Mitch McConnell Finally Congratulates 'President-Elect Joe Biden'

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It took six weeks and an official vote from the Electoral College, but Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell finally acknowledged that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States.

A day after the Electoral College officially locked in Biden’s victory, McConnell took to the Senate floor and congratulated Biden on his win.

“As of this morning our country has, officially, a president-elect and a vice president-elect. Many millions of us had hoped the presidential election would yield a different result, but our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January the 20th,” McConnell said. “The Electoral College has spoken, so today I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”

The comments came after McConnell delivered a lengthy paean to President Trump, who still refuses to accept he lost the election.

“It would take far more than one speech to catalogue all the major wins the Trump administration has helped deliver for the American people,” McConnell said in his speech, touting the GOP’s major corporate tax rate cuts and the record number of judges that Republicans confirmed under Trump.

Even though it’s been clear for more than a month that Biden won, and Trump and his allies have lost all but one of the nearly 60 court cases they’ve filed to challenge the results, most federal Republican elected officials have refused to buck Trump and defend America’s democratic institutions. 

Even Russian President Vladimir Putin beat McConnell to the punch, congratulating Biden on his win hours before McConnell did.

McConnell’s comments fulfill a promise he’d made earlier—that he’d say who won the presidency once the Electoral College voted. And they come as a growing number of GOP senators began to publicly admit that Biden has won following the Electoral College’s official vote on Monday. More than a dozen now have said that Biden won, double the number just a day ago. But House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), a close Trump ally, has yet to call Biden the president-elect.

McConnell may now be bowing to reality, but he offered zero pushback on Trump’s six-week attack on America’s democratic institutions, even as death threats poured in to election officials from Trump supporters and Trump brazenly and repeatedly sought to overturn multiple states’ election results to keep himself in power.

Democrats slammed McConnell for dragging his feet.

"The fact that it took six weeks for my colleagues to recognize reality and stop undermining our democratic process is sad and disappointing," Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said on the Senate floor shortly after McConnell's speech.