Schumer Floor Remarks On Electoral College Vote
Washington, D.C. — Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding today’s electoral college vote for President-elect Biden. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
Today, members of the Electoral College are gathering in all fifty states and the District of Columbia to formally select Joe Biden as the next President of the United States of America.
Typically, the meeting of the Electoral College is merely a formality. The presidential election took place over a month ago. The result is not in doubt. In almost any other year, both major parties would have fully and publicly accepted the will of the American people by now. The peaceful passing of the torch: a hallmark of our grand democracy.
But this year, it seems as if Joe Biden has had to be declared the winner of the Presidential election again, and again, and again—and still, our Republican colleagues have not fully come to grips with that reality. Just how many times does President Trump have to lose before rank-and-file Republicans, before most Senators, acknowledge that Joe Biden will be the next President of the United States?
Last week, more than a hundred Republican members of the House of Representatives signed their names to a lawsuit that would invalidate the results of the election in four swing states. For any serious person, much less a Member of the U.S. Congress, to sign their name to such an anti-democratic document is beyond shameful.
To my knowledge, the Republican leader of the Senate still has not referred to Joe Biden as President-Elect. Will he change his tune now that the Electoral College has once again confirmed his victory? Will the rest of my Republican Senate colleagues do the same?
After no evidence of widespread voter fraud was found in the country; after state election officials corroborated the accuracy of the results in every state in the country; after the Trump campaign’s legal team racked up an astonishing win-loss record of 1 and 59; after the Supreme Court summarily dismissed two ludicrous efforts by Republicans to invalidate the results in swing states; will the Republican Party in Congress—here in the Senate—finally acknowledge the results of an election that was determined over a month ago?
Just how long are Republicans going to keep up this charade, which has become a national embarrassment? Even now, the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee is planning to hold a hearing this week about what he calls “election irregularities.”
Look, our Republican colleagues don’t have to like the results of the election. But they have a solemn responsibility to accept them. They have a duty to confer legitimacy on them. Instead, for the past month, they have given President Trump the space to promote wild conspiracy theories about election fraud and poison Americans’ faith in our democracy.
As the Electoral College casts the majority of its votes for Joe Biden, the same number of votes that President Trump called a “landslide” four years ago, our Republican colleagues must do now what they should have done a month ago: accept the legitimacy of Joe Biden’s election to the Presidency of the United States.
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