Donald Trump’s victory has made Jan. 6 boring again.

Four years after a mob of Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory, Republicans and Democrats seem to agree they’ll give Trump the smooth, drama-free transfer of power he denied Democrats in 2020.

That’s despite the fact that many Democrats see Trump as an insurrectionist, ineligible to hold the presidency because of his role in creating the conditions that led to the attack four years earlier. Instead, top Democrats say they have no plans to stand in the way of Trump’s victory — and they’re not even sure their rank-and-file colleagues will make the token objections they’ve lodged in years past.

They also anticipate that Vice President Kamala Harris will lead the joint session of Congress to count Trump’s presidential electors precisely the way her predecessors have, taking no active role in the proceedings and tallying the results certified by the states. The result: a quick and simple transfer of power that will culminate on Jan. 20 when Trump takes the oath of office.

“I think you’re going to have a pretty sort of normal transfer, and I think we will respect the wishes of the American people … in contrast to what happened January 6, 2021,” said Rep. Joe Morelle (D-N.Y.), the top Democrat on the House committee tasked with overseeing elections. “I do feel like that’s worth saying over and over again.”

There is one potential crisis, attributable to Trump’s own party and the incoming president himself. After a spending fiasco last week, conservatives have expressed doubts that Mike Johnson should still be speaker, and Trump hasn’t weighed in to defend him. That House vote is scheduled to occur on Jan. 3, and a protracted battle could delay the certification of Trump’s win. Congress can’t do anything else until it elects a speaker.

Here’s a look at how the final stages of the presidential transition will play out once the new Congress convenes next month.

Before Jan. 6

Before Congress convenes to count electoral votes there are two crucial questions lawmakers must answer. The first: Who will be speaker of the House?

When the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3, their first job is to select a speaker, who can then swear in the other members and preside over the adoption of rules to govern the chamber. Until last week, Johnson appeared to be a shoo-in to win a full term, consolidating the support of his fractious conference, winning over detractors and lining up votes for what he hopes will be his first full term. But his stewardship of spending negotiations and an initial deal with Democrats led to a conservative revolt, with several openly calling for a new speaker. Trump also openly issued veiled threats about Johnson’s future as speaker.

If Democrats, as expected, unanimously back Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) holds to his promise not to return to Congress, Johnson can only afford to have one Republican vote against him. That’s a suddenly realistic possibility — Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) has already vowed to oppose him, and several more are noncommittal.

A battle for the speakership could take days, creating uncertainty about the House’s ability to count Electoral College votes. And there’s no road map for what to do if a protracted battle eclipses Jan. 6.

That leads to the second question: Could Congress change the date of the joint session? Lawmakers have the authority to pass a law changing the date from Jan. 6 — and there’s precedent for doing so in modern history. The branches could, of course, push the session back a few days to give the House breathing room to resolve a speaker fight.

Presuming the speakership is resolved, the House and Senate must agree on the procedures governing the joint session of Congress. For more than 100 years, this has been uncontroversial and Congress has approved rules governing the legislative branch, including the Electoral Count Act, a statute that has governed the joint session since 1887. Even in 2020, when Trump was contesting the results of the election, Congress adopted this resolution unanimously.

However, the fight that emerged in 2020 revealed that some Republican lawmakers do have doubts about the laws that govern the transfer of power. And Johnson himself has yet to clarify his own views on the Electoral Count Act — particularly since Biden signed significant amendments to it in 2022.

Though Republicans are unlikely to want to stoke uncertainty, given that their guy is about to take the oath of office, a fight over the Electoral Count Act could still emerge on Jan. 3.

Democratic objections

Republicans are fond of pointing out that Democrats have lodged objections to presidential electors in every race Republicans have won since 2000. However, Democrats have seen those objections as largely symbolic, without any endorsement from national leaders or party organizations.

This time, there may not even be a symbolic objection to Trump’s victory. POLITICO spoke to the group of Democrats who challenged some of Trump’s electors in 2017, and none of them said they planned to mount a similar effort this time. They acknowledged that their 2017 votes were token statements that they did not expect to succeed, and said the events of the last four years underscored the need to show confidence in the transfer of power.

“I’m not intending to do that again, because I think that people don’t differentiate,” said Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.). She added: “I think there was a clear difference between what we did and what he does.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), who also lodged an objection in 2017, said he hadn’t heard of a single Democrat who planned to object this time and predicted that Democrats would be “constitutional patriots.”

“I have not actually heard of anybody who intends to vote no,” added Morelle, “and I would certainly discourage it.”

And if Democrats did mount challenges to Trump’s electoral votes, the updated Electoral Count Act made it significantly harder to force their colleagues to consider them.

In every previous joint session, it took objections from just one House member and one senator to trigger a lengthy debate and vote. But the revised law now requires 20 percent of each chamber — 87 House members and 20 senators — to sign challenges before they trigger further proceedings. It’s hard to imagine any potential challenge coming close to that threshold in 2025.

Kamala Harris presides

Harris will be presiding over the certification of her own defeat — a moment that is simultaneously uncomfortable and an ode to the peaceful transfer of power. She’s the third losing candidate to do so in recent history.

The vice president, who serves as president of the Senate, is constitutionally required to fulfill this role, with limited exceptions. In 2000, Al Gore brushed aside Democrats’ protests to certify George W. Bush as the victor. In 2016, Biden told a handful objecting Democrats that it “is over” and ushered in the first Trump presidency. And in 2020, Mike Pence resisted a crushing pressure campaign from Trump — and a violent riot — and followed in his predecessors’ footsteps.

Trump and a group of fringe attorneys argued that Pence could buck history and take control of the joint session, deciding which electoral votes to count or postponing the session altogether to give states a chance to reverse their certified results. Pence rejected this approach as unconstitutional, contending that the vice president’s role in the joint session is meant to be largely ceremonial.

Though some Trump allies still say the vice president has this authority, no one expects Harris to remotely entertain the idea — and Democrats have roundly dismissed it as a possibility.

Harris aides have said she intends to carry out her duties as all vice presidents have before her, in part because it is right and also because it’s the law. Indeed, lawmakers seem so certain that Jan. 6, 2025 will lack intrigue that they’ve largely treated it as an afterthought. Gone are the intensive strategy sessions and convoluted legal analyses aimed at pressuring the vice president to take an active role in the proceedings in order to reverse the outcome.

Security concerns

In 2021, the expectation of challenges to the election were high while the anticipation of violence at the Capitol was low. Those dynamics are reversed this time.

Despite the lack of drama, security agencies — the Secret Service, the Capitol Police, the D.C. police and others — are treating the event on par with the security needs of the Super Bowl. Already, there are signs around the Capitol of enhanced security measures, including surveillance towers set up in the vicinity.

And while protests are possible, there’s been no call by any national leaders to converge on Washington for the joint session or to challenge the outcome. That lack of organizing energy suggests the fervor of Trump supporters in 2021 simply won’t be replicated by Trump’s detractors.

As Congress prepares to certify another election on Jan. 6, the U.S. Capitol Police looks like a vastly different agency than it was ahead of the attack on the Capitol four years ago.

Security officials on the Hill were widely excoriated for the lack of preparedness ahead of the attempted insurrection, prompting multiple high-level resignations in the following weeks. An oft-repeated criticism was that officials should have requested help prior to the attack, given clear signals that there would be a huge protest coming to the area with the potential to turn violent. Those issues coincided with a steep increase in violent threats made against members of Congress.

With that in mind, Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger has sought to shift the agency’s identity as a traditional police force with a focus on Capitol Hill to a “protective force” built on intelligence gathering, threat assessment and flexing its nationwide authority and jurisdiction. It now has an intelligence bureau with dozens of agents, as well as field offices in Florida and California, with more possible in Massachusetts, Wisconsin and Texas.

But those shifts come at a cost. Capitol Police now operates with a $791.5 million budget, up more than 70 percent since the Capitol attack. Even accounting for inflation, that’s more than seven times the 9/11-era budget. Total spending is expected to reach $1 billion in the next few years, with officials requesting another 14 percent increase for next year’s budget.

“If all we had to do was protect the members of Congress on Capitol grounds, our budget would be a fraction of what it is,” Manger said in a recent interview. “We’ve got to protect the members of Congress all over the country.”

That has prompted some lawmaker questions about oversight. While Congress is the one that greenlights that funding, there’s an inescapable conflict given members’ increased fears for their own safety. No lawmakers publicly criticize USCP for its additional efforts to protect members — a difficult and complex task — but some would like to see transparency ramp up as more cash flows to the department, wondering if the increased money has really translated to increased safety.

“I think we need a lot of oversight on the United States Capitol Police processes, and that includes budget,” said Rep. Morgan Griffith (R-Va.), who sits on the House Administration Committee. “We need to be more active. And we need more transparency coming from leadership.”

In addition to the intelligence gathering operations, the new money has also gone toward addressing staffing shortages and attrition, with mixed results. Capitol Police leaders were already trying to grow the department before Jan. 6, as many of the officers were approaching retirement eligibility. Then hundreds more officers left en masse after the attack, too. Capitol Police officials now say that the first responder’s unit, expanded bicycle team, crowd management and civil disturbance units are “now appropriately trained and equipped.” While the department is still recruiting aggressively, staff has grown by between 300 and 400 employees since the riot, not counting hundreds of others hired to backfill retirements and attrition.

Back in December 2021, the FBI and multiple law enforcement agencies from NYPD to Washington State had raised concerns about the possibility that Donald Trump’s supporters would turn violent on Jan. 6. Capitol Police’s own intelligence unit saw social media posts about a plot to breach the complex — complete with maps of the building’s tunnels and explicit threats of violence against members of Congress.

But on Jan. 5 2021, guidance circulated within Capitol Police that “at this time there are no specific known threats related to the Joint Session of Congress Electoral College Vote Certification.” It couldn’t have been further from the truth or more disconnected from various intelligence, including the department’s own.

After years of expansion and training, Manger now describes the capabilities of the intelligence bureau of USCP as “world class.” He said it includes social media, emails, telephone calls and every other avenue for threats that are made against members and the Capitol. Manger told senators last week that the department has implemented all of the official recommendations for changes to USCP made by lawmakers in the wake of the attack.

One key area they’re still trying to expand is threat assessment teams that handle the growing threats against lawmakers. Manger estimated that, in 2024, threats will eclipse previous years to “well over 8,000” against members and the Capitol complex, compared to just 1,000 to 2,000 a decade ago. He said that despite increased staffing, caseloads for the special agents investigating the threats are still too high. There’s also significant turnover in these high-pressure roles that are outside the protection of the Capitol Police union.

“This has been a really, really difficult cycle for a number of members whose families have been threatened,” Rep. Annie Kuster (D-N.H.) said. “They have death threats out for them, they have to have special security.”

Capitol Police also monitors residential security for members of leadership — changes were made to that process after the attack on Paul Pelosi in former Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco home last year. There has been a drumbeat of demand from lawmakers for more protection when they are outside the heavily protected Capitol grounds, whether in their districts, in transit and especially at events where many members gather together and could be targeted.

“We’re concerned about the safety of our family members, ourselves and our staff both here locally and in our district offices and our homes,” said Legislative Branch Appropriations Subcommittee ranking member Rep. Adriano Espaillat (D-N.Y.). “This is escalating … it’s nasty out there.”

Capitol Police insist these changes have made them better equipped to deal with threats. Manger called their responsibility to protect lawmakers a “24/7 no-fail mission” and said that has required more officers, training and administrative staff — all of which takes more money.

But concerns about oversight remain. After the 2021 attack, both lawmakers and outside groups urged an overhaul of the oversight apparatus for the USCP, which largely falls to the Capitol Police board. The halting and uncoordinated response of the board while the Hill was overrun drew calls for restructuring.

The 141-year-old board — which is made up of the House and Senate sergeants at arms and the architect of the Capitol, with a nonvoting presence by the Capitol Police chief — was built to encourage a deliberative decision-making process, not for responding quickly to a violent crisis on the Capitol’s doorstep. Resignations and firings led to a wholesale replacement of the board after the attack, but the structure remains unchanged.

“Do I think that there’s tweaks that could be made to make the whole sort of oversight system a little better? Absolutely,” Manger said. But “I’m trying to work within that structure.”

Not everyone is so sure those changes have helped matters. Griffiths said that USCP still has issues with being transparent with lawmakers who are explicitly tasked with overseeing the department, saying “my assessment is that it is not improving.”

“Congress propelled Capitol Police funding and manpower into the stratosphere but failed to launch the accountability mechanisms that would keep the police on mission,” longtime transparency advocate Daniel Schuman from the American Governance Institute said in a recent interview.

Meanwhile, Capitol Police funding has been on a steady upward climb since 1998, when a gunman bypassed a security checkpoint and killed two USCP officers in his attempt to enter the Capitol office suite of then-Majority Whip Tom DeLay. The Capitol Police began seeking — and receiving — a reliable series of budgetary increases which have not slowed.

The Capitol Police are requesting $906 million, a 14 percent increase over current funding levels for fiscal 2025. The department’s funding will be finalized as lawmakers negotiate a spending deal in the new year.

Jordain Carney and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.