Mitch McConnell is the most senior Republican in the US Senate
Credit: REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
The most senior Republican in the US Senate, Mitch McConnell, has congratulated Joe Biden on his election victory and called him the “president-elect” for the first time, breaking with Donald Trump.
Mr McConnell, the Senate leader, made the acknowledgement on Tuesday morning, the day after the electoral college formalised Mr Biden’s win by voting him in as the next president.
The move undercuts Mr Trump’s continued attempts to claim without evidence he was the real winner of the election and suggests appetite is waning on Capitol Hill for publicly backing the president’s position.
“As of this morning, our country has officially a president-elect and a vice president-elect,” Mr McConnell said on the Senate floor.
He added later: “The electoral college has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate president-elect Joe Biden.”
The remarks came as more Republican senators began to publicly acknowledge Mr Biden’s victory and say they would work with him in the preceding 24 hours.
John Thune of South Dakota, the second most senior Republican senator, had said “at some point you have to face the music”. Others called Mr Biden “president-elect".
The public comments end the repeated refusal by senior Republican senators to accept Mr Biden’s victory on November 3. They were previously insisting legal challenges must play out.
Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, also on Tuesday acknowledged Mr Biden’s win for the first time, saying "for my part, I am ready for cooperation and contacts with you”.
Mr Putin also said: "Russian-American cooperation based on the principles of equality and mutual respect would meet the interests of people in both countries as well as the entire international community."
The trigger for the changes came on Monday when 538 so-called "electors" met in state capitals and Washington DC to formalise Mr Biden’s win, fulfilling a role specified in the US Constitution.
That moment, largely procedural but still constitutionally important, all but ended Mr Trump’s legal route to overturning his election defeat. On January 6 Congress meets to rubber-stamp the result.
However there was little sign in the immediate aftermath that the US president would join his senior senators in accepting Mr Biden’s victory.
Moments after Mr McConnell spoke, Mr Trump tweeted: “Tremendous evidence pouring in on voter fraud. There has never been anything like this in our country!”
Neither the US president nor his legal team has provided conclusive proof to back up that claim. No court has agreed there was mass voter fraud at the election despite scores of lawsuits.
In the hours before Mr McConnell’s speech Mr Trump had shared a message from another user on Twitter which suggested the Republican governor and secretary of state in Georgia will “soon be going to jail” because they failed to overturn Mr Biden’s win in the state. There is no evidence that is the case.
Meanwhile Mr Biden, a Democrat, used a speech on Monday evening after electors had voted to issue his fiercest denunciation of Mr Trump’s refusal to concede and of Republicans for not breaking with the president.
Mr Biden said: “The Trump campaign brought dozens and dozens and dozens of legal challenges to test the results. They were heard. And they were found to be without merit.”
He went on to say that “none of this has stopped baseless claims about the legitimacy of the results” and single out Republicans who had backed a Texas-driven lawsuit that would have thrown out millions of votes in key swing states.
He said of that lawsuit: “It’s a position so extreme we’ve never seen it before. A position that refused to respect the will of the people, refused to respect the rule of law, and refused to honour our Constitution.”
Mr Biden said at one point: “In America, politicians don’t take power — the people grant power to them.
“The flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know that nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power, can extinguish that flame.”
Mr Biden will take over the presidency at the inauguration on January 20.
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