In refusing to acknowledge Biden win, McConnell again puts politics ahead of country

Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to acknowledge the election of Joseph R. Biden and his insistence that Donald Trump is “100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options” is an abject failure of leadership that enables a serious threat to democracy.

McConnell’s position would be reasonable if there was a legitimate reason to question the outcome of the election in any state that would make a difference. But that is not the case. This is not like the election of 2000 when there were issues regarding about 500 votes separating George W. Bush and Al Gore in Florida that would determine the outcome of the national election for president.

Trump’s lawyers have filed frivolous lawsuits that have been laughed out of one court after another. He and his lawyers have made wild claims of massive fraud at press conferences, but they have not included most of those claims in their lawsuits because they have no evidence to support them. Pressed by a federal judge in Pennsylvania last week, Rudolph W. Giuliani acknowledged, “this is not a fraud case.” The judge threw the case out on Saturday in a scathing opinion saying Trump’s lawyers had presented “speculative accusations . . . unsupported by evidence” and “strained legal arguments” that were without merit.

A division of the Department of Homeland Security said the election was “the most secure in American history,” with no “evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes or was in any way compromised.” The former Republican governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, called the conduct of Trump’s legal team a “national embarrassment.” Maryland’s Republican governor, Larry Hogan, said the efforts to overturn the election were beginning to make the United States look like “a banana republic.” He said he was “embarrassed that more people in the party aren’t speaking up.”

But even if there was some merit to any of the lawsuits, it would not make a difference. President-elect Joseph Biden won 306 electoral votes, 36 more than the 270 needed to take the White House. Trump would need to change the outcome in three states in order to win. His legal team has not raised a legitimate challenge in a single state. Biden is expected to end up with about 80 million popular votes, the most any candidate has ever received, and six million more than Trump.

These times call for leadership. One would hope that McConnell, 78, who has just been elected to another six years in the Senate, would provide it. But McConnell refuses to recognize the outcome of the election. As he has done so often, McConnell has put politics and party ahead of the national interest.

All Americans should be celebrating the remarkable success of an election that went very smoothly and had a record turnout despite the complications of the pandemic and Trump’s baseless attacks on voting. We should have greater confidence in our elections. Instead, Trump and his minions are making false claims of fraud in order to undermine public confidence in the election and in the legitimacy of the Biden administration. McConnell is complicit in this assault on the democratic process. And we can expect McConnell to exploit it after Biden is inaugurated to obstruct everything the new president tries to do.

Former Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan said this week that “it’s really important that we respect the will of the people,” and described the consequences of failing to do so: “if we don’t, we will end up doing damage to our country, to our democratic institutions, to norms and to the cause of freedom.” Unfortunately, that damage has been done and will continue for a long time.

Stephen B. Bright of Lexington teaches at the law schools at Yale and Georgetown Universities.