Republican Rep. Paul Mitchell of Michigan announced that he is quitting the Republican Party on Monday over the GOP’s refusal to admit that President Donald Trump lost the election to President-elect Joe Biden.
What We Know:
- “It is unacceptable for political candidates to treat our election system as though we are a third-world nation and incite distrust of something so basic as the sanctity of our vote,” Mitchell wrote in a blistering letter to the GOP, first reported by CNN. The letter was specifically addressed to Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California.
- The letter came around the same time as the Electoral College voted to confirm Biden’s presidential victory. Mitchell wrote that Trump’s illegitimate, unsupported claims of widespread ballot fraud and the party’s tolerance of those claims were a threat of “long-term harm to our democracy.”
“Further, it is unacceptable for the president to attack the Supreme Court of the United States because its judges, both liberal and conservative, did not rule with his side or that ‘the Court failed him,'” added Mitchell.
- Mitchell admits that he had voted for Trump despite having reservations about what another four years of his presidency would bring. He adds, “The stability and strength of our democracy has been an ongoing concern for me.” Mitchell has been in office since 2017, has voted along the lines of President Trump 95% of the time that he’s been in Congress.
- He continues criticizing the Trump administration in the letter, expressing concerns he’s had about the President’s response to Charlottesville, the anti-immigrant policies, and racist comments of his own colleagues in the House.
Mitchell believes his Republican colleagues have a civic duty to speak out against the Trump administration’s baseless voter fraud claims. Unfortunately, Mitchell is only one of the few lawmakers who have condemned the attacks on democracy committed by the President.
