U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) speaks with reporters after weekly meeting of Republican Senate conference at Mansfield Hall of U.S. Capitol in Washington, USA, on 1 December 2020.
Tom Williams | Reuters
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell explicitly on Tuesday recognized Joe Biden as president-elect on Tuesday after weeks of Republican delays in recognizing the outcome of the 2020 election.
The Kentucky Republican congratulated the new Democratic president after the Electoral College formally certified Biden’s victory Monday. Numerous Republican senators did not recognize Biden as the winner of the election for more than a month, as President Donald Trump unfoundedly claimed that widespread election fraud cost him a second term in the White House.
“Our country officially has an elected president and an elected vice president,” McConnell said Tuesday in the Senate floor.
“The Electoral College has spoken. So today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden,” and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, he continued later.
McConnell congratulated Biden after going through a list of what he called “almost endless” successes during Trump’s term as president. He noted policies that included the 2017 GOP tax law and “perhaps most importantly” the confirmation of three conservative Supreme Court judges.
Republican senators, including Maine’s Susan Collins and Utah’s Mitt Romney, congratulated Biden shortly after it became clear he would win the presidential election last month. Others like Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 2 Republican in the House, publicly accepted the reality, as the Electoral College voted Monday.
Still, some, including Republican Party sensors Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia, have refused to accept Biden’s victory. Both lawmakers will try to keep their seats in the Jan. 5 qualifiers that will determine whether McConnell and the Republican Party retain control of the Senate.
If Republicans keep the House, McConnell will have a massive influence on what his former Senate colleague Biden can achieve in the White House. Biden’s top priorities, including a massive coronavirus relief package, a public health care option and a green energy-focused infrastructure plan, are likely to face resistance from the GOP.
Trump has vowed never to give in to Biden. He falsely claims that he won the race and that he is spreading a series of unproven, discredited and baseless conspiracy theories as he claims that his re-election was stolen by a massive electoral and electoral fraud.
Trump, in his first tweet after McConnell’s acknowledgment of Biden’s victory, reaffirmed his allegations of election fraud without addressing the Republican Senate leader’s statements.
Even after the Electoral College cast its ballots to make Biden’s victory official, Trump continued to amplify his false claims on Twitter.
“Huge problems were found with the voting machines,” he tweeted Tuesday morning, providing no evidence. “Able to achieve a convincing victory and reduce it to a narrow loss,” he tweeted falsely.
Attempts by the Trump campaign and its allies to reverse Biden’s victory have failed in dozens of judicial challenges. The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday delivered what appeared to be a fatal blow to those efforts, when it refused to hear a long-running proposal from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton to invalidate the results of four key states that voted in favor of Biden.
More than 100 House Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, supported Texas’ demand.
Trump had called Paxton’s blatant case “big,” though a broad consensus of election law experts predicted his failure was inevitable.
But neither the devastating judicial loss nor the defeat of the Electoral College seem to have attenuated the president’s comments, the most incendiary of which have been directed at Georgia Republican Party officials. Biden narrowly won the state.
On Tuesday morning, Trump retweeted a message from attorney Lin Wood, who predicted that Georgia Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger would “go to jail soon.”
Trump’s promotion of Wood marks a potentially consistent clash with his party ahead of the two crucial fundamental elections in Peach’s state.
Wood, who along with attorney Sidney Powell has filed numerous failed lawsuits alleging election fraud, is calling for a boycott of these runoffs. Republican lawmakers backed down fiercely, accusing Wood of being a Democratic operative trying to depress participation in the Republican Party of Perdue and Loeffler.