Biden will take the oath; Trump’s efforts will fail
I am an elected official, so I am no stranger to criticism that is often aggressive and sometimes hateful. I will never get used to personal attacks, but of course I expect them to a certain extent. What I did not expect, however, is to see someone tell me — on my state of Connecticut Office of the Attorney General Facebook page — to “go back to China.” I will admit that it set me back a bit. It was disorienting. I felt foggy and unmoored for a few brief moments, like I needed to check myself and make sure I was still who I am.
That is how I would describe the last three and half years under this president — disorienting. If you ask me, the true destructive power of MAGA and of a political movement fueled by hate and division and disruption is its immense power to disorient and confuse us and make us doubt even our most basic truths. Go back to China? You mean, for real? Was I not born an American citizen in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1973? If I went “back to China,” a country I have visited only a few times, where would I even go? Did I really cause COVID-19? And so it goes with each tweet, lie and false statement, which renders every truth we have held for 244 years to be far less evident.
Now the president and his co-conspirators want us to doubt the truth of an election that President-Elect Joe Biden won convincingly with 306 electoral votes and over 6 million more popular votes. This was the grand and final fraud they sought to perpetrate in plain sight. Some called it a Hail Mary, an act of desperation, or maybe it was the Giuliani Gambit. We must call it what it is: The president tried — and is still trying — to steal this election through the courts.
Every day — and still today — my fellow attorneys general and I continue to confront the president’s craven legal strategy. Over the last several months, we successfully sued the postal service to force it to deliver ballots on time. We protected
voters from intimidation and suppression and stood up for election laws across the country. We are joined by teams of lawyers and leaders, Democrats and Republicans alike, committed to stopping the president from sacrificing our country to save himself. The president is aggressive and unrelenting, but his lawyers have lacked the credible facts and good legal claims necessary to be successful. Nearly all of the cases in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia have now been tossed. They lack evidence. The Arizona cases have been dismissed or withdrawn. None of the cases involved anywhere near enough votes to make a difference in the outcome. We have won because no competent courts, no judges or justices
of good conscience, will violate their own judicial oath just to hand the president a win where there is no legal or factual basis to do so. And what about rogue state legislatures or boards of certification? That was a road to oblivion a scant few dared to travel.
The president and his gang cannot stop transition either, try as they may. Gravity has taken over, and the country is moving on. The U.S. General Services Administration has formally begun the transition, and it had no choice otherwise. No single man can override the U.S. Constitution, stop the machinery of a vast and decentralized federal government, and impose himself upon the 50 sovereign states. A president cannot govern the unwilling, not in Amer
ica. The majority of Americans are anxious to complete transition because we want to go back to being Americans, even as we move forward beyond the ugliness and the shame of this moment. We want to resuscitate the democratic and legal norms that make us beautiful and to breathe new life into the constitutional system that makes us exceptional. We want justice, fairness, possibility and opportunity. We do not want to be a nation that doubles down on cruelty, rewards lawlessness and celebrates treason as patriotism and a virtue. That does not wear well.
The truth is that Joe Biden will become our president on Jan. 20, 2021. We recognize this truth not just because we expect that it will happen in fact, but because we understand the consequences if it does not. Americans live, and for all of our history have died, for the truth that we govern ourselves, and we delegate power only to those whom we elect to act on our behalf. The states choose the president, through popular vote and our designated electors. Presidents can only serve and exercise power by our consent. And we transfer power peacefully and on schedule according to our Constitution’s command. By electing
Joe Biden as our next president and inaugurating him into office, America will begin to find its way again and restore these truths we hold most evident.