Top House Dem: ‘Very Tough’ Watching Kamala Certify Trump

Watching Kamala Harris certify Donald Trump’s election victory on the House floor Monday was “difficult to stomach,” a lead Democrat on the Jan. 6 committee tells the Daily Beast.

“It was very tough to be in that room remembering the backstage political coup taking place at the same time as insurrectionary mob violence targeted Congress and the vice president,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said.

Harris pulled off her most awkward and painful duty to date as vice president as she declared the man who just months ago she called a “fascist” and “dangerous” the legitimate winner of the 2024 presidential election.

Her language on Monday was much different than on the campaign trail.

“Pursuant to the Constitution and the laws of the United States,” Harris declared from her perch standing shoulder to shoulder with House Speaker Mike Johnson as she announced her role in overseeing the quadrennial certification process.

Former Vice President Mike Pence, who faced death threats on Jan. 6, 2021, praised Monday’s peaceful certification as a “hallmark of our democracy.”

Harris appeared composed and carefree. She smiled and chatted amiably with Johnson, who barely survived a vote to keep his gavel on Friday, before the official certification got underway—a process that lasted under 45 minutes, unlike the marathon four years ago that was interrupted by bloody mayhem.

Lawmakers who gathered on the House floor during the joint session of Congress counted the votes, and certified the tally: 312 electoral votes for Trump; 226 for Harris.

“I think we did demonstrate what fidelity to the Constitution looks like,” Raskin said. But he acknowledged “it was difficult to stomach his result in light of four years of lying about who had won in 2020.”

Harris, who was a senator during the Jan. 6, 2021, certification that turned into an insurrection—when lawmakers literally ran for their lives, barricaded themselves in the House chamber and in their offices—mentioned not a word of it on Monday.

“Today, I did what I have done my entire career, which is take seriously the oath that I have taken many times to support and defend the Constitution of the United States, which included, today, performing my constitutional duties to ensure that the people of America, the voters of America, will have their votes counted, that those votes matter and that they will determine, then, the outcome of an election,” Harris said after overseeing the certification of Donald J. Trump and JD Vance as president and vice president, respectively, of the United States of America.

“It has to be difficult for her and other folks,” Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) told the Daily Beast. “The mood was very different from four years ago, that’s an understatement.”

Harris became the first losing presidential candidate since Al Gore to have to certify her opponent as the winner of a presidential election.

Just a little over two months ago, Harris said during a CNN town hall that voters would prefer “not having a president of the United States who admires dictators and is a fascist.”

“I believe that Donald Trump is dangerous,” she continued. “As the president of the United States, the commander in chief, he’s saying to his generals, in essence, why can’t you be more like Hitler’s generals? Come on!”

The incoming commander in chief‘s team had the last word on Monday.

Raskin said Democrats displayed baseline proper behavior for elected officials counting electoral votes on Jan. 6 this year. “We can feel proud that we’re not election deniers and that we didn’t mobilize violence and fraud to try to overthrow the election the way the Republicans did in 2020,” he said. “We acted as constitutional patriots.”

The real test, he said, will come when Republicans lose their next presidential election.

“It would be nice to think that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was this radical deviation and abhorration. But we won’t really know that until the Republicans lose an election and don’t recycle big lies and efforts to overturn the electoral process.”