Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) backed the Trump team’s legal challenge of voting results in various battleground states during his first public comments on the Senate floor since Election Day.
In his Monday remarks, McConnell said that “no states have yet certified their election results” and that recounts are already pending in “at least one or two states.” The longtime Senate fixture argued that President Trump is “100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.”
“The core principle here is not complicated: in the United States of America, all legal ballots must be counted, any illegal ballots must not be counted, the process should be transparent or observable by all sides and the courts are here to work through concerns,” the majority leader added.
McConnell’s remarks came after the mainstream media over the weekend declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential race and have begun referring to him as “president-elect,” even though an individual is not president-elect until he has been elected by the Electoral College in December. Nevertheless, Biden, running mate Kamala Harris, and their campaign have already begun work with their transition team.
McConnell called for the investigation of voter-fraud claims.
“If any major irregularities occurred this time of a magnitude that would affect the outcome, then every single American should want them to be brought to light,” he said. “If the Democrats feel confident that they have not occurred, they should have no reason to fear any extra scrutiny. We have the tools and institutions we need to address any concerns.”
The Republican leader compared the current situation to the 2000 race, during which a recount took place in Florida due to the slim margin of votes between Al Gore and George W. Bush. The Gore campaign mounted a long legal challenge and did not concede until December.
“Let’s not have any lectures, no 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,” McConnell said in reference to Democrats’ accusations of Russian interference in Trump’s favor in 2016.
His comments assuage concerns among Republicans that he and the party would rather have Joe Biden in the White House than Donald Trump. McConnell and Biden, after all, worked in the Senate together for decades, and the Republican leader called the former vice president an “old friend.”
McConnell’s recent comments in support of President Trump are a good sign for those on the side of honest elections, as they signal that the Republican Party is now willing to fight alongside the president after initially being tepid in the face of the media anointing of Biden.
Amid the silence, Donald Trump, Jr. called out supposed Republican 2024 hopefuls, writing that “They have a perfect platform to show that they’re willing & able to fight but they will cower to the media mob instead.”
In response, several, such as former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley, spoke up. And Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) made an adamant plea to the president not to concede.
“If Republicans don’t challenge and change the U.S. election system, there will never be another Republican president elected again,” Graham said on Fox News. “President Trump should not concede. We’re down to less — 10,000 votes in Georgia. He’s going to win North Carolina. We have gone from 93,000 votes to less than 20,000 votes in Arizona, where more — more votes to be counted.”
Of course, the usual NeverTrump crowd is more than ready for a President Biden. Senator Mitt Romney (R-Utah), for example, rejected the president’s voter-fraud claims and said it’s “time we get behind the new president.”
If the media bothered to fact-check that statement, their “false” meters would be off the charts. For not only is Biden not the president-elect, he is most certainly not the “new president.”
Ultimately, Graham is right: Republicans, and the American people in general, cannot simply cross their arms and ignore the voter fraud. Not only would it be the greatest insult to our electoral system (and the citizens who put their trust in it), but if Biden and Democrats get a hold of the reins of power, they will usher in an unprecedented era of socialism and restructure the system (court packing, abolishing the electoral college, amnesty, non-citizen voting, statehood for Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C., gun control, etc.) so that Republicans, at least conservative ones, will find it unlikely to ever again win a presidential election.
