Michael Kruse writes:

Last summer, in a private moment at the memorial service for ex-senator Joe Lieberman at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, two former vice presidents had a conversation.

Al Gore thanked Mike Pence, according to people close to both men, in an interaction that’s never been reported, for his actions at the Capitol the day it was attacked by a mob. Pence, on the opposite side of the political aisle but in the same set of pews, said something surprising in response. He suggested to Gore he had done what he’d done on Jan. 6, 2021, in part because of what he had seen as a newly sworn-in member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2001. He had witnessed a vice president like him stand up to pressure from his own party to defy the Constitution even though doing so by definition meant personal defeat.

“I never forgot it,” Pence said to Gore, in the recollection of a Pence ally.

“You don’t know how much that means,” Gore said, “coming from you.”

What Pence did and did not do four years back underscored the elementally high peril of what’s often considered all but a formality: the certification of the Electoral College vote. Obviously, there are no guarantees in modern political life that rules will be followed, that norms will be respected, that precedent will hold, and Pence knew this better and more viscerally than most. Because of Jan. 6, 2001, he knew on Jan. 6, 2021, that in a moment of rote ceremony there also was ample opportunity for destabilizing mischief: When the person in charge of this ministerial act has a much more personal stake, the bedrock of American self-governance is at once at its most visible and its most vulnerable.

On Monday, then, Kamala Harris will do what no one since Al Gore has done — preside over the process that makes official his or her own defeat for the presidency. Given the nature of the results of this past election — no serious allegations of fraud plus a clear loss of the popular vote — it’s unlikely there will be much if any pressure on Harris to do more than call out the count. But seen in the light of the chaos and physical violence of 2021, and the still-palpable bitterness from 2001, her adherence to this constitutional process carries its own weight. [Continue reading…]