Vice President Kamala Harris is set to do what only two other vice presidents in recent history have done – preside over her defeat in a White House election.
On Monday afternoon, Harris will preside over a joint session of Congress, when lawmakers will certify President-elect Donald Trump’s victory over the current vice president in November’s election.
The vice president said her mission is to ensure a peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.
Harris, in a recorded video message released ahead of congressional certification of the 2024 Electoral College vote, said it is a ‘sacred obligation’ she will uphold, ‘guided by love of country, loyalty to our Constitution and my unwavering faith in the American people.’
Pointing to four years ago, when Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an unsuccessful effort to upend congressional certification of Trump’s 2020 election loss to President Biden, Harris said ‘as we have seen, our democracy can be fragile.’
‘It is up to each of us to stand up for our most cherished principles,’ the vice president emphasized.
The Capitol was attacked hours after Trump, at a large rally on the National Mall near the White House, repeated his unproven claims that the 2020 election was riddled with massive voter fraud and stolen from him. Trump urged then-Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election results.
Harris, in her role of presiding over the Senate, becomes the first vice president to oversee the congressional confirmation of their electoral loss since then-Vice President Al Gore did it in January 2001, following his razor-thin defeat to then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the 2000 election, which was decided by a Supreme Court ruling.
Four decades earlier, then-Vice President Richard Nixon presided over the certification of his narrow election loss in a 1960 showdown with then-Sen. John F. Kennedy.
Biden, in comments Sunday night, joined Harris in emphasizing that he was ‘determined to do everything in my power to respect the peaceful transfer of power.’
The president, pointing to the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the Capitol, told new Democrats in Congress that ‘now it’s your duty to tell the truth. You remember what happened, and I won’t let January 6th be rewritten or even erased.’