It’s official. Official-official. Joe Biden is the president-elect, and there’s nothing Trump and his posse of ghouls can do about it. (Not that there ever really was.)
On Monday evening, the Electoral College voted to affirm the election results, with Biden finishing at 306 votes. The formal certification gave Biden license to finally speak out more harshly against the president’s attempts to contest the election. In a speech following the vote, Biden accused Trump of spreading “baseless claims about the legitimacy of the results.”
“It’s a position so extreme, we’ve never seen it before,” Biden said, referring to the Republican members of Congress of attorneys general who signed onto a Texas lawsuit to wipe out the vote counts in several states he won. “It’s a position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honor our Constitution.”
In the hours since the Electoral College vote, Biden says seven Republican senators have called him, an acknowledgement that he is, in fact, president-elect. Another Republican, Michigan Representative Paul Mitchell, has very heroically announced that he will change his party affiliation to Independent for the last two weeks of his term, disavowing the GOP’s decision to go along with Trump’s election delusion. (I predict there’s more of this hand-waving to come, especially for retiring members of Congress who want to secure those coveted CNN contributor jobs.)
Of course, the Electoral College vote has done nothing to change the mind of someone like Stephen Miller, who got on Fox News while the vote was still happening to share that the Trump camp had arranged for Trump electors to hold a fake vote and send the results to Congress. He called it an “alternate slate.” OK.
The coup…it had a good run (the few hours when some of us wondered if we were living through a coup), but it’s simply not a thing.