20 Years Before Jan. 6, Al Gore Stood Up To His Own Party. Mike Pence Was Watching.

Last summer, in a private moment at the memorial service for ex-senator Joe Lieberman at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, two former vice presidents had a conversation.

Al Gore thanked Mike Pence, according to people close to both men, in an interaction that’s never been reported, for his actions at the Capitol the day it was attacked by a mob. 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.”

What Pence did and did not do four years back underscored the elementally high peril of what’s often considered all but a formality: the certification of the Electoral College vote. Obviously, there are no guarantees in modern political life that rules will be followed, that norms will be respected, that precedent will hold, and Pence knew this better and more viscerally than most. Because of Jan. 6, 2001, he knew on Jan. 6, 2021, that in a moment of rote ceremony there also was ample opportunity for destabilizing mischief: When the person in charge of this ministerial act has a much more personal stake, the bedrock of American self-governance is at once at its most visible and its most vulnerable.

On Monday, then, Kamala Harris will do what no one since Al Gore has done — preside over the process that makes official his or her own defeat for the presidency. Given the nature of the results of this past election — no serious allegations of fraud plus a clear loss of the popular vote — it’s unlikely there will be much if any pressure on Harris to do more than call out the count. But seen in the light of the chaos and physical violence of 2021, and the still-palpable bitterness from 2001, her adherence to this constitutional process carries its own weight.

“Not enough people think about this,” Mitchell Berger, a prominent South Florida attorney and longtime Gore confidant, told me. “Vice President Harris is going to do her duty in 2025. Mike Pence did his duty in 2021,” Berger said. “Gore did his duty in 2001.”

“He could have caused a lot of turmoil. He could have done some version of what Donald Trump did following 2020, but he chose not to — because he values the institutions of democracy and realizes that they need to be nurtured,” John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt who’s married to Gore’s chief of staff, told me.

“Al Gore helped break a fever, and Donald Trump threw gasoline on a fire,” former Gore (and Joe Biden) speechwriter Jeff Nussbaum told me. “Two diametrically opposite reactions — and the irony, of course, is that Al Gore had far more right to be aggrieved.”

Aides to Gore and Pence did not respond to requests for the two men to talk in more detail about Jan. 6, 2001, or Jan. 6, 2021, or that encounter last summer at the synagogue. But it was clear to those close to them that this shared history meant a lot to both men. “The fact that the vice president discharged his duty that day despite the fact that many in his party believed he had won the election made an indelible impression on me,” Pence would later say of Gore, “about the resilience of our institutions when our leaders are willing to keep faith with the Constitution.”

“Mr. Vice President,” South Florida congressmember Peter Deutsch said early in the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2001, “I make a point of order.”

“The gentleman,” said Gore, speaking in the stilted, scripted language practically mandated by his role in the task at hand, “will state his point of order.”

“Mr. Vice President, we have just completed the closest election in American history …”

Gore cut him off. “The gentleman will suspend,” he said. “The Chair is advised by the Parliamentarian that, under Section 18 of Title 3, United States Code, no debate is allowed in the joint session. If the gentleman has a point of order, please present the order.”

“Mr. Vice President,” Deutsch pressed, “there are many Americans who still believe that the results we are going to certify today are illegitimate.”

“The gentleman,” Gore said again, “will suspend.”

The congressional convening was a coda to a couple of months that had been exceedingly fraught. The presidential election of 2000, between Gore and George W. Bush, was infinitesimally close. Gore won the popular vote, but the determinative Electoral College vote had come down to just one total toss-up state — in the memorable words of the late Tim Russert, “Florida, Florida, Florida.” For the nation and its most important institutions, the exhausting drama amounted to a rolling stress test. Gore, though, a former senator who was the son of a senator, was to the core an institutionalist — driven, in the estimation of his friends and advisers, by a deference to and reverence for those institutions, and by a deep-seated adherence to systems, to rules, to norms.

“I remember very explicitly meetings at the Naval Observatory with Al Gore there and Warren Christopher and Bill Daley there,” said Gore’s former chief speechwriter Eli Attie, referring to one of his top recount sherpas and one of his main campaign managers, respectively, “where they were saying things to him like, ‘Look, at a certain point, you may need to step aside for the good of the country and stop fighting simply so we don’t let tainted electors show up to the Electoral College because it’s too important to preserve that system.’”

He didn’t need much convincing. “Why didn’t Gore want to color outside the lines?” Berger said. “For the same reason it was so bad that Trump did color outside the lines. It breaks the system down — the peaceful transfer of power, the rule of law, everything he believed in.”

It was a posture that struck some as not only insufficiently forceful but naïve. No small number of people sympathetic to his party and his cause wanted him to do more, say more, fight harder — in the 36 days from election night to his concession speech in the wake of the Supreme Court’s controversial 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, and then in the run-up to Jan. 6.

“This will not be the ceremonial proceeding that everybody thought would happen,” then-Florida congressmember Alcee Hastings said to a reporter, vowing to object to the certification. “You really believe this election was stolen?” Bill Press asked Al Sharpton on CNN. “Absolutely,” Sharpton said. “Jail to the thief!” protesters from Democrats.com chanted outside the Capitol. It was “important to do everything to fight the theft of an election,” said Bob Fertik, a co-founder of the group. “What is the matter with Democrats? They are rolling over in a blissful haze of bipartisanship,” Robert Kuttner, the co-editor of the American Prospect, wrote at the time in a column in the Boston Globe, agitating for stiffer resistance — “instead of ceremonially enjoying his sad, twilight moment as Senate President, Gore should be leading the opposition.”

Inside the Capitol, however, Gore stifled the opposition. “Mr. Vice President,” Deutsch said, “I will note the absence of a quorum and respectfully request that we delay the proceedings until a quorum is present.”

Gore had a reputation for being wooden and uncharismatic. Here, though, he was some mixture of dry, resigned and self-effacing. “The Chair,” he said, “is advised by the Parliamentarian that Section 17 of Title 3, United States Code, prescribes a single procedure for resolution of either an objection to a certificate or other questions arising in the matter. That includes a point of order that a quorum is not present. The Chair rules, on the advice of the Parliamentarian, that the point of order that a quorum is not present is subject to the requirement that it be in writing and signed by both a member of the House of Representatives and a senator.”

“It is in writing,” Deutsch said, “but I do not have a senator.”

“The point of order,” Gore said, “may not be received. The Chair hands to the tellers the certificate of the electors for president and vice president of the state of Alabama.” The alphabetical count was underway. Florida loomed.

“Is there objection?” Gore said.

There was. “Mr. President,” Hastings said, “I object to the certificate from Florida.”

“Is the gentleman’s objection in writing and signed by a member of the House of Representatives and by a senator?”

“Mr. President, and I take great pride in calling you that, I must object because of the overwhelming evidence of official misconduct, deliberate fraud and an attempt to suppress voter turnout …”

“The Chair must remind members that under Section 18, Title 3, United States Code, no debate is allowed in the joint session,” Gore said.

“Are there other objections?”

There were. Reps. Carrie Meek and Corrine Brown from Florida. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson and Sheila Jackson Lee from Texas. Reps. Maxine Waters and Barbara Lee and Bob Filner from California. Rep. Elijah Cummings from Maryland. Rep. Cynthia McKinney from Georgia. Rep. Eva Clayton from North Carolina. Rep. Patsy Mink from Hawaii. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. from Illinois.

“Mr. President,” said Brown from Florida, “it is in writing and signed by several House colleagues on behalf of … the 27,000 voters of Duval County, of which 16,000 of them are African-Americans, that were disenfranchised in this last election …”

“The gentlewoman will suspend.”

“Mr. President,” said Jackson from Illinois, “it is a sad day in America, Mr. President, when we cannot find a senator to sign these objections …”

“The gentleman will suspend.”

“The objection is in writing,” said Waters from California, “and I do not care that it is not signed by a member of the Senate …”

“The rules,” Gore said, “do care.”

Throughout, Gore was patient, good-natured and even good-humored. “The Chair thanks the gentleman,” he said over and over. “The Chair thanks the gentlewoman,” he said over and over. “The Chair thanks the gentleman from Illinois,” he said to Jackson, “but hey …” — pausing for a second, shrugging his shoulders, drawing some laughter from the floor. “This is going to sound familiar to you,” he joked at one point.

“He’s doing just exactly what the Constitution requires him to do,” Chris Black said in the rolling live report on CNN. “His very presence, the fact that he’s willing to do this, he’s going through this, as difficult as it is, shows the strength of the constitutional system in the United States.”

Gore, reporter David Welna said on NPR, “left an impression of somebody who really does respect the rule of law, even when it goes against him.”

And Pence, a 41-year-old former conservative radio host turned congressmember on just his third full day in office, sat in the chamber and watched Gore as he “yielded to the constitutional order.” And Gore, in Pence’s memory, watched him as well. “From time to time,” Pence would say, “from his chair behind the rostrum, he glanced at me, probably wondering who the total stranger was.”

“January 6,” Brown University professor of politics and constitutional law Corey Brettschneider wrote in his 2024 book, The Presidents and the People, “reflects a more urgent truth we must confront as Americans: The power of the presidency has always been a loaded gun, one that threatens American democracy itself.”

“If Mike Pence does the right thing, we win the election,” Trump told the crowd at his “Save America” rally on Jan. 6, 2021. “All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people.”

The statement Pence issued in response was as unambiguously grounded in the language of the Constitution as Gore’s had been 20 years before: “his role as President of the Senate at the certification proceeding that was about to begin did not include ‘unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.’”

The pressure to make Pence back down, however, was incalculably more intense. “Hang Mike Pence!” the roiling crowd chanted at the Capitol.

“The prospect of killing the vice president is horrific on its own,” Brettschneider wrote in his book. “Under the Twelfth Amendment, the vice president must certify the election. If Pence had died, no vice president could be appointed without the president’s nomination and approval of Congress, an unlikely scenario given the circumstances. Absent a vice president to certify electoral votes, no one knows what would’ve happened. Perhaps the election would have been decided by the House, with each state delegation having one vote, a process that could have propelled Trump’s election, given the Republican majority of state delegations. The role of the vice president was fundamental at that moment, and the threat to his life was a dire threat to American democracy.”

Looked at in this light, there is arguably nobody in the country more important quadrennially on Jan. 6 than the vice president. The certification might be ceremonial, but it is not a mere formality. What the vice president does or does not do, if only on this one day, is the very linchpin of American democracy.

“He wasn’t going to put the system into question by trying to challenge it,” said Geer, the Vanderbilt professor with ties to Gore.

“There was never any question,” Roy Neel, a chief Gore adviser for decades, told me. “Clearly,” he added, “there were those who were saying you’ve got to fight on …”

“But where does it stop if you go down that slippery path?” Berger said. “If you don’t have tight square corners on these small-d democratic propositions, then what are you fighting for? If you believe in the institutions, you believe in the rule of law … then you have to live by that.”

“Even,” I said to Berger,” when those institutions let you down.”

“Even when the other side insists on tearing them down,” Berger said, “you have to continue to build them up.”

In the estimation of Brettschneider, Gore could have, even should have, more vigorously called into question the actual decision of Bush v. Gore — a decision Brettschneider told me he sees as “illegitimate,” a case of “the Court acting in a political, partisan way” — “but definitely not,” Brettschneider emphasized, “at that moment.” Not at the Capitol. Not in the joint session. Not on Jan. 6. Because if Gore had done anything of the sort on Jan. 6, then the role of the vice president on that or any Jan. 6, he said, becomes a “discretionary act.” And that, Brettschneider said, would have “opened up the floodgates.”

“We don’t want a race to authoritarianism,” he said. “There have to be defenders of democracy.”

“What do you think,” I asked him, “people should have on their minds when Kamala Harris does this?”

“I think,” he said, “she should be explicit about it. I don’t know if she’s going to do it as she’s got the gavel in her hands, or before, or after, but Americans have to be reminded that the transition of power, the peaceful transition of power, is a fragile thing, and it relies on people of basic virtue to follow the rules. And that’s what she’s doing.

“She doesn’t like Trump, she does think he’s a danger, but she’s not going to stop the certification of votes. And that should remind us of the irony, which is that she’s allowing this person to take power — this person who refused to do that — and actually risks at that moment the teetering of democracy. And unfortunately, the risk we’re taking is that he might do it again or something like that. ... So I think she’s got to just call out the delicacy of the moment and explain what she’s doing and why she’s doing it.”