Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) said Sunday that the vote certification process will be peaceful on Monday ― the fourth anniversary of the deadly Jan. 6, 2021, Capital insurrection.
Their remarks come four years after President-elect Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, prompting MAGA supporters and election deniers to violently occupy the Capital and disrupt the vote count.
But on Monday, there will be another vote certification — this time for the 2024 election Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Trump. Harris will lead the operation, which is standard practice for the sitting VP. Notably, though, Harris and Democrats have not baselessly claimed the election was stolen like their opponents did in the previous presidential election.
“It is a very unnerving moment. I do not believe we will have a repeat of that,” Clyburn said on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki on Sunday.
“We will have a vice president presiding on tomorrow who believes in the peaceful transition of the office, and she will preside over her own defeat,” Clyburn continued. “I hope the American people will take time out to watch this tomorrow and hopefully have their faith in this great country renewed.”
In a Sunday interview on NBC News “Meet the Press” with moderator Kristen Welker, Schiff acknowledged that Monday’s vote will likely be “quite an emotional experience” for those in Congress who were present when the 2021 attack took place.
While he believes that Monday will represent a peaceful transfer of power, Schiff, who was a member of the Jan. 6 committee, warned against Trump pardoning the slew of individuals who participated in his insurrection — a move he said he’d make on his first day back in office.
“If [Trump] goes forward with pardoning vast numbers of people involved in that violence, he will begin his new administration the way he ended his last administration, and that is by celebrating violence against our democracy,” Schiff said. “I think it would be a terrible start – send a terrible message about our democracy, about lawlessness, about people who attacked police officers. Exactly the wrong message and the wrong way to start out an administration.”
Online and on the campaign trail, the president-elect has been vocal about using his presidential power to move forward with a vendetta against his political opponents, including members of the Jan. 6 committee. Despite this, Schiff said he isn’t sure that Trump is serious about coming after the committee.
“All of us on the committee, I think, are very proud of the work that we did. We stand behind it,” Schiff said. “Who knows what the president means? I guess we’ll find out. But we stand behind our work.”
Critics of Trump have called on Biden to preemptively pardon the committee members before Trump assumes office later this month. Schiff, however, is against the move.
“The concern that I have, which is what I conveyed, is the precedent that it would set that you have an outgoing president giving a broad group of pardons to members of his party or others because I think the precedent could be abused,” Schiff said. “Now, people have rightly pointed out, Donald Trump may abuse that precedent regardless. But the idea that each administration hereafter gives broad pardons to people who have worked in the administration or aligned with the administration, I don’t think that’s a road we want to go down.”
