Trump’s last grip | The HuffPost

Call it the last act, or rather the last foothold in what has become one of the strangest American presidential elections. January 6 is the date set for a joint session of the Washington Congress: a session that is repeated every four years, after the election of the president and before his oath, and that until today has had the bureaucratic task of ratifying what decided at the polls on November 3.

In the calendar of American politics, it is the appointment that occurs on this date that makes the most sense: January 20 is the day the president-elect swears on the Bible and begins his term at the helm of the country.

But this year everything is different: the members of the House and the Senate will meet in a joint session – chaired by Vice President Mike Pence in his role as President of the Senate – not only to definitively certify the electoral results, but also to put into motion scene, like it or not, what the newspapers call Trump’s last foothold.

As Italy celebrates the Epiphany, in Washington Republicans and Democrats will give specially designated persons – “scrutineers,” readers might say in Italian – the task of reading the election results aloud, state by state, in alphabetical order. At the end of each reading, Pence will ask if there are any objections to the announced result. The entire process took 23 minutes in 2013 and 41 in 2017, when then-Vice President Joe Biden presided over it as president of the Senate.

This year, however, we already know that it could continue late into the night. According to the regulation, in fact, a single opposing opinion drawn up and signed by a member of the Senate and one of the House is enough to stop everything: in front of it, deputies and senators must meet separately, each branch of Parliament by its account, and argue for a maximum of two hours. To be accepted, the objection must gather the majority of votes in both the House and the Senate: once the discussion is over, whatever the result, the deputies and senators meet again, record the result and continue reading the electoral results .

Technically, since Democrats control the majority in the House of Representatives, there is no way for Republicans to approve their objections – and even if a few do approve, it would not be enough to overturn a result that saw Biden win by 306 votes. election against 232. But despite this, Trump – who has never admitted defeat – on January 6 will launch the last of his challenges to try to maintain the presidency that the Americans have taken from him.

It is impossible to say whether the president really believes he can reverse the outcome: so far he has given little sign that he is willing to admit defeat, and according to the newspapers even those closest to him don’t know what to expect. But he certainly believes he can control the party: Trump is convinced of that. As he often likes to remember, he is the Republican candidate with the most votes in history. Being a person who considers fidelity more than anything, it is clear that in his vision the future will only be assured to those who are faithful to him until the last minute.

A group of Republican senators should have this idea in mind: that is why they joined Ted Cruz of Texas in announcing that the announced votes will be questioned on Wednesday at the Washington Capitol. There are at least eleven senators, to which we must add about 140 deputies: a sufficient number to mount the dispute but not to win it.

The purpose of the program will not be so much to keep Trump in the White House but rather to influence the direction the party will take in the future. The Republican leader in the Senate, the very powerful Mitch McConnell, has understood for weeks that the unity of the party is at stake in the opening phase: so, reluctantly, he accepted Biden’s victory and warned his colleagues to transform the bureaucratic steps of these days in a parody.

Likewise, other Republicans have announced that they do not want to participate in a tug of war that they perceive as an insult to the popular will. The risk is that the party is divided between Trump supporters at any cost and those who believe that we must adhere to higher ethical principles than those tied to a single election or presidency.

An even greater risk is damaging the reputation of American democratic mechanisms. The November vote and its aftermath showed that there are few barriers to a leader who refuses to accept the popular will and abuse the trust of millions of Americans. The destructive power of this choice comes from these acts, which undermine the mechanisms on which our democracy is based and have the power to question one of the basic principles of this nation: what United we are says, united we can be strong. .