Kamala Harris’ Farewell Address
Certifying her election loss will be (for now) her final public act.
Good morning on a snowy day here in Washington, D.C. It’s Monday, January 6th, 2025, the fourth anniversary of the riot at the U.S. Capitol. Inauguration Day is exactly two weeks away.
President Joe Biden, NBC’s Carol Lee reported this weekend, is gearing up to deliver two major speeches before leaving office: one on foreign policy, and the other a formal farewell address.
According to Lee, unlike most recent presidents, Biden does not plan to hold a press conference before his term is over, shielding him (once again) from questions about his age, mental acuity, and pardon for his son. Similarly, Biden has reportedly already held “the only sit-down [he] is giving a print publication as he prepares to leave office,” an interview he sat for on Sunday with USA Today. If true, that means he will end his term as the only president in modern history to go four years without sitting for interviews with major American newspapers like The Washington Post or The New York Times.
As for most of his presidency, Biden’s departure will be defined — even for a once-world-famous talker — not by what he has said, but by what he hasn’t: the interviews and press conferences he didn’t (or couldn’t) give, the arguments he didn’t (or couldn’t) make on the debate stage, the political case he didn’t (or couldn’t) mount.
Vice President Kamala Harris also hasn’t held many public appearances of late, although that isn’t as unusual. Vice presidents don’t get farewell addresses.
Instead, Harris’ final high-profile appearance on the national stage (at least for now) will come this afternoon, as she oversees the certification of President-elect Donald Trump’s election victory. Being VP — as Harris has learned firsthand — is often an unforgiving job, with mixed odds at career advancement. It is a role with few legal responsibilities; she will perform the last one today, a task more quotidian than grandiose.
Or, well, it used to be.
The certification itself is expected to be routine; under the surface, it is pregnant with meaning. Not only will Harris be presiding over the verification of her own loss to Trump, but she will be doing so exactly four years after he tried to deny her and Biden the same courtesy — standing by as the U.S. Capitol was ransacked in the process.
Adding an extra layer of poignancy, Harris once thought that that January 6th would be the message that would ensure Trump’s defeat, even delivering her last big campaign speech right where he stood on the morning of the riot. “Look, we know who Donald Trump is,” Harris said in that address. “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election.”
But Harris made an incorrect gamble about how the country remembered January 6th — or, more accurately, how much the country cared to remember it. Instead of seeing it as a day of infamy, as Harris framed it, or as a “day of love,” as Trump did, evidence suggests that the day had just fallen, for the most part, out of voters’ minds.
“In more than 200 interviews, voters worried not about an endangered country,” the New York Times concluded in an examination of Harris’ messaging on democracy, “but about paying rent.” Democrats thought that, to voters, January 6th would be, far and away, the most salient thing about Trump, even four years later. It wasn’t.
In fairness to them, in the days immediately following January 6th, no one would have thought otherwise. At the time, Trump left Washington in disgrace, abandoned by his allies. Liz Cheney (here, you have to turn your head back to a time when you heard “Liz Cheney” and thought “rock-ribbed Republican”) called for his impeachment. Mitch McConnell practically called for his indictment. “Enough is enough,” said Lindsey Graham.
But there can be no better symbol of Trump’s extraordinary political resurrection than the fact that the very next January 6th certification, instead of confirming his pariah status, is verifying his return to power.
The institutions that Trump sought to break are still working — exactly well enough to usher him back to office, where he has promised to pardon at least some of the 1,500 people charged for their role in the Capitol riot, which spawned the largest criminal probe in American history. As a prelude, Trump’s own prosecution for his attempts to overturn his 2020 defeat has already been dismissed in light of his 2024 victory.
In refusing to similarly deny her loss, Harris is joining an unbroken — unbroken, that is, against Trump’s wishes — chain of vice presidents who have verified election outcomes, even when the results haven’t been to their liking.
Politico’s Michael Kruse has a great piece out about two of the links in that chain: Al Gore, who gaveled down objections from his own party in certifying his loss to George W. Bush, and Mike Pence, who ignored Trump’s pressure to overturn their loss to Biden and Harris.
According to Kruse’s reporting, Gore thanked Pence — one vice president to another — at a Washington synagogue last summer, as they gathered at the memorial service for a near-member of their fraternity, Gore’s former running mate Joe Lieberman.
Pence, on the opposite side of the political aisle but in the same set of pews, said something surprising in response. He suggested to Gore he had done what he’d done on Jan. 6, 2021, in part because of what he had seen as a newly sworn-in member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2001. He had witnessed a vice president like him stand up to pressure from his own party to defy the Constitution even though doing so by definition meant personal defeat.
“I never forgot it,” Pence said to Gore, in the recollection of a Pence ally.
“You don’t know how much that means,” Gore said, “coming from you.”
Later today, Harris will become the first vice president since Gore to announce her own loss in a January 6th session. Since Hubert Humphrey passed the task off to the Senate president pro tempore in 1969, the only other VP to do so in the modern era was Richard Nixon in 1961.
According to the Congressional Record, in 2001, Gore added few flourishes when certifying his razor-thin defeat: “May God bless our new President and our new Vice President,” he said, but not much more. In 1961, though, Nixon asked — in light of the “unprecedented situation” of overseeing his own loss — for “permission to impose upon the time of the Members of this Congress to make a statement which in itself is somewhat unprecedented.”
Nixon said:
This is the first time in 100 years that a candidate for the Presidency announced the result of an election in which he was defeated and announced the victory of his opponent. I do not think we could have a more striking and eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system and of the proud tradition of the American people of developing, respecting, and honoring institutions of self-government.
In our campaigns, no matter how hard fought they may be, no matter how close the election may turn out to be, those who lose accept the verdict, and support those who win.
And I would like to add that, having served now in government for 14 years…it is indeed a very great honor to me to extend to my colleagues in the House and Senate on both sides of the aisle who have been elected; to extend to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, who have been elected President and Vice President of the United States, my heartfelt best wishes, as all of you work in a cause that is bigger than any man’s ambition, greater than any party. It is the cause of freedom, of justice, and peace for all mankind.
It is in that spirit that I now declare that John F. Kennedy has been elected President of the United States, and Lyndon B. Johnson, Vice President of the United States.
The three other sitting vice presidents who have lost the presidency in the modern era offer interesting models for Harris to follow.
Like Harris is now, Gore led early polls for the Democratic presidential nomination in the next election cycle. But he declined to run, instead using his platform to advance a specific cause from the sidelines, winning a Nobel Peace Prize and an Emmy Award — but never another political office — for his climate activism. (In keeping with Harris’ shape-shifting career, it’s unclear what such a cause would even be. Smart policing, a crusade she largely dropped? Abortion rights? The “opportunity economy”?)
Both Nixon and Humphrey remained in the political arena. Two years after losing the presidency, Nixon ran for governor in California; Humphrey ran for Senate in Minnesota. Nixon lost; Humphrey won. They would both go on to mount another run for president. This time, Nixon won; Humphrey lost (he was denied even his party’s nomination).
Like her ’60s-era predecessors, Harris is now considering runs both for statewide (California governor in 2026) or national office (the presidency in 2028). In some ways, it is hard to imagine a comeback after she was decisively rejected in November. But, then again, it’s hard to imagine her doing anything else: at age 60, she has been seeking or holding elected office continuously since her late 30s.
Depending on the route she chooses, Harris’ return to the spotlight today will either be a capstone on her political career — one last norm obeyed before ceding power to the norm-breaker — or the beginning of her next chapter.
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The day ahead
All times Eastern
President Biden will travel to New Orleans, where he will attend an interfaith prayer service and meet with community members impacted by the January 1 attack.
The House and Senate will convene for a Joint Session to count the 2024 electoral ballots. Senators will march as a group to the House chamber at 12:40 p.m. The session will begin at 1 p.m., with Vice President Kamala Harris presiding.
Certificates of each state’s electoral votes will be opened and read. Under the bipartisan Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022, one-fifth of both the House and Senate would have to object to a state’s votes to trigger debate over their legitimacy. No objections are expected.
The Supreme Court has no oral arguments scheduled.
" Biden’s departure will be defined — even for a once-world-famous talker — not by what he has said, but by what he hasn’t"
To me his presidency has been defined by action, not words. He leaves behind a far better situation than he started with...Covid just being one example, but the economy as well. He sowed competency not chaos. And he did it without voluminous, vitriolic tweets.
“Decisively rejected” when it was the smallest margin of victory in many years.