After the confirmation within the Electoral College that Joe Biden will indeed be the next president of the United States and the Supreme Court’s dismissal of a suit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, we are seeing an increasing number of Republican politicians accept the results of the 2020 presidential election.
As NBC News reported , this came after Senator Mitch McConnell congratulated Biden on his win and warned others within his party against objecting when Congress counts each state’s results on January 6.
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But while an orderly transition of power to the Biden administration appears increasingly likely, President Donald Trump indicated his continued refusal to concede the election, tweeting , “Too soon to give up. Republican Party must finally learn to fight. People are angry!”
This serves as the continuation of the pattern Trump has shown since the election was first called and that pattern was addressed in a speech Biden gave on Monday evening.
At a December 14 speech in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden acknowledged the record-breaking voter turnout that saw over 155 million Americans cast their ballots.
As transcribed by PBS News Hour, he said, “We saw something very few predicted, even thought possible, the biggest voter turnout in the history of the United States of America, a number so big that this election now ranks as the clearest demonstration of the true will of the American people, one of the most amazing demonstrations of civic duty we’ve ever seen in our country.”
He also spoke of the record-breaking 81 million votes he and Vice President-Elect Kamala Harris received.
The way these votes were spread out throughout the nation led to their attainment of 306 electoral votes, which he also recalled matched the votes won by Trump when he beat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election.
This led him to condemn Trump’s refusal to concede the election, for, as he put it, “By his own standards, these numbers represented a clear victory then, and I respectfully suggest they do so now.”
He also sought to remind Trump of the many avenues he was able to use to contest the election results.
As he outlined , these included recounts, legal challenges presented to 80 judges throughout the country, and even the aforementioned sweeping lawsuit presented to the Supreme Court. And the results of all of these confirmed the same results.
As Biden said, “Respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy, even when we find those results hard to accept.”
He also sought to remind the president that “in America, politicians don’t take power. People grant power to them.”
Biden also had words for the 17 Republican attorneys general and 126 congressional representatives who supported Paxton’s case with the Supreme Court.
This suit aimed to discount the votes of 20 million Americans in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin so Trump could win the election, which led Biden to refer to it as “a position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution.”
“Thankfully,” he added , “a unanimous Supreme Court immediately and completely rejected this effort. The court sent a clear signal to President Trump that they would be no part of an unprecedented assault on our democracy.”
Among these admonishments, Biden also extended his appreciation for the efforts of the election workers, as well as state and local officials who administered the electoral process in the face of unusual risk.
As he put it , “And they wouldn’t be bullied into saying anything different. It was truly remarkable, because so many of these patriotic Americans were subjected to so much, enormous political pressure, verbal abuse, and even threats of physical violence.”
With the confirmation of the election results behind the nation, Biden called on Americans to “turn the page” and direct their focus toward healing the country as the COVID-19 pandemic continues its devastation.
He spoke of the work needed to contain the virus, vaccinate the public against it, administer effective economic relief to the millions of Americans made vulnerable by measures against the spread of the virus, and to rebuild the economy itself.
As he said, “In doing so, we need to work together, to give each other a chance, to lower the temperature. And, most of all, we need to stand in solidarity as fellow Americans, to see each other, our pain, our struggles, our hopes, and our dreams.”
h/t: PBS News Hour
