Republican U.S. Senator Richard Shelby recognized Wednesday that Democrat Joe Biden is the president-elect and acknowledged that it was ‘time to move on” from the 2020 presidential election.
“The Electoral College met earlier this week, which is our constitutional process for determining the result of the presidential election,” Shelby, chairman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, said in a statement to AL.com. “The electors voted 306 for Joe Biden and 232 for Donald Trump, thereby making Joe Biden the official President-elect. While I wish it would have yielded a different outcome, it’s time to move on.”
Shelby’s comment came one day after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, during a speech on the Senate floor Tuesday, recognized Biden as the president-elect after the Electoral College ratified the November election results on Monday.
McConnell’s comments were criticized by President Donald Trump on Twitter, who shared a news report on McConnell’s remarks in a tweet with a message that said, “Mitch, 75,000,000 VOTES, a record for a sitting President (by a lot). Too soon to give up. Republican Party must finally learn to fight. People are angry!”
Trump’s push to overturn the election results are expected to take center stage in the U.S. House on January 6, when U.S. Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Huntsville, plans to challenge the electoral college votes in some of the battleground states that voted for Biden. For Brooks to be successful, he will at least need one Senator to support him and, so far, none have publicly said they plan to do so.
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