Joe Biden speaks after his Electoral College Win…

This from the Hill….

President-elect Joe Biden on Monday blasted President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 vote and called on the nation to move beyond the divisive election season hours after the Electoral College officially certified his victory.

Speaking from near his home in Delaware, Biden noted that he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris had won more votes than any previous presidential ticket in history, calling their victory the “clearest demonstration of the will of the American people.”

Biden noted that he won by about the same Electoral College margin that Trump had in 2016, which the president at the time called a “landslide victory.”

The former vice president said that Trump had made use of every legal avenue available to him in challenging the outcome, and that now it is time to accept the results and move on.

“Respecting the will of the people is at the heart of our democracy even when we find those results hard to accept,” Biden said. “But that’s the obligation of those who have taken on a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.”

“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy prevailed … faith in our institutions held and the integrity of our elections remained intact,” he continued. “And now it’s time to turn the page as we’ve done throughout our history, to unite and to heal.”

Electors from every state gathered at capitols across the country on Monday to affirm Biden’s victory in the Electoral College, moving him one step closer to inauguration next month. Biden will finish with 306 electoral votes, compared to 232 for Trump.

But six weeks after Election Day, Trump has still not conceded and his campaign is working to have the outcome overturned in state and federal courts, where dozens of its lawsuits have so far been rejected or dismissed.

Biden praised the democratic institutions that he said had “proved to be resilient and strong” despite having been “pushed, tested and threatened” by the president and his allies…

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Politico…

“In America, politicians don’t take power — the people grant it to them,” Biden said. “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.”

He decried Republicans’ numerous legal challenges of the election results as an “unprecedented assault on our democracy” and called for solidarity across the partisan divide.

Biden praised election workers who braved a global pandemic and also an unprecedented misinformation campaign claiming the election was rife with fraud. He also denounced threats of violence election workers and officials faced from conspiracy theorists buying into Trump’s claims of a stolen election.

“It is my sincere hope we never again see anyone subjected to the kind of threats and abuse we saw in this election,” Biden said. “It’s simply unconscionable.”

Biden also used the speech to emphasize his public commitment to being “president for all Americans,” not only those who voted for him….

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image Susan Walsh/AP