Mitch McConnell and Several Other GOP Senators Finally Acknowledge Biden’s Victory

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R–Ky.) today finally acknowledged Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election that was held six weeks ago. “Yesterday electors met in all 50 states,” he said on the Senate floor, “so as of this morning, the country has officially a president-elect and a vice president-elect….The Electoral College has spoken, so today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”

That wasn’t so hard, was it? Yet for a month and a half, McConnell had declined to take this step, because he did not want to antagonize President Donald Trump, who continues to insist that he actually won re-election by a landslide, an outcome that would be apparent but for a vast criminal conspiracy that fraudulently denied him his rightful victory. “Allies insisted privately that [McConnell] would ultimately honor the election results, but did not want to stoke a year-end conflict with the president that could hurt the party’s chances in two Georgia Senate runoffs and imperil must-pass legislation,” The New York Times reports.

At least McConnell did not join the more than 100 Republican members of Congress who backed Texas Attorney General’s Ken Paxton’s unsuccessful attempt to stop Biden from taking office by challenging election procedures in four battleground states. The Supreme Court last week unanimously declined to consider Paxton’s lawsuit, which was widely derided by legal scholars as an ill-conceived, poorly reasoned, and unprecedented effort to reverse the outcome of a presidential election by asserting that one state has standing to sue others when it disapproves of their election rules.

Trump was unfazed by that setback, saying the Supreme Court—which includes six Republican appointees, half of them nominated by Trump himself—had “chickened out” because the justices “didn’t want to rule on the merits of the case.” Today he claimed “tremendous evidence” is “pouring in on voter fraud” and repeated his allegation that fraud-facilitating election software helped deliver a phony win to Biden.

Having failed to produce any of that “tremendous evidence” in court, Trump is now holding out the hope that his allies in Congress can give him a second term by challenging the electoral count on January 6. The president is relying on Rep. Mo Brooks (R–Ala.), who refuses to join the “surrender caucus” and plans to “object to the submissions of Electoral College v