DEMOCRACY WATCHProtecting Democracy: Jan. 6 Panel’s Recommendations, Proposed Reforms

On Thursday, 22 December, the House committee examining last year’s attack on the U.S. Capitol issued its long-awaited final report.

The committee argues that former President Donald Trump, between the November 2020 election and 6 January 2021, tried to use his executive authority in a broad, sustained, and illegal effort to defy the verdict of the voters in order to cling to power despite his election defeat.

The final report also proposes eleven reforms aiming to ensure that Trump’s attempt to subvert the will of the voters and prevent the peaceful transition of power from one president to the next would not be repeated.

Here are the committee’s eleven recommendations (given here not in the order presented by the committee):

Electoral Count Act
The committee’s top legislative recommendation is reforming the Electoral Count Act of 1887 in an effort to protect presidential elections from being overturned in the future.

To that end, the panel called on the Senate to take up the Presidential Election Reform Act, legislation crafted by Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) that the House passed in September. The measure would clarify that the vice president’s role in certifying election results is strictly ministerial and increase the threshold for objecting to a state’s electoral votes, among other tenets.

The upper chamber, however, has instead approved its own version of the legislation — titled the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act — which is largely similar to the House measure with a few minor differences. Senate leaders included the legislation in the end-of-the-year omnibus, which passed through the chamber on Thursday. The spending measure now heads to the House.

Note: The omnibus government funding legislation that includes the Electoral Count Act reform passed the House on Dec. 23 and heads to the White House for President Joe Biden’s expected signature.

More Severe Penalties for Obstructing the Transfer of Power
Congress’s role in finalizing presidential election results is symbolic: It confirms and certifies the electoral votes submitted by the states based on the election results. 

But the Jan. 6 rampage, and, preceding it, the campaign of lies and conspiracies conducted by Trump and his supporters, sought to upend that tradition. The committee proposes that Congress expand existing federal criminal statutes to include those who try to obstruct, influence, or impede the counting of Electoral College votes.