This Jan. 6 won’t be the same. Four years ago, then-President Donald Trump urged supporters to head to the Capitol to protest Congress’ certification of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election. “Will be wild!” Trump promised on Twitter a few weeks before Jan. 6, 2021. And it was. Trump gave a vitriolic speech to thousands of people gathered at the Ellipse behind the White House, after which many marched to the Capitol and stormed the building in an attempt to stop the previously routine final step in formalizing the winner of the presidential election. Even after the rioters dispersed, eight Republicans in the Senate and 139 in the House voted against ratifying Biden’s win in certain swing states, despite no evidence of problems or wrongdoing that could have affected the outcome. This year, the only turbulence preceding the quadrennial ratification of the presidential election resulted from House Republicans fighting among themselves over who should be speaker. “There will be no violence. There will be no attempt to mount an insurrection against the Constitution,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md. “It will be a lot more like what we’ve seen for the rest of American history.” The last time, Trump urged his vice president, Mike Pence, who was presiding over the certification, to intervene to keep him in the White House. This time, Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee against Trump, has acknowledged her loss and isn’t expected to try to change long-established procedures for certifying the election. No other prominent Democrat has urged the party to contest Trump’s win, either. Congress also has since updated the law that governs the proceeding, clarifying the process in the states and specifying the vice president’s role as merely ministerial. After the 2020 election, many Republicans contended there were signs of massive voter fraud that made it impossible to confirm Biden’s victory, even though there has never been any indication of widespread fraud. After Trump won this November, many of those same Republicans had no such objections, saying they trusted the accuracy of the vote count. It was a change in sentiment shared by Republicans across the country. “As citizens, we should all be happy when it goes smoothly,” said Edward Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University. “It’s always better not to have major contestation over elections, especially when there isn’t a reasonable position for it.” Still, the calm may be illusory. Trump and Republicans had signaled that if had Harris won, they were prepared to contest her victory. Vice President-elect JD Vance, as an Ohio senator, argued that Pence should have acted to overturn Biden’s election. Vance himself is set to be in the position to preside over the next significant Jan. 6 — in 2029, when Congress will be scheduled to accept the electoral votes for the winner of the 2028 presidential election. “The most dangerous January 6 event is not January 6, 2025. It’s January 6, 2029, and beyond,” said David Weinberg of Protect Democracy, which defends against what it terms authoritarian threats to the country. “It creates an enormous problem when only one side of the aisle stands down when it loses an election.” The Constitution lays out some basic steps required to choose the next president, and congressional legislation has filled in the procedural blanks. […]