Dictators, Republicans deny result
The heads of the world’s major democracies have congratulated Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on their election last week, among them Britain, Germany, France, Italy, Canada, Australia, Japan and South Korea. The leaders of Israel and the Palestinian Authority alike recognized the same result. Even some of President Trump’s fellow exponents of authoritarian drift — India’s Narendra Modi, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and ( belatedly) Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan — joined the global mainstream in acknowledging the presidentand vice presidentelect.
There are, of course, a few rogue powers still refusing to recognize reality. They include Russia’s Vladimir Putin, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and most of the United States’ elected Republicans.
As of Tuesday, a week after voting concluded, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of Bakersfield and the bulk of their respective caucuses were aligned with the likes of Putin, Kim and China’s Xi Jinping in declining to recognize the result of a free and fair American election.
Biden is leading in states worth more than 300 electoral votes, well over the required 270, and ahead by 4.7 million votes and counting. But Republican denial of his election remains as standard as global acceptance: It’s easier to count the prominent GOP officials who have recognized the next president than to list those who haven’t.
Although former President George W. Bush and Utah Sen. Mitt Romney, the party’s previous president and nominee for the office, have congratulated Biden, that has failed to move most of their fellow partisans. Romney is one of only four Republican senators to have recognized the presidentelect. The numbers are similar among House members and governors: Only a few have acknowledged the outcome, mostly those representing divided or Democraticleaning constituencies.
Like Putin’s spokesman, who referred to “certain legal proceedings” in declining to consider the result official, most Republicans are relying on the notion that the outcome is not clear because Trump’s lawyers are contesting votes in battleground states. But it has quickly become clear that the lawsuits they have filed are at worst frivolous and at best challenging small numbers of ballots that won’t change the outcome.
Top Republicans have nonetheless gone well beyond the evidence to falsely and irresponsibly suggest that the winner is in doubt. Sen. Roy Blunt, RMo., said Tuesday that Trump “may not have been defeated.” The same day, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, sounding like the foreign minister of a dictatorship, threatened a “smooth transition to a second Trump administration.” And the day before, Attorney General William Barr announced a change in Justice Department policy allowing federal prosecutors to “pursue substantial allegations of voting and vote tabulation irregularities prior to the certification of elections,” prompting the director of the department’s election crimes unit to step down.
Other administration officials were following orders not to cooperate with Biden’s transition team. Federal law and custom provide funding, office space, and intelligence and other briefings to president select. But the transition process is being stymied by the Trump appointee heading the General Services Administration, Emily Murphy, who has refused to recognize the election result.
It’s no accident that these officials are on the same page as foreign autocrats. They’re making a mockery of our system, which can only delight the enemies of democracy around the world.