Profiles in cowardice

The Post has since updated the number to indicate that 26 Republicans acknowledge Biden as the winner. Of those lawmakers, 12 of the 52 GOP senators acknowledged Biden’s win, and 14 House Republicans said the same.

[...]

The Post asked all 249 GOP members of Congress three questions: Who won the election, do you support President Trump’s efforts to claim victory and will you accept Biden as the “legitimately elected president” if he wins a majority in the Electoral College?

Thirty-one Republicans said that they would accept him as the “legitimate winner,” one more than the 30 previously reported.

  The Hill

Pathetic. They should all accept an Electoral College win.

Nine of the lawmakers said they opposed Trump’s continuing efforts to claim victory, while eight supported those efforts.

More than 70 percent of the lawmakers did not answer the Post’s questions.

Chickenshit.

UPDATE:  Good for you, Congressman Riggleman.

Those are the findings of a Washington Post survey of all 249 Republicans in the House and Senate that began the morning after Trump posted a 46-minute video Wednesday evening in which he wrongly claimed he had defeated Biden and leveled wild and unsubstantiated allegations of “corrupt forces” who stole the outcome from the sitting president.

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Today, most Republicans just want to avoid the Trump question altogether, following the lead of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), whose office pointed to his recent comments about the election and declined to participate in the survey.

On Tuesday, McConnell ducked questions about Trump’s claim of fraud and refused to take any leadership role in acknowledging Biden’s victory.

“The future will take care of itself,” he told reporters.

On Thursday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) would not even consider how he would fight executive orders in Biden’s first days in office, leaving open the idea that someone else could be sworn in on Jan. 20.

“Let’s wait until [we see] who’s sworn in,” McCarthy said, “and we can discuss that.”

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Even Kellyanne Conway — Trump’s 2016 campaign manager and longtime adviser, who famously coined the phrase “alternative facts” — went further than most Republican members of Congress. She acknowledged Friday that it looked like Biden “will prevail” and called for a “peaceful transfer of democracy.”

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With Perdue and Loeffler facing Jan. 5 runoff elections that will determine the Senate majority, the two have publicly embraced Trump’s baseless claim that the Dominion Voting Systems machines used in Georgia were rigged as part of a global conspiracy, hoping to retain support among the president’s strongest backers. Both also have called for Raffensperger to resign.

Yet in a video obtained by The Post, Perdue privately acknowledged the reality that Trump lost and that Republicans needed to focus on those Georgia races to save the Senate majority.

“We can at least be a buffer on some of the things that the Biden camp has been talking about,” he told donors on a video conference.

[...]

Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) went as far as any Republican in embracing Biden. The two worked together on the Beau Biden Cancer Moonshot proposal, named for Biden’s son who died of brain cancer in 2015, turning it into a massive 2016 medical research bill.

Within hours of the Nov. 7 declaration of Biden’s victory, Upton vowed to work with the new administration.

[...]

Sen. Patrick J. Toomey (R-Pa.) held out until Nov. 21 when a federal judge, ushered to confirmation by the staunch conservative senator, issued a scathing rebuke of Trump’s legal challenges in Pennsylvania and gave a legal seal of approval to Biden’s win there.

“Joe Biden won the 2020 election and will become the 46th President of the United States. I congratulate President-elect Biden,” Toomey said in a statement.

[...]

Reps. Paul A. Gosar (Ariz.) and Mo Brooks (Ala.) are the only Republicans in Congress who have publicly insisted Trump is the winner. Gosar has spent several weeks embracing the disproved conspiracy theory that the Dominion voting machines used in Arizona, Georgia and some other states manipulated the results and stole the election for Biden.

He said he will never accept the Democrat as the legitimately elected president.

  WaPo