transcript
transcript
‘The Electoral College Has Spoken’: McConnell Recognizes Biden’s Win
On Tuesday, Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, recognized Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect and Senator Kamala Harris of California as vice president-elect.
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Six weeks ago, the Americans — Americans voted in this year’s general election. The legal and constitutional processes have continued to play out since then. Yesterday, electors met in all 50 states. So as of this morning, our country has officially a president-elect and a vice president-elect. Many millions of us had hoped the presidential election would yield a different result. But our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on January the 20th. The electoral college has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden. The president-elect is no stranger to the Senate. He’s devoted himself to public service for many years. I also want to congratulate the vice president-elect, our colleague from California, Senator Harris. Beyond our differences, all Americans can take pride that our nation has a female vice president-elect for the very first time. I look forward to finishing out the next 36 days strong with President Trump. Our nation needs us to add another bipartisan chapter to this record of achievement.
Breaking with President Trump’s drive to overturn his election loss, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky on Tuesday congratulated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on his victory and began a campaign to keep fellow Republicans from joining a last-ditch effort to reverse the outcome when Congress tallies the results next month.
Although Mr. McConnell’s moves came weeks after Mr. Biden was declared the winner, they amounted to clear effort by the majority leader, who is the most powerful Republican in Congress, to put an end to his party’s attempts to sow doubt about the election. They were also a bid to avoid a messy partisan spectacle on the floor of the House that could divide Republicans at the start of the new Congress, pitting those loyal to Mr. Trump against institutionalists.
“Many of us hoped that the presidential election would yield a different result, but our system of government has processes to determine who will be sworn in on Jan. 20,” Mr. McConnell said in a speech on the Senate floor. “The Electoral College has spoken. So today, I want to congratulate President-elect Joe Biden.”
A short time later, on a private call with Senate Republicans, Mr. McConnell and his top deputies pleaded with their colleagues not to join members of the House in objecting to the election results on Jan. 6, when Congress meets to ratify the Electoral College’s decision, according to three people familiar with the remarks.
A small group of House members, led by Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, plan to use a constitutional process to object to the inclusion of five key battleground states that day. There is almost no chance they would succeed, but if they could convince at least one senator to join them, they could turn the counting session into a chaotic last stand for Mr. Trump.
So far, no senator has committed to joining them. And though Mr. McConnell could not stop one of them from doing so if they wished, he made clear that the challenge would be futile and embarrassing for the Senate.
His public remarks were a decisive shift for Mr. McConnell and came hours after members of his leadership team, and even the Senate chaplain, began softening the ground by congratulating Mr. Biden Monday evening and Tuesday morning.
The incoming president and the majority leader, who served alongside one another in the Senate for decades, spoke by phone short time later, apparently for the first time since the election.
“I called to thank him for the congratulations, told him although we disagree on a lot of things, there’s things we can work together on,” Mr. Biden said, adding that it was a “good conversation.”
Though he never repeated them, Mr. McConnell had allowed Mr. Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread voting fraud or fantastical claims that he had won the election by a wide margin to circulate unchecked for more than a month. Allies insisted privately that he would ultimately honor the election results, but did not want to stoke a year-end conflict with the president that could hurt the party’s chances in two Georgia Senate runoffs and imperil must-pass legislation.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will nominate Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., to lead the Department of Transportation, adding a young-generation voice to his team, said a person familiar with Mr. Biden’s deliberations.
Mr. Buttigieg, 38, fought a fierce battle for the Democratic nomination but bowed out and endorsed Mr. Biden in his bid for the presidency. The two men bonded during the general election campaign and the president-elect made it clear that he wanted to find a place for the former mayor in his administration.
If he is confirmed by the Senate, Mr. Buttigieg would become the first openly gay person to serve as a cabinet secretary, shattering a barrier and contributing to Mr. Biden’s promise to make his administration “look like America.” Under President Trump, Richard Grenell, who is also openly gay, served as acting director of National Intelligence, a cabinet-level post. But he did not face Senate confirmation as the acting leader.
“Mayor Pete Buttigieg was open and honest about his identity throughout his time on the national scene, giving a voice to our community, and a new vision of who and how our leaders can love,” said Alphonso David, the president of Human Rights Campaign, an L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy group.
A Navy veteran, Mr. Buttigieg could have led the Department of Veterans Affairs. But Mr. Biden decided instead to put him in charge of transportation, which is likely to become a key part of the administration’s efforts to combat climate change with aggressive actions on emissions. Reuters earlier reported Mr. Biden’s choice of Mr. Buttigieg.
In his presidential bid, Mr. Buttigieg proved himself to be among the Democratic Party’s most skilled communicators, transforming himself from a small-town mayor to a top-polling presidential candidate.
While Mr. Biden, like many others in the 2020 Democratic presidential field, was at first annoyed by Mr. Buttigieg’s presidential ambitions — and before the New Hampshire primary belittled his mayoral experience in revitalizing South Bend’s sidewalks — the two grew closer in their shared effort to hold back the party’s more liberal contenders.
As a candidate, Mr. Buttigieg consistently argued for the government to take strong steps to fight global warming. And his experience as the leader of a local community provides him experience with the infrastructure needs of cities and counties, another key priority for Mr. Biden.
At debates, it was Mr. Buttigieg who scraped with Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, leaving Mr. Biden to largely stay above the fray.
And when Mr. Buttigieg ended his campaign after registering next to no support from Black voters in the South Carolina primary, the Biden campaign gave him his own endorsement event — a plum not afforded to fellow rivals like Senator Amy Klobuchar and former Representative Beto O’Rourke, who threw their support to Mr. Biden at a campaign rally hours later.
Becoming part of Mr. Biden’s cabinet will give Mr. Buttigieg a national perch from which to advance his future political career in the Democratic Party.
Reid Epstein contributed reporting.
The top four congressional leaders are set to meet this afternoon to discuss a stimulus package and a catchall omnibus bill that Congress is racing to agree upon and approve by week’s end, the first in-person talks for the bipartisan group on the issue since the election,
The invitation from Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, to meet with Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the minority leader, and the top two Republicans on Capitol Hill, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, came as lawmakers faced a Friday deadline when government funding is currently set to lapse.
Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, is expected to join the meeting by phone, after speaking separately with Ms. Pelosi for more than an hour on the two funding issues, said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi.
The Speaker and Secretary Mnuchin spoke at Noon by phone for 1 hour, 7 minutes and discussed the latest on COVID and Omni talks. The Secretary will join the Four Corners leadership meeting today at 4 p.m. by phone.
— Drew Hammill (@Drew_Hammill) December 15, 2020
In recent days, leaders in both parties have agreed that any additional pandemic aid should be wrapped into the year-end spending measure. But obstacles remain to an agreement, with millions of Americans at risk of losing jobless benefits next week in the absence of a deal.
Top Democrats previously rejected a $916 billion stimulus proposal from Mr. Mnuchin because it curtailed new funding for unemployment programs and did not revive the supplemental unemployment benefits that lapsed over the summer. And it was unclear whether leaders of either party would embrace a $748 billion version proposed on Monday by a group of moderates in both parties, which separated out the two most contentious items, money for state and local governments and coronavirus liability protections for businesses and other entities, into a separate bill.
Democrats were continuing to push to include the state and local government funding, which Republicans have opposed. Mr. McConnell and other Republicans have pressed for sweeping liability protections, to which many Democrats object.
Even if the four leaders were to reach an agreement, it would likely face hurdles among some rank and file lawmakers, as Republicans chafe at the prospect of spending billions of dollars in taxpayer funds and Democrats argue that an agreement amounting to less than $1 trillion would be insufficient.
Progressives in the House are pushing to include direct payments of at least $2,000 for all working Americans in the stimulus deal.
In a letter sent to the leaders, liberal lawmakers, led by Representatives Pramila Jayapal of Washington, and Ro Khanna and Katie Porter, both of California, argued that such payments “are a crucial part of any Covid relief package.” They also pressed for at least six months of unemployment benefits, including enhanced supplemental benefits that expired earlier this year.
“We’ve had this issue of direct payments on the table for months now, and we’re willing to look at different amounts,” Ms. Jayapal said. “There is absolutely no reason why we can’t put the direct payments in, and dare the Senate to take them out.”
Two senators, Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and Bernie Sanders, Independent of Vermont, have threatened to hold up the broader government funding bill if Congress failed to ensure that Americans receive payments of $1,200 per adult and $500 per child in the stimulus measure.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is confronting outbreaks of factionalism and fierce impatience within his own party, as the groups that make up the Democratic coalition see President Trump crumbling as an adversary and turn instead toward the battle to define the personnel and policies of a new administration.
The competition for senior offices has strained valuable political alliances, vexing some of Mr. Biden’s key supporters from the Democratic primary contest, as well as numerous minority and female lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
Mr. Biden has so far sought not to muffle Democratic dissension or impose a tightly focused message on the party, but rather to roll out a team focused on addressing the coronavirus crisis while placating various interest groups.
It remains to be seen whether Mr. Biden will attempt a more assertive approach once he takes office. Advocacy groups from across the Democratic coalition have been mobilizing to demand swift executive action on matters from student debt and police overhauls to union rights and climate change.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, a prominent progressive, said she hoped Mr. Biden would soon lay out the overarching themes of his administration, going beyond the week-by-week staff announcements.
Some lawmakers are also complaining that they have not been adequately consulted by Mr. Biden and his team on appointments, especially the selection of Lloyd J. Austin III, a retired general, for defense secretary, given that his recent military service will require Congress to grant him a special waiver.
In addition, there is mounting angst among some of Mr. Biden’s allies that people who fought hard for him during the campaign have found themselves waiting in line for jobs while Obama-era holdovers were quickly slotted into senior roles.
So far, the president-elect and his advisers have tried to manage conflict from something of a careful distance, holding listening sessions with various Democratic constituencies and then holding deliberations within Mr. Biden’s tight inner circle, eventually unveiling personnel decisions in batches aimed at pleasing several groups at once.
Mr. Biden’s choices stem from his determination to fulfill his promise of appointing a cabinet that reflects the diversity of the country. And his aides have privately been working to salve wounds by telling people there will be turnover in the top jobs soon enough.
In the meantime, Democrats say, Mr. Biden may continue to receive help from a familiar source in his bid for party unity.
Representative Ro Khanna, a California progressive, said there was still enough “fear of Trump” in the Democratic coalition to offer Mr. Biden an ongoing “grace period.”
“Trump continuing to float that he’s a candidate in the future may be a blessing for Joe Biden,” Mr. Khanna said. “It may be what Joe Biden needs to keep the Democratic coalition together.”
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is traveling to Georgia on Tuesday in a show of support for the Democratic candidates in January runoff elections for the state’s two Senate seats, a set of crucial contests that will determine control of the chamber.
Mr. Biden’s trip to Atlanta comes a day after the Electoral College affirmed his victory, and a day after in-person early voting began for the runoff elections.
The contests on Jan. 5 will have an outsized effect on the start of Mr. Biden’s presidency. If Republicans keep control of the Senate, he will face a far steeper challenge in advancing the ambitious legislative agenda he laid out during his campaign.
To win control, Democrats need to defeat both of Georgia’s Republican senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Mr. Perdue is facing Jon Ossoff, while Ms. Loeffler is being challenged by the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, the senior pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta.
Mr. Biden narrowly won Georgia last month, making him the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry the state since 1992.
“Our message and his message is going to continue to reflect what he’s been saying all along,” Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, said of his visit. “In particular, really talking about early voting and the importance of voting, talking about the importance of Georgia in his victory.”
Runoff elections typically see a substantial drop-off in voter interest, especially in comparison to a presidential campaign, but the first day of early voting suggested these high-stakes races were bucking that trend.
About 168,000 Georgia voters showed up to voting sites on Monday, exceeding by tens of thousands the number of votes cast on the first day of in-person early voting for November’s general election.
President Trump held a rally in southern Georgia earlier this month. On Tuesday, a spokesman for his campaign, Tim Murtaugh, issued a statement saying that Mr. Ossoff and Mr. Warnock “represent the left-most fringe of the Democrat Party.”
“That Joe Biden would campaign for them is further proof that he is utterly in the grip of the extreme left, which is the driving force in today’s Democrat Party,” Mr. Murtaugh said.
The committee charged with planning the inauguration of President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is asking the public to stay home on Jan. 20 and participate in virtual activities instead.
On Tuesday, the committee announced that it had hired production experts to plan “a new and innovative program” for Americans to safely participate in inaugural events, including a “reimagined” inaugural parade.
While the plan includes a swearing-in ceremony at the Capitol, the committee said it would be a significantly scaled-down event because of the pandemic. Previous inaugurations have drawn thousands of people to Washington for a week of celebration.
“President-elect Biden’s unwavering commitment to the safety of the American people is our North Star as we plan an inauguration that protects public health while honoring inaugural traditions and engaging Americans across the country,” the committee’s executive director, Maju Varghese, said in a statement on Tuesday. He said additional details about health precautions and virtual participation would be coming soon.
The committee also announced on Tuesday that David A. Kessler, a former commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration and an adviser on the Biden transition, would also serve as an adviser to the planners.
The plans for a scaled-back inauguration are in keeping with Mr. Biden’s focus on demonstrating responsible behavior to minimize transmission of the coronavirus. He has said he would call on Americans to wear facial coverings for his first 100 days in office, a period in which he has vowed to get “at least 100 million Covid vaccine shots into the arms of the American people.” Vaccinations began this week as the nation’s death toll passed 300,000.
As the mass vaccination campaign entered its second day in the United States, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said it was his “strong recommendation” that President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris receive a Covid-19 vaccine quickly.
“For security reasons, I really feel strongly that we should get them vaccinated as soon as we possibly can,” he said on “Good Morning America” Tuesday. “You want him fully protected as he enters into the presidency in January.”
Mr. Biden told reporters in Delaware on Tuesday that Dr. Fauci, who will be his chief medical adviser, “recommends I get the vaccine sooner than later.”
“I want to just make sure we do it by the numbers,” Mr. Biden said. “When I do it, you’ll have notice and we’ll do it publicly.”
A vaccine developed by Pfizer and BioNTech was given emergency use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration on Friday, and a second vaccine, made by Moderna, is expected to be authorized later this week. The first shots have generally gone to frontline health care workers.
Dr. Fauci said he would also recommend that President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence get the vaccine, even though the president has already had Covid-19.
“You still want to protect people who are very important to our country right now,” Dr. Fauci said. “Even though the president himself was infected and he has, likely, antibodies that likely would be protective, we’re not sure how long that protection lasts.
So to be doubly sure, I would recommend that he get vaccinated as well as the vice president.”
At a briefing on Monday, Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary, said that the president would “receive the vaccine as soon as his medical team determines it’s best,” but that he was not yet scheduled to do so. She added that “some senior administration officials” would take the vaccine publicly in the coming days in order to “instill that confidence” in it, but she did not say who would do so.
Mr. Pence, officials said, has not yet taken the vaccine, but may also take it publicly in the coming days. Ms. McEnany said that the number of White House staffers receiving the vaccine would be “a very limited group of people,” a shift that came after The New York Times reported on Sunday that there was a plan in place to try and vaccinate everyone who worked in the West Wing.
Mr. Trump said on Sunday night that he would delay the plan for senior White House staff members to quickly receive the vaccine.
“People working in the White House should receive the vaccine somewhat later in the program, unless specifically necessary,” Mr. Trump tweeted. “I have asked that this adjustment be made. I am not scheduled to take the vaccine, but look forward to doing so at the appropriate time.”
The acting secretary of the defense, Christopher C. Miller, received the vaccine at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday. The Defense Department is one of the agencies coordinating Operation Warp Speed, the Trump administration’s effort to distribute the vaccine as quickly as possible.
For elected officials and public figures, getting vaccinated may be a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t proposition. On the one hand, doing so publicly could be useful as a show of confidence to members of the public, and particularly to minority groups who can be especially wary of vaccination and of government-sponsored programs.
But with the vaccine in scarce supply, those in positions of power do not want to be accused of jumping the line.
The issue came up on Capitol Hill last week when Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee and chairman of the Senate Health Committee, acknowledged to The Wall Street Journal that he had sought advice from Dr. Robert R. Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about how lawmakers should handle vaccination.
“If they want public figures to take the vaccine early in order to reassure Americans that it’s safe, I’m sure many of us will do that,” Mr. Alexander said he told Dr. Redfield. But he added, “I’m not going to do that on my own. I’m going to do it when the public health officials tell me it’s my turn.”
In affirming Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the president-elect on Monday, members of the Electoral College firmly denied President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of a free and fair election by using legal challenges and political pressure on his Republican allies.
The process took place smoothly. But the president’s unrelenting efforts to discredit the election that he lost by more than seven million popular votes and more than 70 electoral votes have left the Republican Party fractured.
While Mr. Trump spent Monday tweeting about a “Rigged Election!” and “massive fraud,” — allegations that were quickly flagged by Twitter as “disputed” — Mr. Biden, speaking from Wilmington, Del., just hours after the Electoral College formally cast its votes, forcefully condemned Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the election results.
“‘We the people’ voted,” Mr. Biden said. “Faith in our institutions held. The integrity of our elections remains intact. And so, now it is time to turn the page, as we’ve done throughout our history. To unite. To heal.”
In another positive development for Mr. Biden, who has pushed repeatedly for a bipartisan compromise on another economic stimulus to address the fallout from the coronavirus, a group of centrist members of Congress on Monday presented a pair of compromise measures totaling $908 billion intended to break the stalemate in negotiations.
The rare news of bipartisan agreement on Capitol Hill came as some Republicans separated themselves on Monday from Mr. Trump’s charged complaints about the election. A Michigan congressman who voted for President Trump this year announced that he was severing ties with his party over its refusal to accept the president’s election defeat, while a Georgia elections official angrily denounced violent threats and harassment directed at elections workers and urged the president to “stop inspiring people to commit potential acts of violence.”
The president has increased his pressure campaign on members of his party in recent weeks, many of whom have fallen in line behind him out of fear for their political careers. On Monday, Attorney General William P. Barr, who had affirmed Mr. Biden’s victory, became a casualty as Mr. Trump announced that he would depart the Justice Department next week.
Despite a tenure where Mr. Barr had displayed a willingness to advance the president’s political agenda, he fell out of favor with the president in recent weeks after acknowledging that the Department of Justice had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud.
The president’s closest allies in the House of Representatives are still eyeing a challenge to the Electoral College’s votes when Congress officially tallies them in a joint session on Jan. 6. The members of Congress, led by Representative Mo Brooks of Alabama, have their sights set on challenging five states — Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Georgia and Wisconsin — where they claim that widespread voting fraud occurred, despite the fact that all five states have certified that the results are valid and that there is no evidence of any widespread impropriety.
Constitutional scholars and even members of the president’s own party say the effort is all but certain to fail. But the looming battle is likely to culminate in a messy and deeply divisive spectacle that could force Vice President Mike Pence into having to declare once and for all that Mr. Trump has indeed lost the election.
The incoming Biden administration has yet to lay out plans for the Guantánamo Bay military prison on the U.S. Navy base where leftover fragments of the Bush administration’s most disputed responses to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks remain unresolved three presidencies later.
In the past year, prisoners have told their lawyers about sloshing raw sewage in their cells, flickering power, extreme water temperatures and other problems wrought by tropical rain inside the prison complex’s most secretive and highest-security facility, called Camp 7, which houses the 14 former C.I.A. detainees who were brought to the base starting in 2006 from overseas black site prisons.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is not expected to repeat President Barack Obama’s splashy but ultimately unmet promise in 2009 to close the prison within a year, according to people familiar with transition deliberations. A law prohibits bringing detainees to a domestic prison, as Mr. Obama had proposed doing, and Mr. Biden said during his campaign that congressional consent is needed to close Guantánamo.
But the new administration will be forced to confront several difficult decisions, such as what to do about the deteriorating building holding the 14 prisoners and how soon the State Department will resume negotiations to find secure arrangements for detainees who are approved for transfer to other countries.
Of the 40 prisoners currently at Guantánamo, nine have been charged with or convicted of war crimes, six have been recommended for transfer with security conditions in the receiving country, and the rest remain in indefinite detention, uncharged but deemed too dangerous to release.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. declared that it was “time to turn the page” on the 2020 election in a speech Monday evening, just hours after the Electoral College formally cast its votes for him to replace President Trump on Jan. 20.
Just over a month before he will be inaugurated as the 46th president, Mr. Biden hailed the record-breaking turnout in the presidential campaign, calling it “one of the most amazing demonstrations of civic duty we’ve ever seen in our country” and saying that it “should be celebrated, not attacked.”
Mr. Trump has sought for weeks to reverse the outcome of the election, offering baseless and unproven accusations of voter fraud in the swing states that delivered the victory to Mr. Biden. The president has refused to concede while he and his allies have undermined faith in the country’s democratic system of governance.
Mr. Biden denounced the attacks on voting by the president and his allies, calling them “unconscionable” and saying that no election officials should ever face the kind of pressure they received from Mr. Trump in recent weeks to falsely proclaim the election to be fraudulent.
Anticipating potential complaints from Republicans, the president-elect noted that Mr. Trump and his legal team were “denied no course of action” as they challenged the legitimacy of the election before Republican-appointed judges, with Republican legislatures, and in desperate conversations with Republican officials at the state and local levels.
None wavered in their determination that the election was fairly conducted, Mr. Biden said.
In his speech, he expressed confidence that the defining feature of American democracy — its electoral process — would survive Mr. Trump’s assault.
“What beats deep in the hearts of the American people is this: Democracy,” Mr. Biden said. “The right to be heard. To have your vote counted. To choose leaders of this nation. To govern ourselves. In America, politicians don’t take power — people grant power to them.”
As he has for weeks, Mr. Biden kept his focus on the raging coronavirus pandemic, which has killed more than 300,000 people in the United States. Though emergency medical workers and others have begun receiving the first doses of a vaccine, Mr. Biden warned that the months ahead will be difficult.
“There is urgent work in front of us,” he said. “Getting this pandemic under control and getting the nation vaccinated against this virus. Delivering immediate economic help so badly needed by so many Americans who are hurting today — and then building our economy back better than it ever was.”
He also called for unity on a day in which electors in many states performed their duties under threat of violence.
“The flame of democracy was lit in this nation, a long time ago,” Mr. Biden added. “And we now know nothing, not even a pandemic or an abuse of power, can extinguish that flame.”
Alejandro N. Mayorkas, President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s choice to lead the Department of Homeland Security, will immediately face the challenge of rolling back President Trump’s restrictive immigration policies, while balancing demands from the left for more lenient policies with those of the moderates who see any show of tolerance as an instigator to an uptick in illegal migration.
While Mr. Trump’s approach to legal and illegal immigration has been more extreme than that of several previous administrations, the balancing act is a challenge Mr. Mayorkas has faced before.
“Many have taken great issue with the administration’s removal of individuals who have not qualified for refugee status or asylum status in the United States and our practice of removing those who have not qualified for relief under law,” Mr. Mayorkas said during a 2016 address at Georgetown Law when he was the deputy secretary of the department under former President Barack Obama. “Whether we expand the basis of which we seek to welcome these individuals fleeing for a better life is a question that is answered by thinking of who we want to be as a country.”
Many of the Trump administration’s policies cannot be immediately undone, and Mr. Biden is likely to face an early test of human consequences, as indicators suggest that migration will swell at the southwestern border with Mr. Trump’s pending departure.
In November, border officials apprehended a child crossing the border alone 4,467 times. That is a slight drop from the 4,661 in October, but a stark increase from the 712 recorded in April, when various countries imposed national lockdowns and the Trump administration invoked a public health emergency rule to put new border restrictions in place.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia’s tepid and tardy congratulation to President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Tuesday — took place as Washington grapples with a massive hack of federal domestic and national security agencies attributed to malefactors in Moscow.
Mr. Putin, who has kibitzed frequently with President Trump by phone, waited nearly six weeks to offer his well wishes, and did so by telegram.
“Oh, how nice,” wrote Michael McFaul, President Barack Obama’s ambassador to Russia, on Twitter.
The two developments this week — the discovery of a major cyberattack followed by Mr. Putin’s perfunctory jab at the reset button — defined the expected trajectory of U.S.-Russia relations under Mr. Biden, a longtime Putin skeptic far less warm and welcoming than Mr. Trump.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in early 2014, Then-Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. unsuccessfully pressed President Obama to increase arms sales to Kyiv to make Moscow “pay in blood and money” for its aggression.
In his 2017 memoir, Mr. Biden described a testy meeting with Mr. Putin at the Kremlin in which he wise-cracked, “I’m looking into your eyes. I don’t think you have a soul,” referencing President George W. Bush’s famous claim that Mr. Putin did indeed have one.
On Tuesday, after the Electoral College confirmed Mr. Biden’s victory, the Kremlin ended its wait and announced that Mr. Putin had sent the former vice president a “congratulatory telegram” marking his “victory in the United States presidential election.”
“Vladimir Putin wished the president-elect every success and expressed confidence that Russia and the United States, which bear special responsibility for global security and stability, can, despite their differences, effectively contribute to solving many problems and meeting challenges that the world is facing today,” the Kremlin’s statement said.
Mr. Putin had been one of the last major holdouts among world leaders in sending Mr. Biden the sort of congratulatory message that is routine in international diplomacy, even among adversaries. China congratulated Mr. Biden on Nov. 13, 10 days after Election Day.
President Andrzej Duda of Poland similarly waited until this week to congratulate President-elect Biden.
The Kremlin had said that since Mr. Trump had not conceded, it was waiting for an “official announcement” of the American election result. The delay in recognizing Mr. Biden as president-elect also allowed Russian state media to underline, for its domestic audience, what it cast as the chaos and illegitimacy of American democracy.
But the Kremlin also recognizes that it would need to work with Mr. Biden — not least on nuclear arms control, with a major treaty limiting American and Russian nuclear warhead numbers expiring on Feb. 5. Both Mr. Biden and Mr. Putin have signaled that they would like to extend the treaty, but they will not be able to make it official until after Mr. Biden is inaugurated on Jan. 20.
President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory was affirmed by the Electoral College on Monday, despite President Trump’s relentless promotion of conspiracy theories and attacks on the integrity of the results.
Here are four takeaways on the longer-term effects of Mr. Trump’s refusal to accept the outcome, Mr. Biden’s victory and the future of the democratic process in the United States.
Biden wins. Again.
Mr. Biden defeated Mr. Trump by more than seven million votes, but the election wasn’t fully over until the Electoral College weighed in, and that took place on Monday. The question now is how Republicans who have refused to acknowledge the election outcome will respond to this unsurprising news.
Many, including Senator Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, had argued that the race had simply been called by the news media, and not yet by the Electoral College. Such an argument is now, of course, far more difficult to make, and support for Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the results began to collapse among Senate Republicans Monday evening.
Democracy prevailed, but at a great price.
Democracy is fragile, and built upon public trust. And while the outcome of this year’s race has been affirmed, the acid messaging of Mr. Trump and his allies threatens to weaken the pillars of the institutions that run America’s elections.
“The greatest danger to America is the naïve belief that there is something unique that guarantees America will remain a democratic civil society,” Stuart Stevens, a longtime Republican strategist turned vocal Trump critic, said on Twitter. “Much of a major party has turned against democracy. It’s foolish to believe that doesn’t have consequences.”
There are some dissenters. Representative Paul Mitchell of Michigan, who is retiring and served in House Republican leadership, said on Monday that despite voting for Mr. Trump last month, he was quitting the party for the remainder of his term, turned off by the efforts to overturn the election.
“I believe that raw political considerations, not constitutional or voting integrity concerns, motivate many in party leadership to support the ‘stop the steal’ efforts, which is extremely disappointing to me,” he wrote in an open letter to party leaders.
The system survived the messy 2000 recount and two presidents elected in the 21st century despite them losing the popular vote. The great unknown is the cumulative impact of those past bouts and this year’s further erosion of democratic norms on the next inevitably close and contested election.
We learned what Electoral College meetings actually look like.
One of the many unusual things about this election was that Americans were able to see what is usually a postscript to Election Day. The proceedings were carried by live video streams or even on television, and the country could see the solemnity and ceremony that accompany the process. The appointment of the officers for the day. The distribution of the secret ballots. The wait for the official count.
Republicans are (still) resisting reality.
Inside the Georgia Capitol, while Democratic electors gathered in the State Senate to cast their votes, elsewhere in the Capitol, a group of Republicans gathered for a shadow ceremony, anointing their own slate of pro-Trump electors. David Shafer, the Georgia Republican Party chairman, explained the vote of the nonelectors as a bid to keep Mr. Trump’s legal options open.
The Republican goal posts for when the election will be fully decided keep moving. The latest circled date is Jan. 6, when Congress has its final say on the election. Some Trump allies are organizing a floor challenge to Mr. Biden’s victory.
