Forty-two days after Election Day, and 38 days after each network decision desk determined that Joe Biden had secured enough electoral votes to win the presidency, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for the first time Tuesday morning acknowledged the new administration.
“The Electoral College has spoken,” McConnell said on the Senate floor, after some lengthy throat-clearing tallying the Trump administration’s successes. “So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden. The president-elect is no stranger to the Senate. He has devoted himself to public service for many years.” He extended his congratulations to Vice President–elect Kamala Harris as well, noting that “all Americans can take pride that our nation has a female vice president–elect for the first time.”
Biden’s 306 to 232 affirmation of victory in Monday’s Electoral College vote was the ceremonial marker that McConnell needed to see before acknowledging the result that’s been known since last month.
After weeks of stalling, obfuscating, and vamping, that point of view extends throughout much, though not all, of the senior Republican ranks. Missouri Sen. Roy Blunt, a leadership member and the chairman of the inaugural committee, recognized Monday that “we’ve now gone through the constitutional process, and the electors have voted, so there’s a president-elect.” Senate Majority Whip John Thune said, too, that Biden would be president-elect as soon as he crossed the 270 electoral vote threshold, after which it would “time for everybody to move on.” Even South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, who pressed Georgia’s secretary of state last month about whether there was any way to kind of… throw out ballots??… said “Yeah” when asked by reporters whether Biden was now the president-elect. He briefly nodded to a “very, very narrow path for the president,” but then started dishing his takes on Biden’s Cabinet picks. Sens. Lamar Alexander, Mike Braun, Rob Portman, John Cornyn, and Shelley Moore Capito similarly acknowledged that the jig was up.
McConnell’s move does not mean that every last elected Republican in Washington will come around. Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, the No. 3 Senate Republican, for instance, insisted to a reporter on Monday that the question of whether Biden was president-elect was a “gotcha question,” a term politicians use for queries that force a difficult negotiation between politics and reality. Sen. Ted Cruz, who had volunteered to make the argument for overthrowing the election at the Supreme Court if the court agreed to hear it, did not respond to a request for comment. And it’s reasonable to infer that dragging this acknowledgement out of a House Republican Conference, the majority of whose membership last week signed an amicus brief supporting the case to overturn the results of the election, will be more challenging yet. There will be House Republicans who object to the official tally of the Electoral College vote in Congress on Jan. 6, and it’s an open question of whether they can get a Senate Republican to participate and force votes in each chamber. (Such votes won’t be successful.) A healthy chunk of Republican voters will never accept Biden as a legitimate president.
But McConnell is the embodiment of the institutional Republican Party, and his announcement Tuesday is the effective end of the institutional Republican Party’s support of—or convenient turning of a blind-eye to—the president’s efforts to overturn the election. Why did he choose this particular this ceremonial marker in the creaky constitutional process? He could have congratulated Biden following state certifications of 270 Biden electoral votes, or after the “safe harbor” deadline, last week, that compelled Congress to count the votes of chosen electors. One point of concern, though, is that the next threat to democracy would taking place not in some distant county clerk’s office, but from inside the house: He doesn’t want his conference, on Jan. 6, to be forced to go on the record over whether to reject electoral votes.
In waiting this long, though, McConnell and other Trump enablers in the GOP have established a new norm in when it’s proper to acknowledge a winner in the absence of a defeated candidate’s concession. Even if a presidential election is not particularly close, the defeated candidate, under the new precedent, is entitled to any and all efforts to try overturning the result of the election until the electors have cast their ballots in mid-December, beyond which point continued efforts would be terribly uncouth.
from Slate Magazine https://ift.tt/2K8yDEX
via IFTTT
沒有留言:
張貼留言