Senate Republican lawmakers are standing by President Trump’s refusal to concede the election to Joe Biden, urging critics to allow the legal challenges to play out.
“I think we ought to quit all the hand-wringing, not act like this is extraordinary,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican. “We’re gonna get through this period, and we’ll swear in the winner, on Jan. 20, 2021, just like we have every four years since 1793.”
Senate Republicans have largely stood by Trump’s challenge to the election results, comparing it to the 2000 election, when Democrat Al Gore challenged the Florida election results that declared George W. Bush the winner.
“We first need to finish counting all the votes,” Sen. Rick Scott, a Florida Republican, told reporters Tuesday.
Vice President Mike Pence updated GOP senators in a closed-door lunch Tuesday on Trump’s efforts to contest the election.
The message from Pence, Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts said, was “hope but not change.”
Republicans are largely ignoring criticism by Democrats, who accuse them of being too fearful to challenge Trump. Three GOP senators, Susan Collins of Maine, Mitt Romney of Utah, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, have congratulated Biden as the president-elect.
“This is so different than it was in 2000, and yet, they can’t come to grips with the fact that President-elect Biden has won the election, fair and square,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a New York Democrat, said Tuesday. “And now, more and more of them seem to be lining up behind these just patently ridiculous lawsuits. They’re not going to succeed.”
Republicans said Tuesday that the president has a right and valid reasons to challenge the results.
Trump said he believes there has been widespread election fraud.
“This is a case of where if he wants to make the accusation, he should then present and show us the evidence,” said Sen. Mike Rounds, a South Dakota Republican. “He has time to do that. The courts will follow them through. The courts will make the decision. We’ll move forward, just as the Founding Fathers expected it to be done in the first place.”
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican, said he has received information about possible ballot harvesting in Pennsylvania, a state where Trump is contesting election results. Graham said 25,000 mail-in ballots were requested by nursing home patients on the same day.
Sen. Ron Johnson, a Wisconsin Republican, told reporters that the race has not been decided despite calls by major media outlets that Biden is the winner.
“There is legitimate cause for concern and legitimate reason to take legal action on this,” Johnson said. “It’s not the media who determines the president. It’s the votes.”
He predicted a recount in Wisconsin, another state where the results are being contested by Trump.
Johnson said Republicans want to make sure that every vote counted is legitimate.
Sen. Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, said the election could hinge on just a fraction of the 140 million votes cast flipping from Biden to Trump.
“There are a lot of questions,” Shelby said. “The president has to make his own decisions.”
Roberts told reporters the election will be decided when the state electors certify the results in December.
“It will play out,” Roberts said. “We’ll know when the electors come to town and states certify the election, but it’s just something we’re apparently going to have to go through.”
Roberts did not declare Biden the winner but said he served with him in the Senate for many years.
“It will be fine,” he said.
Schumer called the GOP “politically distraught” and said that unlike 2000, when fewer than 600 votes separated the two candidates in Florida, “these are many states, where there is a difference of tens of thousands of votes.”
