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“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed.”

Over the past six weeks since Election Day, President-elect Joe Biden carried about his business while largely ignoring the circus surrounding President Donald Trump’s incessant lies about election fraud and refusal to concede. That changed a bit on Monday.

Speaking hours after the Electoral College officially voted to confirm his victory over Trump, Biden declared victory. He also criticized the president, whom he portrayed as on the wrong side of the struggle for democracy, for refusing to acknowledge the reality of his defeat.

“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed,” Biden said. “We the people voted. Faith in our institutions held. The integrity of our elections remains intact. And so now it is time to turn the page. To unite. To heal.”

Biden noted that he won the same number of electoral votes as Trump did following the 2016 election — 306, though Trump ultimately received only 304 electoral votes because of two faithless electors — and said, “At the time, President Trump called his Electoral College tally a landslide. By his own standards, these numbers represented a clear victory then, and I respectfully suggest they do so now.”

Biden: "306 electoral votes is the same number that Trump & Pence received when they won in 2016. At the time, Trump called his electoral college tally a landslide. By his own standards, these numbers represented a clear victory then & I respectfully suggest they do so now" pic.twitter.com/StyOFRJoxn

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 15, 2020

At another point, Biden took an indirect shot at Trump, saying “the flame of democracy was lit in this nation a long time ago. And we now know that nothing — not even a pandemic, or an abuse of power — can extinguish that flame.”

Biden addressed the flood of failed lawsuits the Trump campaign has filed since the election and the Supreme Court’s refusal last week to take up a flimsy case that could’ve overturned his victory. He also praised state and local officials on both sides of the aisle for overseeing a fair election while refusing to be “bullied” by Trump.

“In America, when questions are raised about the legitimacy of elections, those questions are resolved through the legal processes. And that’s precisely what happened here,” he said. “All the counts were confirmed ... none of this has stopped baseless claims.”

Later, Biden noted that “respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy,” adding that when Trump won four years ago, “it was my responsibility to announce the tally of the Electoral College votes to the joint session of Congress ... I did my job.”

Biden: "4 years ago, when I was VP, it was my responsibility to announce the tally of the Electoral College votes to the joint session of Congress ... I did my job ... now it's time to turn the page as we've done throughout our history." pic.twitter.com/eCHWQMWxPo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 15, 2020

Although a majority of House Republicans indicated in writing last week that they supported the aforementioned case that could have overturned the election results, Biden extended an olive branch, saying, “I’m convinced we can work together for the good of the nation on many subjects. That is the duty owed to the people, to our Constitution, to our history.” He also thanked the Senate Republicans who have already acknowledged his victory.

Biden, who sounded noticeably hoarse throughout, closed by noting that the joy of his win “is tempered by the pain so many of us are feeling today. Our nation [today] passed a grim milestone: 300,000 deaths due to this Covid virus. My heart goes out to each of you during this dark winter of the pandemic.”

Biden winds down his speech: "We have always set the example to the world for a peaceful transition of power. I know the task before us won't be easy. It is tempered by the pain so many of us are feeling today. Our nation passed a grim milestone. 300,000 deaths due to this virus" pic.twitter.com/hSDGAK6Pkg

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 15, 2020

While the president-elect wants to turn the page from the election, the president continues to toss around lies about it being stolen from him. Stephen Miller, who serves as both a White House official and campaign adviser, indicated where things might be heading during a Fox & Friends appearance earlier Monday when he said that “an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote [for Trump] and we are going to send those results to Congress.”

But that’s just political theater. The fact of the matter is that Biden is president-elect. And as he noted, “Trump was denied no course of action he wanted to take” in challenging the results. As Biden emphasized on Monday, there is no escaping the reality that Biden’s victory was the product of a free and fair election, whether Trump wants to acknowledge it or not.

He started his administration with “alternative facts.” He’s ending it with alternate electors.

President-elect Joe Biden’s win was confirmed yet again Monday, as the 538 members of the Electoral College cast their votes across every state and the District of Columbia — a fact that has led more conservatives to urge President Trump to concede.

There was little drama expected in how the day’s tallying would go; in the end, no elector went against their state’s popular vote.

States and districts accounting for 306 electoral votes have certified wins for Joe Biden — which means Democrats, chosen by state parties, were named the electors for those states. Meanwhile, states and districts with 232 electoral votes certified wins for President Trump and appointed Trump-supporting electors.

Yet the president seems to have other ideas. White House senior adviser Stephen Miller said on Fox Monday that Trump’s team planned to support an “alternate” set of electors in key states Biden won, which Trump is continuing to baselessly dispute.

“As we speak, today, an alternate slate of electors in the contested states is going to vote and we’re going to send those results up to Congress,” Miller said. “This will ensure that all of our legal remedies remain open.”

And Trump’s chosen electors did indeed meet in states including Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan to cast their votes for Trump — though some involved tried to downplay the significance of this move, calling it merely a legal formality.

In fact, it’s a legally frivolous and baseless action. The legitimate and legally recognized electors in states Biden won have had their appointments certified by each state governor, in accordance with the vote totals in each state. The president’s “alternate” electors were acting with no legal authority whatsoever, apparently because Trump doesn’t want to acknowledge the election is over and that he’s lost.

The move is a preview of further shenanigans when Congress meets to count the electoral votes on January 6 — the final constitutional step before the winner is inaugurated. There, Trump allies plan to file challenges to the results in states Biden won. Yet those challenges will fail because Democrats will control the House.

So overall, any “alternate slate of electors” should mainly be understood as a stunt, to deceive Trump’s voters into thinking he still has a chance and keep the grift (and massive fundraising) that accompanies that deception going for another few weeks.

Any alternate electors would have no legal authority

Both before and after the 2020 election, nightmare scenarios were floated that focused on the possibility that multiple slates of electors could be sent from a state to Congress. For instance, in a swing state Biden won with a Republican-controlled legislature, the governor could send a slate of pro-Biden electors, but the legislature could (dubiously try to) send a slate of pro-Trump electors.

But that didn’t pan out. Despite Trump’s efforts to pressure GOP leaders in key states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia, Biden’s wins were certified on schedule — and no state legislature tried to appoint Trump electors instead.

According to Miller, though, Trump’s team is trying to ignore this impediment by having Trump’s chosen electors in states Biden won meet on their own authority and cast their electoral votes for Trump, despite having no actual authority to do so. These electors would effectively just be some people, not the certified electors for states.

Efforts to do this took place in swing states like Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. One would-be Trump elector in Georgia hyped the effort as “taking decisive action.” But another downplayed the effort to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein, saying that the idea was “basically, checking legal boxes, if something should come of the lawsuits.”

The Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania chair also argued in a statement that “this was in no way an effort to contest the will of the Pennsylvania voters,” and that their elector-naming was merely “conditional” and meant to “preserve any legal claims that may be presented going forward.” (They pointed toward Hawaii’s close presidential election in 1960 as a precedent, though it has little relevance for the current situation.)

Miller optimistically suggested three main ways this alternate slate of electors could end up becoming the real electors.

First, he said, the courts could send their votes to Congress, “if we win these cases.” This seems quite unlikely, as Trump and his allies’ efforts to overturn the results of states in the courts have been uniformly rejected so far, at both the state court and US Supreme Court levels.

Second, Miller said, “the state legislatures in Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, can do the same,” suggesting Trump will keep trying to pressure GOP-controlled state legislatures to somehow reject the electors that will, after today, already have been approved in their states, and replace them with the president’s. Legislature leaders in these states have refused to do this thus far, often claiming they have no such authority to do so under state law.

Third, Miller said they plan to “send those results up to Congress,” and that “Congress has that opportunity as well to do the right thing.” This effort is also doomed, and we’ll explore why that is below.

This sets up more stunts for when Congress counts the electoral votes in January

On January 6, 2021, a joint session of the newly elected Congress will convene to count the votes cast by the Electoral College. This congressional count is the final formal step in making the presidential election results official before the inauguration itself.

The 12th Amendment to the Constitution says that Congress — led by Vice President Mike Pence, in his role as president of the Senate — is supposed to “open all the certificates” of electoral votes sent by states, and “the votes shall then be counted.”

Eventually, Congress became an arena for resolving disputes over the presidential election’s outcome — particularly in the infamously disputed election of 1876. Subsequently, Congress passed the Electoral Count Act to try to shift more responsibility for settling results to the states, but it also set up a procedure by which members of Congress could challenge results in particular states.

Under this process, if at least one House member and one senator object to the results in any state, each chamber will hold a vote on the matter. For the objection to succeed, both the House and the Senate must vote in favor of it. Otherwise, it fails. (And since Democrats will control the new House, any objection to Biden’s win will surely fail in that chamber. Failure in the Senate is also a strong possibility, since several Republican senators have acknowledged that Biden won.)

The nightmare scenarios for a post-election dispute — like this one written last year by Ned Foley, a law professor at Ohio State University — often focused on how Congress might settle things if they got two slates of electors from a contested state, one certified by the governor and one by the state legislature. Which elector slate would be the “default” one? Would Pence end up making the final call? If he did so, and Congress was divided, who could stop him? There are various messy possibilities as to how this could play out.

But that’s not the situation that’s unfolding. For the 2020 election, every governor has certified a result, and no state legislature has disputed that result.

So maybe the Trump campaign will try to “send” their own results up to Congress somehow, as Miller claimed. But under the Electoral Count Act (which deals with the scenario where “more than one return or paper purporting to be a return from a State shall have been received”), it’s difficult to see how the alternate results could possibly be counted, unless Republicans decide to unilaterally declare they won’t follow this provision of the Electoral Count Act because they believe it to be unconstitutional, or something.

The person who will truly be in an awkward position on January 6 is Vice President Pence. He’s of course not the first veep to preside over the tense election of the opposing party’s candidate — Vice President Biden did it for Trump in 2016, and Vice President Al Gore did it for his own opponent in 2000.

But both Hillary Clinton and Gore had conceded by then. If Trump hasn’t yet conceded, he and his allies will likely try to pressure Pence to somehow interfere with the congressional counting process, even though Pence’s role is widely understood as mostly ceremonial.

He will depart December 23.

Attorney General Bill Barr is resigning, President Donald Trump announced on Twitter Monday evening. His last day will be December 23.

Barr has been one of Trump’s most loyal allies, most notably for his outspoken criticism of the 2016 Russia investigation and for going as far as launching an investigation into the origins of that probe.

But Barr’s relationship with the president had become strained in recent weeks over the attorney general’s refusal to back Trump’s claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. Barr, contradicting Trump, said earlier this month that there was no evidence of “fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” Barr had reportedly told associates in recent weeks that he was considering stepping down from his post before Inauguration Day.

Whether this was fully Barr’s decision is not totally clear, given that the attorney general had clearly fallen out of favor with the president. Last week, Trump retweeted a post that called for Barr to be fired. Trump also added his own commentary: “A big disappointment!”

On Monday, before the news of Barr’s departure had been announced, a reporter asked White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany about the friction between Barr and Trump. “Yeah, you know there’s a clear frustration,” she responded. “I’ll leave it at that.”

Trump, in announcing Barr’s resignation Monday evening, said in a tweet: “Our relationship has been a very good one, he has done an outstanding job!”

Trump added: “As per letter, Bill will be leaving just before Christmas to spend the holidays with his family... Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all!”

...Deputy Attorney General Jeff Rosen, an outstanding person, will become Acting Attorney General. Highly respected Richard Donoghue will be taking over the duties of Deputy Attorney General. Thank you to all! pic.twitter.com/V5sqOJT9PM

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 14, 2020

Trump’s tweet included Barr’s resignation letter — and it’s really quite something, as far as resignation letters go.

In it, Barr praises the president effusively, saying that he is “greatly honored that you called on me to serve your Administration and the American people once again as Attorney General.”

“I am proud to have played a role in the many successes and unprecedented achievements you have delivered for the American people,” Barr writes. He continues:

Your record is all the more historic because you accomplished it in the face of relentless, implacable resistance. Your 2016 victory speech in which you reached out to your opponents and called for working together for the benefit of the American people was immediately met by a partisan onslaught against you in which no tactic, no matter how abusive and deceitful, was out of bounds. The nadir of this campaign was the effort to cripple, if not oust, your Administration with frenzied and baseless accusations of collusion with Russia.

This is a truly remarkable statement, given that Barr was tasked with overseeing the conclusion of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

Barr has made no secret of his distaste for the Russia probe, and he made controversial moves that critics say undercut Mueller’s work, from misleadingly framing Mueller’s findings in an early summary to questionable interventions in the cases of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn and Trump associate Roger Stone, both of whom were charged in the special counsel’s investigation. (Trump later commuted Stone’s sentence, and he recently pardoned Flynn.)

Barr also tapped a US federal prosecutor, John Durham, to launch an inquiry into the origins of the 2016 Russia investigation. Barr has since named Durham as special counsel, thereby allowing Durham to continue his work under a Biden presidency.

Barr helped Trump advance his agenda in other ways, too, including on immigration and on punishing protesters and cities for disorder during this summer’s protests.

But all of that might not have been enough to keep Barr in Trump’s good graces once Barr decided not to back Trump’s disproven claims that the election was stolen from him. Instead, Barr is the latest official departing or forced out with just weeks left in Trump’s presidency.

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