Republicans Back Trump’s Refusal to Concede,
Declining to Recognize Biden
Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, slammed
Democrats for expecting the president to quickly concede and said he had every
right to pursue legal challenges.
By Nicholas
Fandos and Emily Cochrane
Nov. 9,
2020
Leading
Republicans rallied on Monday around President Trump’s refusal to concede the
election, declining to challenge the false narrative that it was stolen from
him or to recognize President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory even as party
divisions burst into public view.
Senator
Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the top Republican in Congress, threw his support
behind Mr. Trump in a sharply worded speech on the Senate floor. He declared
that Mr. Trump was “100 percent within his rights” to turn to the legal system
to challenge the outcome and hammered Democrats for expecting the president to
concede.
In his
first public remarks since Mr. Biden was declared the winner, Mr. McConnell
celebrated the success of Republicans who won election to the House and the
Senate. But in the next breath, he treated the outcome of the presidential
election — based on the same ballots that elected those Republicans — as
unknown.
“President
Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of
irregularities and weigh his legal options,” said Mr. McConnell, the majority
leader. “Let’s not have any lectures about how the president should
immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same
characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the
last election.”
In Georgia,
where the continuing vote count showed Mr. Trump losing the state’s electoral
votes, Senators David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler — both Republicans now facing
January runoffs to keep their seats — took the extraordinary step of calling on
the state’s top election official to resign. Declaring Georgia’s handling of
the election an “embarrassment” and citing vague “failures” in an echo of Mr.
Trump’s evidence-free charges of stolen votes, they said Brad Raffensperger,
the Republican secretary of state, had failed the state.
Mr.
Raffensperger bluntly rejected their calls, declaring the senators’ claims
“laughable” and suggesting that they were merely disgruntled because Mr. Trump
might lose and their jobs were on the line.
The
intraparty feuding underscored how political considerations around Georgia,
whose two Senate contests will most likely decide control of the chamber two
weeks before Inauguration Day, are driving Republicans’ calculations about how
to handle the election results. Republican leaders are reluctant to make any
move that might alienate Mr. Trump’s loyal supporters and hurt their
candidates’ chances. That includes appearing to bow to the reality that he has
lost before the president himself is ready to do so.
There was
little sign on Monday that would happen in the near term. Mr. Trump’s team
rolled out its latest legal moves to challenge the outcome in key states. And
in Washington, Emily W. Murphy, a Trump political appointee and administrator
of the General Services Administration, refused to formally recognize Mr. Biden
as the president-elect with a letter of “ascertainment,” leaving the country’s
transition of power in flux.
Unperturbed,
Mr. Biden plunged ahead with a transition operation that was quickly getting
off the ground. In Wilmington, Del., he announced the creation of a Covid-19
advisory board and made an urgent plea to Americans to wear face masks to slow
the spread of the coronavirus. He fielded a call from Prime Minister Justin
Trudeau of Canada, as a legion of advisers worked quickly to begin lining up
candidates to fill top agency posts.
“It doesn’t
matter who you voted for, where you stood before Election Day,” Mr. Biden said
after meeting with the advisory board. “It doesn’t matter your party, your
point of view. We can save tens of thousands of lives if everyone would just
wear a mask for the next few months.”
On Capitol
Hill, even as many Republicans privately conceded that the president’s claims
were outlandish and mostly avoided repeating them, their public statements
suggested that they had no intention of forcing Mr. Trump to accept defeat and
begin preparing to hand over the reins of power.
They
appeared intent on standing by him for a variety of reasons, hoping that the legal
process might lend more authority to the final result or that Mr. Trump might
simply give in without an intraparty fight.
“I think
the election is not over until the votes are counted and the legal challenges
are decided,” Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of the president who was
re-elected to his South Carolina seat, told reporters. “That’s why I would
encourage the president not to concede.”
Only a
small group of independent-minded Republicans who have records of breaking with
Mr. Trump said they had seen enough.
Senator
Susan Collins of Maine, a moderate who last week resoundingly won re-election
in a state that Mr. Trump lost, congratulated Mr. Biden as the president-elect
and stressed the need to begin a transition. Still, even she said that Mr.
Trump should be given an opportunity to challenge the results and urged
Americans to be patient.
“I know
that many are eager to have certainty right now,” Ms. Collins said. “While we
have a clear direction, we should continue to respect that process.”
But much of
the event included rehashed versions of the arguments Mr. Trump’s team has been
making for days, including the false accusation that Democratic-leaning
election officials had barred Republican observers from critical counting
rooms.
At one
point, Fox News cut away from the briefing, with the host Neil Cavuto telling
his audience, “I can’t in good countenance keep showing you this,” as he noted
that Ms. McEnany had not presented any evidence for her charges of Democratic
rigging.
Earlier, a
Michigan court rejected a Trump campaign filing challenging the results in the
state, calling the motion “defective” because it lacked several requisite
pieces of information, including any evidence.
Yet on
Capitol Hill, Mr. McConnell and many other Republicans were keeping alive the
possibility that Mr. Trump might have legitimate claims. Their approaches were
consistent with the way Republicans in Congress have handled Mr. Trump for the
last four years, declining to explicitly challenge or contradict the
president’s false claims, without necessarily echoing them either.
Rather than
openly rebuke the false assertion that the election was stolen, Mr. McConnell
instead said that “this process will reach its resolution.”
“Our system
will resolve any recounts or litigation,” he said.
But he also
took the opportunity to torch Democrats, saying they had no right to expect
that Mr. Trump would quickly concede.
“At this
time last week, small-business owners in cities across America were boarding up
their windows in case President Trump appeared to win and far-left mobs decided
to reprise their summertime rioting,” Mr. McConnell said. “Suffice to say, a
few legal inquiries from the president do not exactly spell the end of the
republic.”
Democrats
were outraged. Following Mr. McConnell on the floor, Senator Chuck Schumer of
New York, the minority leader, said flatly that “Joe Biden won this election
fair and square.” He called Mr. Trump’s claims “extremely dangerous, extremely
poisonous to our democracy” and warned Republican leaders not to give them
oxygen.
“Republican
leaders must unequivocally condemn the president’s rhetoric and work to ensure
the peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Schumer said.
A group of
30 former Republican lawmakers, including former Representatives Carlos Curbelo
of Florida, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Tom Coleman of Missouri and Bob
Inglis of South Carolina, joined a letter calling on Mr. Trump to concede and
accept the results of the election.
“We believe
the statements by President Trump alleging fraud in the election are efforts to
undermine the legitimacy of the election and are unacceptable,” the group
wrote. “Every vote should be counted and the final outcome accepted by the
participants because public confidence in the outcome of our elections is a
bedrock of our democracy.”
Few elected
Republicans have voiced such views, or even offered the traditional recognition
of Mr. Biden’s victory and called for the country to move forward. In her
statement Monday, Ms. Collins joined just a handful of House Republicans and
just three other Senate Republicans — Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of
Alaska and Ben Sasse of Nebraska — in publicly doing so.
“He loves
this country, and I wish him every success,” Ms. Collins said in a statement.
“Presidential transitions are important, and the president-elect and the vice
president-elect should be given every opportunity to ensure that they are ready
to govern on Jan. 20.”
Other
Republicans focused instead on defending what they described as Mr. Trump’s
right to pursue legal avenues, although some gently suggested that the time had
come for his campaign to substantiate its claims. Pressed on Monday, senators
pointed to the 2000 election — whose outcome remained uncertain as a prolonged
legal fight reached the Supreme Court — as precedent for withholding a concession
as court challenges moved forward. They argued that voters, not the press,
decide the election outcome.
“There is a
process that is available, and I don’t begrudge the president for availing
himself of that process,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, told
reporters on Capitol Hill. “But in the end, they’re going to have to come up
with some facts and evidence. But that’s not my job — that’s his campaign’s
job.”
Nicholas
Fandos is a national reporter based in the Washington bureau. He has covered
Congress since 2017 and is part of a team of reporters who have chronicled
investigations by the Justice Department and Congress into President Trump and
his administration. @npfandos
Emily
Cochrane is a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering Congress. She was
raised in Miami and graduated from the University of Florida. @ESCochrane
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