The people have spoken.
More than 80 million Americans voted for Joe Biden. His win over Donald Trump has been decisive by any objective measure. He has defeated the president by at least four percentage points in the national popular vote, and by a 306-232 margin in the electoral college. Four years ago, the Trump team called that exact count, “a landslide.”
Yet, one woman continues to stubbornly stand in the way of the time-honored transition process.
Trump-appointee Emily W. Murphy, the head the General Services Administration, steadfastly refuses to sign the paperwork that will ascertain Biden’s win. Because of her obstinacy, the Biden team can’t access critical resources.
We know from the 9/11 commission that delaying the transition is a danger to national security. George W. Bush couldn’t start his transition until weeks before his inauguration due to the legal battle over the 2000 election, and it gave Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaeda the opening they needed.
A more immediate and pressing issue is the humanitarian crisis griping the nation. Nearly 255,000 Americans are dead as a result of a lethal virus, and hundreds of thousands more are projected to perish over the next several months.
But it doesn’t look like any of these lives matter to Emily Murphy. She is more concerned about showing fealty to Donald Trump.
This situation is an outrage on so many levels. Without her signature, the Biden transition team can’t coordinate with an uncooperative Trump administration. Pressing issues, like how to distribute tens of millions of doses of a vaccine, demand attention.
But Murphy, it would seem, doesn’t believe the election has been decided, even though every major news organization in the nation called the race 13 days ago. Anyone with half a brain who is reading Trump’s unhinged tweets, or is watching the president’s legal team make fools of themselves, can tell it’s over. Trump has lost and no amount of baseless accusations made by Rudy Giuliani, as his hair dye streams down his face, will change that.
What is Murphy waiting for? Does she really think Trump can successfully coerce 38 faithless electors to flip to his side? Is she waiting for popular votes to be reversed in multiple states? Does she believe the Supreme Court, with one-third of its justices appointed by Trump, will miraculously step in and award the president the election?
Emily Murphy’s conduct these last two weeks has been unpatriotic, undemocratic and unconscionable. She is endangering Americans’ lives. There is no logical reason why this nobody should be holding up the transition and single-handedly overruling the will of the American people.
Two weeks ago, 99.99 percent of Americans had no idea who this person was. Now, her name will be added to the long list of individuals whose personal and professional reputations have been permanently tarnished protecting this president. Murphy has instantly gone from anonymous to notorious, and not in a good way.
Never before in this country has a lowly bureaucrat taken it upon themselves to participate in what amounts to an attack on the bedrock of our society. This nonsense needs to stop, and it needs to stop now.
Donald Trump is on a mission to overturn the result of a free-and-fair election. He is trying to stage a coup, albeit not very competently, and Emily Murphy is complicit.
But here’s the thing.
Come Jan. 20 at noon, Joe Biden will become the rightful President of the United States, and Emily Murphy will be unemployed, no matter what she does. She has the opportunity to do the right thing, to do her job, or go down in infamy as yet another obsequious flunky doing Donald Trump’s criminal bidding.
Sign the papers.