Back in 2021, I traced the language that Vice President Mike Pence used when introducing certificates for the counting of electoral votes on January 6 (into January 7). I quoted the language, as was recorded in the Congressional Record:

Hearing none, this certificate from Alaska, the Parliamentarian has advised me, is the only certificate of vote from that State that purports to be a return from the State and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the State purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.

I recently went back to the Congressional Record from that day, and I found it had a number of corrections made last year, including a series relating to the word “Parliamentarian”:

Hearing none, this certificate from Alaska, the Parliamentarians have advised me, is
the only certificate of vote from that State that purports to be a return from the State and that has annexed to it a certificate from an authority of the State purporting to appoint and ascertain electors.

“Parliamentarian has advised” turned into “Parliamentarians have advised me.”

You can go watch Pence on C-SPAN, and you can hear Pence say “Parliamentarians’ve advised me” (or perhaps “Parliamentarians advise me”). So the original draft was, truly, a typo.

It’s an intriguing if picayune detail. In this special joint session of Congress, both Parliamentarians from the House and the Senate have to be on the same page. The President of the Senate typically, and understandably, would rely on the Parliamentarian of the Senate. But as an institutional matter, it seems hard for one chamber’s Parliamentarian to want one thing and another’s another. It could create material problems in handling objections under the Electoral Count Act if there was leadership friction between the two chambers.

And so, there has been, and continues to be, agreement between the parliamentarians moving through this session. The chambers continue to operate separately even in this joint session–separately, but in harmonious agreement. It’s the kind of thing exceedingly difficult to write into a statute (like the Electoral Count Act or any future amendments), but as a matter of institutional practice remains exceeding important.