President-Elect Joe Biden and his transition team should be receiving assistance from the federal government in preparing to take over the reigns of power from outgoing President Donald Trump and his disastrous administration, but General Service Administration head Emily Murphy is standing in the way.
It is Murphy’s responsibility to sign documents granting Biden and his team resources and offices so they can effectively govern the nation starting on day one. But she has thus far refused to do so because she is bowing to Trump’s demands instead of recognizing that Biden rightfully won the election.
Back in 2016, former GSA chief Denise Turner Roth signed the same documents the day after Hillary Clinton conceded the race so that Trump’s team could hit the ground running. It was a non-contentious transition despite how Trump had treated former President Barack Obama.
But now Trump is openly sabotaging Biden’s transition, and many of his political appointees, including Murphy, are following suit in direct violation of the Presidential Succession Act.
Murphy claims to be conflicted and is reportedly looking for a new job, but Tufts University Professor Daniel Drezner at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy took Murphy to the woodshed in a column published by the Washington Post for failing to do her duty.
“It would engender more sympathy if she were not bringing it on herself,” Drezner wrote.
Murphy seems to be basing her refusal to accept Biden’s victory on the 2000 Election, when the election was not decided for over a month after Election Day. The problem is that the 2020 Election is completely different because Biden is the clear winner and that won’t change regardless of how many recounts take place.
“The hard-working staff here at Spoiler Alerts has stared at that last sentence for a while now and has come to the conclusion that it makes zero sense,” Drezner explained. “Because let’s be clear: There is no comparison between 2000 and 2020. The better comparison to 2020 is 2016. Trump won a couple of states by a narrow margin, and there was some push for recounts, but the outcome was not really in doubt after Election Day. The only difference between 2016 and 2020 is that the losing candidate in 2016 acted like a mature grown-up.”
Indeed, Trump has behaved like a petulant toddler ever since Election Night when he prematurely declared himself the winner before all of the votes were counted. Once the votes were counted, especially the mail-in ballots that Trump has been demonizing for months, Biden took the lead and never looked back, going on to flip the red states of Arizona and Georgia while taking back Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. He leads by thousands of votes in each one of those states, too many for Trump to overcome unless his inept legal team can somehow convince a judge to invalidate the will of the American people.
Biden is the president-elect whether Murphy likes it or not, and she will be looking for another job anyway since she’s already demonstrated to Biden’s team that she can’t be trusted to head up the GSA. She might as well sign the papers transferring power and resources to Biden. Because every day she fails to do so makes our country less safe.
“Right now, without any apparent logic, Murphy is guaranteeing to make the federal government less efficient, less effective and much less responsive to the American people,” Drezner wrote. “I feel her pain. But she seems oddly unaware that it is self-inflicted.”
It should also be noted that every day Murphy refuses to do her job she is breaking the law, which opens her up to immediate prosecution for obstruction after Biden takes office. If she thinks it’s hard to find a new job now, it will be much harder to find one from behind bars and even harder afterward as the infamy of her decisions follow her around for the rest of her life.
Featured Image: Wikimedia Commons
