SUPREME COURT REJECTS TEXAS LAWSUIT SEEKING TO OVERTURN ELECTION RESULTS
Legal action comes as Electoral College set to meet Monday
The Supreme Court on Friday rejected a lawsuit by Texas that had asked the court to throw out the election results in four battleground states that President Donald Trump lost in
November.
The cour t, in a brief unsigned order, said Texas lacked standing to pursue the case, saying it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
The order, coupled with another one Tuesday turning away a similar request from Pennsylvania Republicans, signaled that a conser vative court with three justices appointed by Trump refused to be drawn into the effor t by the president and many prominent members of his party to deny his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, his victory.
It was the latest and most significant setback for Trump in a litigation campaign that has been repeatedly rejected by the courts. Texas’ lawsuit, f iled directly in the Supreme
Court, challenged election procedures in four states: Georg ia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It asked the court to bar those states f rom casting their electoral votes for Biden and to shift the selection of electors to the states’ legislatures. That would have required the justices to throw out millions of votes.
Trump has said he expected to prevail in the Supreme Court, after rushing the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in October in part so that she could hear any election disputes.
“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Trump said of the election a few days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg ’s death in September. “And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”
Legal efforts by Trump and his allies filed in states he lost have been almost universally unsuccessful — one minor win compared with more than 50 losses in state and federal court sat both the trial and appellate level. With the Electoral College set to meet Monday, legal efforts to change the outcome of the election will soon be at an end.
Trump’s campaign did not immediately issue a statement. The president, who at a White House Hanukkah party earlier in the week mentioned the pending court case in his remarks, was scheduled to appear at an another holiday party around the time the ruling came down.
Friday’s order was not quite unanimous. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, issued a brief statement on a technical point. But it was nonetheless a comprehensive rebuke of the legal case. It was plain that the justices had no patience for Texas’ attempt to enlist the court in an effort to tell other states how to run their elections.
The majority ruled that Texas could not file its lawsuit at all. “The state of Texas’ motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing,” the court’s order said.
Alito, taking a slightly different approach, wrote that the cour t was not free immediately to shut down lawsuits f iled by states directly in the cour t. “In my view,” he wrote, “we do not have discretion to deny the f iling of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction.”
But that was as far as those two justices were willing to go. “I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief,” Alito wrote, “and I express no view on any other issue.”
Some of Trump’s advisers had anticipated the cour t might g ive the president and the Republican attorneys general something that could be characterized as supportive, in the form of a dissent or a leng thy commentary. Instead, there was simply the brief statement f rom the two justices.
In the Texas case, the Supreme Court received more than a dozen friend-of-the-court briefs and motions seeking to inter vene, from Trump, from coalitions of liberal and conservative states, from politicians and from scholars.
Among them was a brief filed by more than 100 House Republicans who claimed that the general election — in which most of them were re-elected — had been “riddled with an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities.” More than a dozen Republican state attorneys general expressed similar support Wednesday.
Many legal exper ts dismissed Texas’ suit as a stunt. In invoking the Supreme Cour t’s “orig inal jurisdiction,” Texas asked the justices to act as a trial court to settle a dispute between states, a procedure theoretically possible under the Constitution but employed sparingly, typically i n cases concerning water rights or boundary disputes.
In a series of briefs f iled Thursday, the four states that Texas sought to sue condemned the effort. “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” a brief for Pennsylvania said.
On Friday morning, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, responded with his own brief. “Whatever Pennsylvania’s definition of sedition,” he wrote, “moving this cour t to cure grave threats to Texas’ right of suffrage in the Senate and its citizens’ rights of suffrage in presidential elections upholds the Constitution, which is the very opposite of sedition.”
Claims that the election was tainted by widespread fraud have been disputed by Trump’s own attorney general, William Barr, who said this month that the Justice Department had uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Some 20 states led by Democrats, in a brief suppor ting the four battleground states, urged the Supreme Court “to reject Texas’ last-minute attempt to throw out the results of an election decided by the people and securely overseen and certified by its sister states.”
Georg ia, which Biden won by less than 12,000 votes out of nearly 5 million cast, said in its brief that it had handled its election with integrity and care. “This election cycle,” the brief said, “Georg ia did what the Constitution empowered it to do: it implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by COVID-19, and conf irmed and cer tif ied the election results — again and again and again. Yet Texas has sued Georgia anyway.”
What remains now is a judicial mopping-up exercise. Several suits that the president and his supporters have lost in lower courts are now on appeal, in both the state and federal systems, but the appellate process is quickly running up against a crucial deadline Monday when the Electoral College meets and Biden is expected to prevail in the voting, all but sealing the results of the election.