Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (D-KY) defiantly refused to congratulate Joe Biden as the president-elect during a speech on the Senate floor today in which he would not tolerate lectures about accepting election results from Democrats who never accepted that Donald Trump won in 2016.
“Let’s not have any lectures, no lectures, about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election and who insinuated that this one would be illegitimate too if they lost again — only if they lost,” McConnell said, according to The Hill.
He was seemingly referring to comments made by two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who said earlier this year that Biden “should not concede under any circumstances” if he was behind in the initial count.
“The people who push this hysteria could not have any more egg on their faces than they do right now,” McConnell added.
The Kentucky Republican also said that “in the United States of America, all legal ballots must be counted, any illegal ballots not be counted,” and that the process should be “transparent or observable by all sides,” saying that courts will handle any disputes. He stood by Trump’s efforts to push for recounts and to expose potential voter fraud, if it’s there, saying that the president is “100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.”
“The president has every right to look into allegations and to request recounts under the law and notably the Constitution gives no role in this process to wealthy media corporations,” he said. “The projections and commentary of the press do not get veto power over the legal rights of any citizen, including the President of the United States.”
“Our institutions are actually built for this,” McConnell continued. “We have the system in place to consider concerns and President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.”
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