Throughout the day and into the evening Monday, the Electoral College met and voted. Former Vice President Joe Biden got 306 electoral votes, more than the 270 he needed to win the presidency.
Biden accepted the victory and delivered remarks from Wilmington, Delaware. He noted that his 306 electoral votes are the same as the total won by Donald Trump in 2016.
Probably Biden’s best line is when he noted that “In America, politicians don’t take power. People grant power to them.”
He would do well to remember that, and the fact that more than 73 million Americans and the Constitution provide limits on the power his base wants and expects him to wield. Beyond that, he characterized our form of government as a “democracy,” despite the fact that it is a representative republic. The differences may seem subtle but they are meaningful. Our system was expressly designed to slow government, limit its power, check the ambitions of officeholders, retain and protect the powers and responsibilities of the states, balance the branches of the federal government against one another, and treat the citizen as such, and not as subjects. Our founders experienced the tyranny of kings and knew well the passions aroused during the English Civil War. They designed our system to blunt the ambitious and provide a basis for liberty and, over time, bring about the death of slavery.
Biden lashed out at President Donald Trump’s election challenges, likening them to an “abuse of power.”
Biden’s Democratic Party lost seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, failed so far to capture the Senate, and lost substantial ground in state legislatures around the nation during the 2020 elections. He is threatening to use executive orders to enact sweeping and divisive change on issues from energy to the Second Amendment.
The next election deadline is December 23, 2020, when the states must deliver their certified electoral votes. After that, Congress meets and finally certifies the election on January 6, 2021. At that point, Joe Biden will legally be the president-elect. He is, for all intents and purposes, the president-elect at this point, having received 306 electoral votes.
