The Daily Fuckup

On Jan. 4, 2021, the push to use the congressional Electoral College count as a last-minute check on Joe Biden’s victory was still underway. Republican lawmakers were preparing objections for the Jan. 6 joint session, and allies of President Donald Trump were still urging Vice President Mike Pence to do more than his role clearly allowed. The basic problem for that effort had not changed: the vice president’s job at the count was ministerial, not a license to rewrite or veto the result.

That did not stop the pressure. For weeks after Election Day, Trump and his allies had searched for a procedural opening that could delay the count or force Congress to revisit the outcome. Pence became the focus of that search because he was set to preside over the joint session. But the constitutional and statutory framework left little room for the kind of intervention Trump supporters were demanding. The joint session was designed to open, count and confirm the electoral votes submitted by the states, not to reopen the election itself.

By early January, the campaign was also running into public resistance from parts of the Republican and business worlds. Some business leaders were urging lawmakers to drop the effort to challenge Biden’s electors, warning that the move would go beyond ordinary political opposition and into an attack on the legitimacy of the result. That pushback did not end the challenge, but it showed how narrow the political base for it had become.

The bigger point was timing. The pressure on Pence did not stop on Jan. 4; it carried into Jan. 5 and Jan. 6, when he was set to preside over the count in Congress. But the underlying facts were already fixed. Biden had secured enough electoral votes, the states had certified their slates, and Pence did not have a recognized power to unilaterally alter the outcome. The remaining fight was about whether Trump’s allies could use the certification process to slow the result, not whether they had a lawful path to reverse it.