Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has become the highest-ranking Republican to congratulate Democrat Joe Biden’s presidential election victory, 38 days after Biden was projected as the winner.
McConnell joined several fellow Republican legislators in acknowledging Biden as president-elect after the Electoral College affirmed Biden’s victory on Monday.
“Yesterday, electors met in all 50 states, so, as of this morning, our country has officially a president-elect and a vice president-elect,” McConnell said on Tuesday on the floor of the US Senate.
“Many of us hoped that the presidential election would yield a different result, but our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January 20. The Electoral College has spoken,” he continued.
“So, today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden,” McConnell said. He also congratulated Vice president-elect Kamala Harris, who serves as a Democratic senator from California. “Beyond our differences, all Americans can take pride that our nation has a female vice president-elect for the very first time,” McConnell added.
Biden told reporters Tuesday he called McConnell to thank him for his comments and said they agreed to meet soon.
“I told him although we disagree on a lot of things, there are things I think we can work together on, we’ve always been straight with one another, and we agreed we’d get together sooner than later,” Biden said.
Following the Electoral College vote Monday, Republican lawmakers who had deferred to Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election and unfounded allegations of widespread voting fraud had started publicly acknowledging Biden as president-elect, something most others did on November 7, when it was projected that Biden had won the November 3 election.
Most Republicans who have been publicly supporting Trump’s legal challenges, including the more than 120 who signed onto a Texas lawsuit that was dismissed by the US Supreme Court last week, have not reacted yet to the Electoral College vote. Many of them represent districts where the president is extremely popular and they do not want to run the risk of alienating their constituents by publicly breaking with Trump.
This is the situation that McConnell found himself in and almost certainly a key reason for his delay in congratulating Biden. In fact, before congratulating Biden, McConnell spent over eight minutes praising Trump’s presidency and his accomplishments.
“It will take far more than one speech to catalog all the major wins that the Trump administration has helped to deliver for the American people,” McConnell said, adding that Trump and Pence “deserve our thanks and gratitude for their tireless work and their essential roles in all of these victories and many more.”
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Electoral College officially confirms Biden presidential victory
