(upbeat music) - Hello and welcome to The Journal, I'm Steve Kendall.

Events over the past few weeks, and even the past few months, have altered the way that we look at the way our nation governs itself and the way our elected officials conduct themselves and represent us.

Here to talk about what has happened and what may happen in the future, as we move this through this rather unique time in politics in America, is a professor of political science at Bowling Green State University, Dr. Melissa K. Miller.

And Dr. Miller, welcome to The Journal once again.

Thank you for being here.

- Thanks for having me, Steve.

- Yeah, let's talk about how we got to the point.

And again, with the understanding as we record this program, it's Monday, January 11th.

So things may have transpired between the time that we're talking now and the time that this Arizona WBGU PBS.

So, go back to how we got to this point and maybe start to see how we ended up here on January 11th with the situation we have, with regard to our elections and our national governance, quite frankly.

- You know what Steve, I'd almost go back before the election, on the campaign trail, president Trump told his supporters over and over, that if he lost the election, it would be because the election was rigged.

So he really planted that seed of doubt among his supporters that should he lose the election, it could only be because of widespread fraud that the election was stolen and so forth.

And that message continued, before, during and after the election, even after the networks had declared Joe Biden the winner of the election.

In frankly an electoral college vote that identically mirrored that president Trump had received four years ago.

The president didn't let go of his charges that the election had been rigged.

A key part of that was to complain that there were a number of States that due to the pandemic, they altered, going through their processes at the state level which they are allowed to do, because our constitution allows the States to administer federal elections.

So they get to decide, whether mail-in ballots will be allowed.

Whether you have to have a certain cutoff in order to register, to vote, et cetera.

And so States in response to the pandemic had made some changes to make it easier for people to vote safely during a global pandemic.

He complained vociferously about those changes and his supporters, of course, they believe him.

We've seen that, for four years, these are very, very loyal supporters of the president.

They, he, I should say, is their real source of what they see to be the truth.

He didn't concede.

And in fact, it wasn't until just a few days ago that he admitted that he will be leaving office.

But this was after the violence that erupted, on January 6th, the day that the house and Senate met and joined in session to open the electoral college votes, count them and verify them.

So that's a somewhat meandering answer to your question.

I think we got to the point where thousands of Trump supporters came to the Capitol as kind of a last ditch effort to try to overturn the election results.

Because they simply did not believe that Joe Biden could possibly have won.

And that was the result I believe of weeks, months of messaging from the Trump campaign, that there was no way that he could lose.

So these deeply disappointed supporters, convened near the White House, heard speeches from the president from the president's children, Eric and Don Jr., From his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who encouraged them to engage in trial by combat.

And the president said, "Let's March to the Capitol.

I'll go with you," which he didn't end up doing.

But they appear to have been incited, that's the charge of the Democrats, to March to the Capitol where they stormed the building.

And so now we find ourselves in a situation on the morning of January 11th, where the house is minutes away from introducing an article of impeachment charging the president with inciting an insurrection.

- And along the way too, and one of the other parts of that, I guess too is the fact that the president believed that the vice president was going to somehow intervene in the electoral college, counting in the Senate and the house, and either stop that process or throw out the States that president Trump believed had not voted legally in his mind and in the minds of 74 million people apparently.

And that was another apparent trigger too, that when they found out that Mike Pence was not going to intervene, in his role as sitting as the president of the Senate, that seemed to add another layer of disappointment and anger, I guess you'd have to say given what we saw on January 6th.

So a lot of, cause I know there were a lot of promises it seems made that, this isn't going to stand, this is going to get overturned and we'll make sure that that happens, well, when it didn't, as you said, things got out of hand because people were convinced that there was gonna be a different outcome.

- That's right, I think Trump supporters were really kind of led down a Primrose path that the election results could change.

Whether it came to the certification at the individual state levels, the recounts, the lawsuits I believe there were around 60 lawsuits only one or two of which was successful but affected so few votes that there was no way that the one or two successful lawsuits could change the outcome of the election.

And then finally that, the vice-president himself because he presides over the joint session of Congress every four years, that certifies the electoral college votes.

This hope, this promise that vice president Mike Pence, should be able to change the outcome.

What happened was that, at 12:45 on January six, around about 12:45, vice president Pence released a very clear statement, explaining that his role did not enable him to do anything beyond presiding over the joint session.

And indeed vice-president Pence was correct about that.

The constitution does spell out a role for the vice-president during that quadrennial joint session of Congress, when the electoral college votes are opened, read and verified and certified by Congress.

But he said there is no role, you know?

And so I'm going to carry out the duty of simply presiding over the joint session.

And he was correct about that in terms of the constitution.

Well, that was of course a huge disappointment to the president, his supporters, his team.

And there were sad to say, chance about, I won't repeat them.

I won't repeat them on television, but essentially among these people who stormed the Capitol to do violence to Mike Pence himself.

- Right would you--- - So he was put in danger, of course, everyone in Congress was, we know the outcome those who saw it in real time or saw it afterwards saw the very violent images coming out of the Capitol.

I do think, a key issue here.

There are so many factors that explain how we got here.

And I've mentioned some of them.

I think one of the biggest problems we face now and going forward, is that, it seems that Americans no longer or even both sides can agree on the facts.

- Okay.

- So that Americans tend to live and we get our news in our little silos, where we can pick and choose, Americans can pick and choose to get their news from sources that will reinforce their pre-existing political opinions.

And those sources don't even seem to agree on the facts.

So there's been some reinforcement on conservative talk radio, conservative cable news, that has reinforced the president's charges.

And, those are huge factors.

The one other factor that we can talk about of course, is that there were Republican members of the house and Senate, who challenged the electoral college results in various States.

And so their culpability is also an issue that is being grappled with and many Democrats are accusing senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, Josh Hawley of Missouri, of being culpable in what went down at the us Capitol on January 6th.

- Now, when we come back, let's talk about, what transpired or started to transpire in the Senate and the house of representatives before they were quite rudely interrupted, would be the nice way to put it, before there was a riot inside the Capitol.

And so, when we come back, let's talk about how that process started and how it finally culminated with the count that we kind of knew who was going to be the case anyway.

We'll be back in just a moment here on The Journal, with Dr. Melissa K. Miller, director of, please excuse me, professor of political science at Bowling Green State University.

Thank you for staying with us here on The Journal.

Our guest is Dr. Melissa Miller, professor of political science at Bowling Green State University.

We're recording this program on January 11th and as you're, everyone is aware, if you've been following politics and the national elections, that things are rather fluid.

So maybe some of the things that we talk about today may have changed by the time you're actually seeing this but we're gonna do the best we can to keep up to date with what's going on.

We got to January 6th under, as you described in the first segment, some pretty unusual circumstances for a presidential election in the United States of America.

Talk about what started to happen and what... How things evolved when we actually began the joint session of Congress to deal with counting the electoral votes on January 6th.

- Yeah, it's so interesting.

This happens every four years and usually the major networks would never cover it live.

You wouldn't see this on the three major networks covered live, because it's a ceremonial.

Opening of the envelopes, announcement of how many electoral college votes each State cast for which candidate and so forth.

You might see highlights of it, in the evening news and that's about it.

But because of all the pressure being put by the president on Mike Pence, the networks, the cable news, were covering this with really back to back wall-to-wall coverage, of what should have been just a ceremonial opening of the votes.

Now, what we knew going into it was that the numbers I recall were there about 140 members of the house and about a dozen U.S senators or so, planned to challenge the electoral college results from various States.

These were Republican members of the house and Senate who were going to challenge the results of individual States.

States like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Michigan, et cetera.

And they were already getting a lot of pushback from the Democrats on the other side, that they were going to be essentially bringing unfounded claims of fraud to the floor of the house and Senate in doing so, because just to reiterate about 60 lawsuits had already been filed by the Trump campaign.

And none of them were successful.

Even judges appointed by president Trump himself, were summarily dismissing the complaints and charges by the Trump administration.

Nevertheless, these Republican house members and senators, were going to exercise their constitutional right to challenge the results.

So what happens is the envelopes are opened in alphabetical order.

I believe it's the third state in the list is Arizona.

So the first challenges were made by and under the constitution, it has to be a signed letter by one U.S Senator and one member of the house.

Well, one U.S Senator Ted Cruz, challenged the results in Arizona along with a whole host dozens of house Republicans.

So under the constitution that joint session sort of split, the house goes into its chambers.

The Senate goes into its chambers and each debates the challenges for two hours.

It was during that two hour debate that the Capitol was breached, that the Trump supporters at the rally, had by then reached the Capitol and stormed the building.

So that was interrupted.

There are so many interesting implications, questions, about how was the Capitol breached?

Why was the Capitol not prepared?

What will the implications be politically for Ted Cruz and others?

So what down the road for... As I said in the earlier segment, some Democrats are claiming that because there were Republican members of the house and Senate willing to challenge the results that, that sort of further egged on the disappointed Trump supporters to take action that it gave credence to the allegations that the results were fraudulent, the election was stolen and so forth.

So it'll be interesting to see the extent to which they are held responsible at the ballot box when they come due for re-election.

At any rate, your viewers likely know the rest of the story.

It took a number of hours for the Capitol to be secured, but it was, I think, a remarkable moment when the vice-president gavelled the joint session back into order, at 8:00 pm that evening, the capital had been secured.

And the joint session reconvened after these members of the house and Senate had had to, in some cases crouched under their desks, Don gas masks, et cetera.

Essentially go into lockdown.

And yet democracy was carried out and the Congress carried out its constitutional duties.

They are required to verify those electoral college results.

It didn't happen actually on January 6th, that happened in the middle of the night on January 7th.

There was an additional set of challenges that did have the signatures of a member of the us Senate and multiple house members.

Those were for the Pennsylvania results.

There were also several other States where house members tried to challenge the results.

For instance, Michigan was one of those States but there was not a us Senator who signed on.

So there were only two official challenges that led the joint session to break into these to our debates.

But ultimately what we all knew would be the outcome was that, president elect Joe Biden was verified and certified by the U.S Congress as the winner of the presidential election.

- Yeah, and I guess, and there was no way that they were going to be, the challenges were going to be approved because there was a majority of Democrats in both the house and the Senate and not enough Republicans to overcome any vote that would have said, "Yes, there's an objection to Arizona."

It would have been defeated.

It was refused in the vote that took place then to say, "No, Arizona's electoral college votes are accurate and appropriate."

So there was never any chance that any of those objections would have passed, would have gotten a positive vote.

And so that was-- another piece of it.

- Yeah, I think, there are several serve ironies of this.

And one was that, the challengers, in the house and Senate knew that they were not going to be successful.

- Right.

- And so, they were heading into it already being subjected to criticism that they were feeding the fire, as it were.

And as you say, it's because Democrats have control of the U.S house, and all it takes is one chamber to vote down the challenge, and it's going nowhere.

The second interesting thing was, in none of the States where challenges were made, was there an alternate slate of electors that had been submitted.

- Okay.

- So, you can look at, if it's spun out differently, and if there had been enough votes in the house and Senate to uphold those challenges, which there weren't and never, it was never even gonna be close, but let's imagine-- that just hadn't been upheld - That it actually had happened.

- By a vote in both chambers, there wasn't an alternate slate of electors that would have gone to Donald Trump to deliver him the election.

Some analysts have said that the end result if the challenges had been successful, wouldn't have been that president Trump got to stay in office, but that neither Joe Biden, nor president Trump had enough electoral college votes to win.

And therefore, the presidency would go not to president Trump or vice president Pence, but to the third person in line, which would be speaker Pelosi - The speaker of the house.

Which I'm sure it was not the outcome that any the Mike Pence or the Ted Cruz or any of those particular people want it, but that would have been the outcome because you make a good point.

And one that not a lot of people thought about since there was no alternative to the electoral things that electoral votes that have been submitted.

It wasn't as if the votes automatically rolled to the other candidate.

In this case, president Trump.

They just get wiped off and nobody gets to 270.

And as you just said, maybe that means the speaker of the house becomes the president for the time being for however long that is, we've never had that happen.

So I guess it would have been interesting to see how that would've played out, but, yeah.

- One of the things that really struck me was that going into it, Ted Cruz, Josh Holly, Jim Jordan, Congressman of Northeast Ohio, they had faced criticism that they were, as I said before, sort of fueling the fire and continuing to sort of feed this notion that the results could be overturned and that the results were fraudulent.

There had been no widespread fraud and courts around the country had over and over confirmed and reconfirmed that there was no widespread fraud.

A few irregularities here and there are just common in our elections.

And so, one of the things was that they were charged with, or being criticized for going into January 6th, was for engaging in just political theater.

- Right.

- That right, they were just going to, while the cameras were running, make speeches, challenging results on the house and Senate floor in order to give final attention to this notion that the election was stolen.

And what happened was, that, that political theater, became very, very real, very quickly, when the Capitol was breached.

So it was a bizarre day of, starting with lots of political theater and, turning to violence by people who really believed that the challenges were real, that vice president Mike Pence could constitutionally overturn the result which he could not under the constitution, and he himself agreed, he could not.

And then democracy resuming in the evening and the overnight hours.

So some are saying, well, this is evidence that our democracy is strong it withstood this challenge.

- Right?

- I'm not sure it's as easy and Pat as that, I'm not sure that the genie goes back into the bottle.

And that simply after January 20th, when Joe Biden is inaugurated as president, that those who stormed the Capitol as well as millions of Trump supporters around the country who are deeply disappointed and understandably so, but believe that the election was stolen, I don't know that they just say, "Oh, okay, I understand now, Joe Biden is now our president," that's not going to happen.

I think there are real concerns going forward.

Joe Biden has for months said and ran on this platform of unifying the country.

I think he has an even tougher challenge ahead of him than expected.

- Now, when we come back, let's talk about the fact that, how this affects both the political parties and here at the state level, someone like Mike DeWine who has walked a fine line along as a lot of politicians have, with this president and with this election.

So when we come back, let's talk about, how this affects us, you kind of said how it affects the broader picture but the two parties themselves are split in a lot of ways on what happened as well.

So, we'll be back in just a moment, here on The Journal on WBGU PBS.

Thank you for staying with us here on The Journal, just to let you know a reminder that we're recording this on Monday, January 11th and as everyone knows the situation in Washington, DC and a lot of ways remains fluid.

So, maybe some of the things that we're gonna be talking about over the next five or six minutes, may have changed by the time you see this, but we're going to forge ahead under what we know, on the morning of January 11th.

Dr. Miller, one of the things that has come up and is even as we are recording this program is being discussed, is how Donald Trump will exit office either as a president, normally does of his own volition walks out on the 19th or the 20th of January, and then goes about being a private citizen or doing whatever ex presidents do.

But on the other hand in the house, there is a discussion and there has been a discussion of impeachment.

There's also been discussion of the 25th amendment, which allows the cabinet to remove the president before his term of office is up.

So touch on those a little bit.

And of course then there's center which is a little less impactful, but still is a commentary on the way the legislature feels about the sitting president.

So, touch on those areas a little bit, for what we know right on January 11th.

- Well, what we know is that the president began to lose support amongst members of his own party, essentially as soon as the Capitol was breached.

So even after Congress came back into joint session at 8:00 pm on the night of January 6th, some of those members of the U.S Senate, for instance, who had signed on to the challenges and said they would challenge the results including Senator Kelly Loeffler of Georgia, had since changed their minds and ended up not challenging the results.

So as early as the evening of January 6th, we knew, that there were, was Republican support sort of being peeled away from the president.

It had been so virtually rock solid save for and occasionally Mitt Romney speaking out publicly against the president and so forth.

So really what's at the root of all of this is that Democrats, are really insistent that the president has to be held accountable for what they see as his incitement of the violent mob that descended on the Capitol.

But importantly, that there are now what appears to be a growing number of Republicans who also support holding the president to account.

Now, there are several different ways.

Some of which you've mentioned that this could play out.

One is, that the president could simply resign.

And I think there are many Republicans who wish that is what would have happened.

And that's what happened in Watergate.

As a reminder, that the president Nixon was not actually impeached.

He got so much pressure from members of his own party that they would no longer support him that he simply resigned.

The White House and the president had given no indication that he will step down.

Another is the 25th amendment under the constitution, the vice president and a majority of the cabinet can simply send a letter to the congressional leadership saying that the president is unable to fulfill his duties.

And Mike Pence would serve out then the rest of the term.

The vice president has been fielding calls and getting pressure to invoke the 25th amendment.

But as of this taping on Monday, January 11th, that has not happened.

Meanwhile, the house Democrats were pushing for impeachment.

And in fact, there were some members while hunkered down in lockdown, during the storming of the Capitol drafted articles of impeachment.

And it appears that what the house Democrats are going to do is basically say that if the vice-president doesn't invoke the 25th amendment within 24 hours, they will proceed with impeachment.

And it looks like that impeachment will essentially be for incitement of insurrection.

So these are three or four different options.

None of them is ideal from a political perspective, for the Democrats or the Republicans.

And just very quickly, I'll say the Republicans, there's a famous saying in political science that, members of Congress "Single-minded seekers of re-election."

And it's interesting to know for an impeachment to be successful there would have to be 17 members of the U.S Senate who are Republicans that would join in convicting the president.

That's a high number.

I think it's as true today as it was before that Trump's support is very, very very loyal and is key to the Republican party.

And so they face this question as to whether they should continue to side with the president and his supporters in order to secure their own re-election in the future.

For the Democrats, one of the problems with impeaching the president is that, the newly elected president Joe Biden then, would have his first weeks, months of office, being kind of swamped and overshadowed by an impeachment effort, it would make it very difficult for him, to take the kind of action with Congress to address the coronavirus emergency, the economic emergency.

So there's no really right, perfect easy course for either the Democrats or the Republicans who will no doubt be punished electorally by Trump's supporters if they support the impeachment effort.

- Yeah, okay.

well, and we're gonna have to leave it there for the time being, knowing that this is still unfolding and will continue to resonate.

It appears not just for months, but probably for years.

What has happened over the past several months.

So, Dr. Melissa Miller, a professor of political science Bowling Green State University, thank you for being here.

And you can check us out, at WBGU.org.

And of course, watch us every week, here on The Journal on WBGU PBS, we will see you again, next time.

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