In a harsh rebuke, court rejects Pennsylvania election challenge
In a blistering decision, a Philadelphia appeals court ruled Friday that the Trump campaign could not stop — or attempt to reverse — the certification of the voting results in Pennsylvania.
It reprimanded the president’s team by noting that “calling an election unfair does not make it so.”
The 21-page ruling by the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals was a complete repudiation of Trump’s legal effort to halt Pennsylvania’s certification process and was written by a judge that he himself appointed to the bench.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote on behalf of the appeals court in a unanimous decision. “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
Many courts have used scathing language in tossing out a relentless barrage of lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and its supporters since Election Day; but even so, the 3rd Circuit’s ruling was particularly blunt.
“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president,” the court declared at one point.
The court accused the Trump campaign of engaging in “repetitive litigation” and pointed out that the public interest strongly favored “counting every lawful voter’s vote, and not disenfranchising millions of Pennsylvania voters who voted by mail.”
Even though Republican plaintiffs have continued filing lawsuits
challenging the integrity of the elections and Trump has not let up on baselessly questioning the election results on Twitter, judges around the country — some of them appointed by Republicans — have held the line, ruling over and over that the legal actions in several swing states lack both merit and sufficient proof.
The Pennsylvania decision came on a day of baseless tweets from Trump that the election was “a total scam,” that he “won by a lot” and that the news media “refuse to report the real facts.”
Still, when asked Thursday if he would leave the White House if the Electoral College, as expected, formalizes Biden’s victory, the president said: “Certainly I will.”
On Friday, moments after the three-judge panel from the 3rd Circuit handed down its ruling, Jenna Ellis, one of Trump’s lawyers,
wrote on Twitter that she and Rudy Giuliani, who’s leading the president’s legal campaign, planned to appeal to the Supreme Court.
In her Twitter post, Ellis accused “the activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania” of covering up “allegations of massive fraud” despite the fact all three judges on the panel were appointed by Republicans.
But even if the Supreme Court granted the Trump campaign’s proposed request to reverse the 3rd Circuit, it would not get much, given the narrow way in which the appeal was structured.
Trump’s lawyers had asked the appeals court only for permission to file a revised version of its original complaint to Brann. If the Supreme Court abided by the strict terms of the appeal, it could do no more than return the case to Brann’s court for further action.