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This party should be committed to democracy above all else, our constitution above all else, not politics, Mitchell said on CNN’s The Lead.
Not to protect the candidate. Not just for raw political power, but for what I feel, and I’m ready.
It is unacceptable for political candidates to treat our electoral system as a third-world country and create distrust of something as fundamental as the sanctity of our voice, Mitchell wrote in his letter, which was mailed on Monday.
Mitchell noted that Republican leaders have collectively stood aside and tolerated unfounded conspiracy theories and stopped flying without defending our electoral process, and the straw that broke the camel’s back for him seems to have been the leadership of the Republican Party and our Republican Conference in the House of Representatives who are actively participating in at least some of those efforts.
Later on Monday he repeated that message and said on CNN that anyone entering politics must be willing to accept winning and losing with a degree of grace or maturity. I did both. Losing is cruel, it’s personal, it hurts, but if you’re not willing to accept it, you shouldn’t be in a position of political leadership.
This country desperately needs them, and unfortunately we haven’t seen them demonstrate as often as we should.
Last week, 126 Republicans in the House of Representatives, including leaders, signed a lawsuit in which the Texas Attorney General wants the U.S. Supreme Court to block all votes in the four states where Biden won – Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – and award the votes to Trump, who also joined the lawsuit. The trial, which was full of lies and described by conservative lawyers as garbage and insanity, was summarily dismissed by the Supreme Court.
Despite the undemocratic efforts of so many of his colleagues, Mitchell was openly critical of the GOP’s various unfounded attacks on the elections and defended voters and the facts.
Oh boy, Mitchell twittered last month, @realDonaldTrump Please, for the sake of our nation, drop these arguments without proof and without factual foundation. #stopoptid.
After Trump had sworn to continue the interview with Fox News, which was aired on Sunday morning, Mitchell twittered: Courts have repeatedly heard evidence presented as fraud and found it to be unfounded.
The continuation of this circus is just… so unhealthy… so unproductive… so narcissistic… what’s wrong with our country?
Voters will meet on Monday to formally elect the president and vice-president, but the results of the election have been known for weeks: Biden won 306 electoral votes on Trump’s 232. Biden became the first presidential candidate to receive more than 80 million votes, and the difference between the total number of votes cast for him and the other candidates is more than 7 million.
Mitchell’s departure from the GOP highlights tensions within the party about how to react if Trump does not give in after the electoral college vote. While a growing number of Republican senators are willing to publicly acknowledge Biden’s victory, many Capitol Republicans are still on the side of Trump or completely ignoring his daily conspiracy theories.
And the president’s strongest supporters urge him to fight this loss by the end of January.
It is not uncommon for the strongest supporters of a losing candidate to present their case to the House of Representatives – that is what happened after the presidential elections of 2016, 2004 and 2000. But it is unusual for a losing candidate to spend a week running a public campaign aimed at sowing discord and mistrust in the Democratic Column, which Trump has done ruthlessly since his defeat.
Mitchell, one of the richest members of Congress and a member of the Republican Conservative Party, was elected to the House of Representatives in 2016. He voted for Trump this year and earlier this year. He used to call the president publicly, but politically at least he was a big supporter of Trump and voted with him 95% of the time, as he indicated in his letter to the President of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, a colleague from Michigan and the leader of the minority house, Kevin McCarthy.
The congressman from the 10th district of Michigan. District has included a withdrawal to McDaniel in his letter, suggesting that it knows more, especially with regard to the wild accusations in Wolverine.
Biden won Michigan with more than 154,000 votes, helping to rebuild the blue wall of the Great Lakes, allowing Trump to win four years ago.
The GOP’s efforts focused on lawlessness in Wayne County – the largest in the state – which is disproportionately black and contains Detroit. But Mitchell writes to McDaniel that President Trump lost Michigan not because of Wayne County, but rather because of declining support in areas like Kent and Oakland counties, two former Republican strongholds. In the 2020 elections, President Trump lost 154,000 votes in Michigan, compared to 10,700 in 2016.
Mitchell, who was elected to the House of Representatives for a second term, announced in July 2019 that he would not seek a third term. Earlier this month, he tweeted about the president’s racist attacks on progressive members of the Democratic Congress, mistakenly assuming they were not Native American citizens.
@realDonaldTrump we must be better than such remarks. I share political frustrations with some members of the other party, but these remarks are unworthy of the leadership, he said.
Commenting on Monday’s decision, Mitchell acknowledges that he is likely to be attacked from both left and right.
In my opinion, the extremes on both sides are driving their parties and this country off a cliff. Most Americans are in the middle. Most Americans want solutions to problems – they want us to solve them and don’t see who politically can get what they want. He doesn’t understand who can seize political power, whatever it takes, and actually do something to solve the problem for the American people, he said.
And frankly, we haven’t done enough…. hasn’t sufficiently met the last two conditions. And this election only confirms to me that this is about power, which is frankly disgusting and demoralizing.
Paul LeBlanc of CNN contributed to this report.
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