Vice President Mike Pence concluded the joint session of Congress certifying the electoral votes for President-elect Joe Biden and Sen. Kamala Harris as the Vice President-elect in the 2020 presidential election.
Pence resumed the joint session of Congress to certify the votes early Thursday morning around 3:30 a.m. after Trump supporters stormed Capitol Hill and delayed the proceedings for about six hours, as Breitbart News reported.
The ceremonial certification was also delayed after a House Republican and a Senate Republican issuing formal objections to the electoral votes cast in Arizona and Wisconsin, prompting further debate and a congressional vote on the objection.
Both objections failed in the House and Senate vote.
The Senate rejected the objection to Pennsylvania’s electoral votes with a vote of 7-92. The objection to Arizona’s electoral votes was rejected by the Senate with a vote of 6-93. The House of Representatives also rejected the Pennsylvania objection with a vote of 138 – 282 and the Arizona objection 121 -303.
After the joint session resumed, Rep. Louis Gohmert (R-TX) objected to the electoral votes cast in Wisconsin but said that the U.S. senator that originally agreed to back the objection withdrew his support.
Pence concluded the joint session at 3:44 am after the proceedings ended with a closing prayer, ending a dramatic period in American history beginning with President Trump’s rally with supporters to protest the 2020 election results on Wednesday afternoon.
He did not act on President Donald Trump’s repeated pleas for him to try to reject the votes from the electoral college.
“I do not believe that the Founders of our country intended to invest the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide which electoral votes should be counted during the Joint Session of Congress, and no Vice President in American history has ever asserted such an authority,” Pence wrote in a letter to Congress that he published on social media Wednesday.
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