The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday pardoned attempts by Donald Trump and his Republican allies to turn around the outcome of the Nov. 3 presidential election. Joe Biden won by a margin of more than seven million votes.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton – loyal to Trump – filed a lawsuit for failing to count the result of the polls in four crucial states in which he lost the president: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He demanded that, instead, the legislative assemblies of each state – controlled by Republicans – elect their members of the Electoral College, the delegates who elect the president of the United States.
It was the latest onslaught by Trump and allies who argue that there was “massive fraud” and “election theft,” without presenting consistent evidence. Prior to that, there was pressure on the authorities of the decisive states to prevent the certification of the results, attempts to get the state legislatures to bypass the popular will and rule on their own the voters who elect the presidents and multitude of demands.
Justice – including several state supreme courts – has insistently dismissed these legal actions in half a hundred cases. Also the Supreme Court itself, this same week, against the intent to certify the results in Pennsylvania, which gave Biden the winner.
The Texas lawsuit became an exercise in loyalty to the leader. Trump has been asking for “wisdom and courage” from judges and Republicans for days to join his offensive.
She was supported by prosecutors from 18 Republican states and 126 Republican deputies from the House of Representatives. Yesterday, before the Supreme Court’s decision, Trump described the lawsuit as “the big one” among his many legal offenses.
conservative majority
The Supreme Court rejected it all at once, in a brief letter in which it simply states that “Texas has not shown a judicially recognizable interest in the way another state holds its elections.” The high court has a conservative majority, with three judges elected by Democratic presidents versus six elected by Republican presidents. Three of them were nominated by Trump himself, the president who most judges have managed to put the Supreme Court on since Richard Nixon. The consolidation of the Conservative majority in the high court is one of the great legacies that Trump will leave and perhaps he hoped this would serve him in his crusade against the election results.
“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump said in September about the election result, at a time when he was already accusing of massive fraud by the presence of more postal votes. That was when Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a bastion in the Democratic sector, had just died, and it was debated whether to wait until there was a new president to nominate her replacement. “And I think it’s very important that we have nine judges,” he said then to defend an expedited election process that ended with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as a Supreme Court judge just days before the ballot appointment.
But neither Barrett nor the other two Trump-nominated judges – Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – were willing to consider the Texas lawsuit, which for most legal experts – and the few Republicans who disagree with Trump – had no basis. legal. Two Conservative judges, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, were in favor of accepting the lawsuit but making it clear that this does not mean they were in favor of Paxton’s claims.
No more options
Trump has suffered overwhelming defeats in his attempt to turn the election around. The head of cybersecurity at his government’s Department of Homeland Security, Christopher Krebs, said it had been the “safest” election in the country’s history (he was fired shortly afterwards). William Barr, his attorney general and one of his main supporters, had to acknowledge that the Justice Department had found no evidence of mass fraud.
Now the Supreme does not change what is clear from the count: Biden won the election. Judicial options are fading for Trump, but there remains strong erosion in the democratic system of his attempt, with no further basis to save face and prepare for his next political adventure, to turn around the popular will.
Shortly after the judicial defeat became known, the president of the Republican party in Texas, Allen West, dropped the idea of secession. “Perhaps the states that follow the law should come together and form a Union that respects the Constitution,” he said in a statement.
According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 77% of Republican voters are convinced there was widespread election fraud. It is very possible that this will not change with the decision of the Supreme Court, because everything indicates that Trump will not stop claiming that the election was his. According to The Wall Street Journal, it is proposed that the Justice Department name a special investigator on election fraud and the charges against Hunter, Biden’s son who is being investigated for a China-related tax plot.