The Scene
As progressive organizer Heather Meaney-Allen’s Indivisible group in Williamsburg, Va., prepared for its Jan. 6 remembrance rally, a Japanese TV network called to ask if it could send a cameraman.
She said the network was welcome at her event, then asked why it wanted to cover a rally 150 miles away from the capital. The response, she said, “made me sick to my gut.”
“They told me we were the only ones having an event about the insurrection,” said Meaney-Allen, 61.
On the fourth anniversary of the violent Capitol riot, congressional Democrats made the certification of Donald Trump’s 2024 victory as dull as possible. They arrived at the joint session with a plan to offer no objections on the floor, the first time since 1989 that no Democrat spoke up against a Republican win.
“I can feel proud that we’re acting as constitutional patriots,” said Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, who served as an impeachment manager after Trump tried to subvert the last electoral college certification. “It was a peaceful and uneventful and non-violent transfer of power.”
It was also the first sign of the new Democratic Party. Through gritted teeth, its lawmakers and progressive activists are building a much quieter “resistance” to Donald Trump than the one that greeted him in 2017. Democrats have done nothing to fight the Trump transition; in fact, they’ve made it part of their message to voters that they, unlike Republicans, are willing to lose gracefully.
Some of the groups Democrats built up during Trump’s first term, like Indivisible and Run for Something, survived. Others were rebooted or renamed, the People’s March replacing the old Women’s March and the Tax March transforming into Unrig Our Economy. The activists who remain in the field argue that their members are as galvanized as ever.
“We had 40,000 people on our launch call for the new Indivisible Guide,” said Indivisible co-founder Ezra Levin. “We haven’t seen this level of interest since 2017. And another similarity with that period is that it actually took a while for the broader political ecosystem to recognize there was going to be backlash and resistance to this guy.”
But plenty of progressive fixtures from Trump’s 2017 ascension are missing this time: The hope that Trump might be removed from office, or that it’s worth slowing down the inevitable with procedural tricks. Just a handful of protesters stood outside the Capitol perimeter, urging their representatives to invoke the 14th Amendment’s ban on “insurrection” accomplices holding office.
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Democrats, crestfallen that the larger electorate did not share their outrage at the Jan. 6 riots or Trump’s promise to pardon the rioters, offered little more than hypothetical contrast with him this week.
“We’re not them,” Massachusetts Rep. Jim McGovern told Semafor as he sat quietly through the certification, even as Republicans interrupted defeated Vice President Kamala Harris to cheer for Trump’s victory.
Back in 2017, McGovern objected to Trump’s electoral certification on the grounds that “illegal activities engaged by the government of Russia” had skewed the result.
“What I do know is this: If the election results were different, and this was a very close election, we would have violence in the Capitol again,” McGovern said.
Activist organizers said that a lot of the energy they see is focused not on rallying against Trump but on building a candidate base. Amanda Litman, president and co-founder of Run for Something, told Semafor that nearly 13,000 people had signed up as potential candidates since the November election.
Today’s special elections in Virginia, in fact, generated far more interest on the left than the certification of Trump’s win. Progressives offered no backlash against how Democrats handled the day.
“We support that – follow the law, follow the Constitution,” said Vicki Miller, 72, an organizer with Indivisible Philadelphia, adding that her group was focused on long-term voter outreach and a day of service on Jan. 20 to counter the Trump inauguration. “Rallies are hard. They’re a time-consuming thing to plan. If you’re taking the time to do a rally, it’s got to be awfully important.”
As Capitol Hill moved on from the certification, there were more signs of a less resistant Democratic Party: Four dozen House Democrats voted for a GOP immigration bill, with some citing the removal of anti-Biden language, and more than a half-dozen Democratic senators announced they would meet with the vaccine-skeptical health secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Among the progressives taking meetings with Kennedy were Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren.
David’s view
The absence of any Democratic protest or resistance to the certification was, in a small way, historic. After mounting challenges of various sizes in 2000, 2004 and 2016, this time Democrats ignored the (fairly small) chorus of activists who wanted to see some resistance to what they spent most of last year describing as an existential threat to American democracy.
“There’s clearly some frustration out in the country about the fact that this moment appears to be in tension with Section Three of the 14th Amendment,” said Raskin, referring to legal language prohibiting insurrectionists from holding office. “But the Supreme Court basically made it impossible for us to have a meaningful process.”
Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper, whose state Supreme Court had struck Trump from the ballot before the Supreme Court reversed its decision, said that “the will of the voters is what matters in this case.”
The new GOP majority relished watching Harris lose again. In 2001, 2005, and 2017, after the Democratic objections were finished, Republicans sat quietly as the vice presidents – Al Gore, Dick Cheney, and Joe Biden – read the presidential vote count. In 2017, anti-Trump protesters disrupted the final reading, and applause began only when the session was over.
This time, Republicans interrupted Harris, with House Speaker Mike Johnson joining a standing ovation for the phrase “Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida has received 312 votes.” Democrats noticed that reaction.
“I’d like to be able to say that we’ve restored the normal, peaceful transfer of power,” Raskin told Semafor. “But of course, we won’t know until Trump’s party loses an election whether they’re actually willing to accept the constitutional processes as it’s supposed to work.”
The View From the vice president
“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 duty,” Harris told reporters after the certification.