monday night. “Of course, if he doesn’t come through, I won’t like him quite as much.” As Pence alphabetically reads through the list of states and their electoral votes, the process will be stopped if at least one congressman and one senator object to the outcome in any individual state, setting off up to two hours of debate in each chamber on the merits of the challenge and a vote whether to accept or reject it. The electoral vote in the southwestern state of Arizona could be the first challenged, possibly followed by debates over the vote in Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, all states Biden won. If the electoral votes are challenged in several states, the normally short ceremonial event could last late into the night. Several Republican senators protesting the Electoral College outcome are demanding that a commission be established to consider Trump’s claims of irregularities in the election results and report back within 10 days — just four days ahead of the Jan. 20 inauguration. But that proposal, too, will almost certainly be defeated. The congressional certification of the Electoral College outcome is mandated by the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which says that the Senate and House must meet to officially count and certify the Electoral College results from all 50 states and Washington.
…