Biden calls on Trump to concede

“Respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy, even when we find those results hard to accept,” Biden said.

Speaking in the Queen Theatre in Wilmington, Delaware, Biden noted that the coronavirus had led officials to fear low voter turnout, only to see more than 115 million Americans vote – the greatest number in U.S. history.

Mentioning Trump by name, Biden noted that he won 306 electoral college votes, the same number Trump claimed in 2016 and then called “a landslide.” Trump, by contrast, won 232 Electoral College votes.

Biden also slammed the Trump campaign’s copious lawsuits, none of which changed the electoral college count. “In every case,” Biden noted, “no cause or evidence was found to reverse or question or dispute” the vote.

As he called on Trump to heed the vote and multiple court rulings, Biden recalled Jan. 6, 2017, when as vice president, he presided over a joint session of Congress and a rump of progressive House Democrats tried to challenge Trump’s victory on the grounds it was the result of Russian interference.

“It was my responsibility to announce the tally of the Electoral College votes,” Biden recalled. And while he did not like the results on the election, Biden said, “I did my job.”

No concession likely

Six weeks after the Nov. 3 election, President Donald Trump did not seem likely to concede.

On “Fox & Friends” Monday morning, Trump inner-circle aide Stephen Miller maintained that Biden’s victory was the fruit of a “fraudulent election” and that the campaign would continue to maintain Trump won until Jan. 20, when Biden is set to take the oath of office.

“As we speak, today, an alternative slate of electors from the contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress. This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open. That means that if we win these cases in the courts, that we can direct that the alternate slate of electors be certified,” Miller said.

The Trump campaign unsuccessfully has sought to overturn state vote counts by filing and losing more than 50 challenges in state and federal courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court with its six Republican-nominated justices.

All six contested battleground states – Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada – which Trump claimed to have lost only because of election fraud, nonetheless cast their electoral votes for Biden.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on the floor that usually an electoral college vote is unremarkable, “But this year, it seems as if Joe Biden has had to be declared the winner of the presidential election again, and again, and again — and still, our Republican colleagues have not fully come to grips with that reality. Just how many times does President Trump have to lose before rank-and-file Republicans, before most senators, acknowledge that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States?”

Some Republicans relent

In a signal that Republicans on Capitol Hill are tiring of defending Trump’s choices, Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, issued a statement in which he said: “The orderly transfer of power is a hallmark of our democracy, and although I supported President Trump, the Electoral College vote today makes clear that Joe Biden is now President-Elect.”

Rep. Paul Mitchell, R-Mich., announced that he was leaving the Republican Party on CNN and asked to be enrolled as an independent. In a letter CNN released, Mitchell, who did not run for reelection this year, said he found it “unacceptable for political candidates to treat our election system as though we are a third-world nation and incite distrust of something so basic as the sanctity of our vote.”

Within an hour of the Electoral College’s calling the race for Biden, Trump tweeted out a resignation letter from his second attorney general, William Barr, who “will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family.”

In his resignation letter which was accepted with 37 days to go in Trump’s term, Barr thanked Trump for making sure that the Department of Justice would probe allegations of fraud, but he did not take back his Dec. 1 remarks to the Associated Press in which he said the department had found no widespread fraud that would change the outcome of the election.

Deputy Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen will serve as acting attorney general.

Contact Debra J. Saunders at dsaunders@reviewjournal.com or 202-662-7391. Follow @DebraJSaunders on Twitter.