WASHINGTON (AP) — In the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, an elite group of House Democrats gathered to contemplate a question that their predecessors could have hardly imagined: What would they do if the vice president tried to overturn a free and fair election?
The group assembled by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., included some of the most agile legal minds in the House — California Reps. Adam Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin and Colorado Rep. Joe Neguse. They spent weeks studying the rules for the Jan. 6 certification, gaming out what they would do if Vice President Mike Pence took the unprecedented step of trying to halt Joe Biden’s victory in the Electoral College.
They never came up with a perfect answer.
In the end, the planning was merely a precaution. Pence did not bend to President Donald Trump’s extraordinary pressure to intervene and presided over the count in line with his ceremonial role. He announced the certification of Biden’s victory before dawn, hours after a mob of Trump’s supporters violently ransacked the building.
Still, the idea that the Electoral College process could have been manipulated added a grave new dimension to the Capitol insurrection, heightening the danger the nation faced as Trump pressured lawmakers and election officials around the country to change the results. Democrats, and some Republicans, warn that peril is only growing as Trump and his allies wage a nationwide campaign to seize hold of the machinery of elections.