Supreme Court rejects GOP challenge to Pa. vote
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused a long-shot request from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the state, delivering an unmistakable rebuke to President Donald Trump in the forum on which he had pinned his hopes.
The Supreme Court’s order was all of one sentence, and there were no noted dissents. But it was nonetheless a major setback for Trump and his allies, who have compiled an essentially unbroken losing streak in courts around the nation. They failed to attract even a whisper of dissent in the court’s first ruling on a challenge to the outcome of the election.
The court now has three justices appointed by Trump, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose rushed confirmation in October was in large part propelled by the hope that she would vote with the president in election disputes. But there was no indication that she or the other Trump appointees were inclined to embrace last-minute arguments based on legal theories that election law scholars said ranged from the merely frivolous to the truly outlandish.
Trump and his Republican allies have lost about 50 challenges to the presidential election in the past five weeks, as judges in at least eight states have repeatedly rejected a litany of unproven claims — that mail-in ballots were improperly sent out, that absentee ballots were counted wrongly, that poll observers were not given proper access to the vote count, and that foreign powers hacked into and manipulated voting machines.
Trump has not come close — even once — to overturning the results of a single state’s election, let alone the results in at least three states that he would need to take a victory from Biden. And around the country, judges have started to express their frustration with his attempts to have the courts substitute their will for those of voters.
Last month, for instance, the federal appeals court in Philadelphia rejected a different challenge to the results in Pennsylvania in scathing terms.
“Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy,” wrote Judge Stephanos Bibas, who was appointed to the court by Trump. “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president,” Bibas wrote. “Ballots, not briefs, decide elections.”
On Friday, Justice Brian Hagedorn of the Wisconsin Supreme Court issued an even stronger statement in an opinion rejecting a Republican attempt to overturn that state’s elections results. “Judicial acquiescence to such entreaties built on so flimsy a foundation would do indelible damage to every future election,” he wrote. “This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread.”
In Tuesday’s case, the justices said they would not block a ruling from Pennsylvania’s highest court that had rejected a challenge to the state’s use of mail ballots Nov. 3.