President Donald Trump’s campaign filed a notice appealing the dismissal of a federal lawsuit that aimed to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying its election results unless the state invalidated tens of thousands of mail-in ballots.
The campaign’s presentation was expected Sunday before the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit in Philadelphia.
Trump’s attorney, Rudy Giuliani, has said the case should be decided by the United States Supreme Court, which has a conservative 6-3 majority. The measure is unlikely to prevent Pennsylvania from certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the state as early as Monday. Trump has said his goal is to “decertify” the state’s results one way or another.
On Saturday, US District Judge Matthew Brann in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, did not mince words in dismissing the case. He compared the lawsuit to “Frankenstein’s monster” because it had been “randomly stitched” and lacked evidence.
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, much less of all voters in its sixth most populous state,” wrote Brann, known as a conservative Republican.
The dismissal of the Pennsylvania case was Trump’s highest-profile defeat in the courtroom since the Nov.3 election. Lawsuits brought by the campaign and its Republican allies failed in Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona as justices refused to cast millions of votes based on claims linked to a vast and implausible conspiracy theory about corrupt Democratic poll workers. .
Supervision issues
Giuliani personally argued against Pennsylvania’s motion to dismiss before Brann on Tuesday. The former New York City mayor accused Democrats of working together in swing states, especially urban areas, to steal Trump’s election through a variety of methods, including allowing voters to correct mistakes on their ballots. elections by mail and counting votes “in secret” without the proper supervision of campaign observers who stayed too far away.
In its legal filings, the campaign made a narrower case, arguing that voters in Republican-leaning counties were denied the same protection under the United States Constitution because Democratic-leaning counties were more permissive in allowing voters “cure” the defects of the ballot. The campaign sought to have at least 70,000 mail ballots discarded as improperly curated.
Brann ruled that the Trump campaign had no standing to sue and had failed to file a valid claim for equal protection as state law did not prohibit Pennsylvania counties from allowing voters to correct minor errors on the ballot.
“It’s not law, it’s theater, and it’s not very good theater,” Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe, a frequent critic of Trump, said in a telephone interview.
‘Dangerous and harmful’
“It is a dangerous and damaging theater because it undermines the confidence of millions of people in our electoral system and legal system” so that the president “will jump out of court and make outlandish claims,” he said.
Tribe also said it does not believe the Supreme Court will overturn Brann’s decision, even if it agreed to hear the case.
The campaign appeal will be randomly assigned to a panel of three of the Third Circuit’s 14 justices, eight of whom were appointed by Republican presidents, including three by Trump; six were appointed by the Democrats.
Trump has remained defiant even as he faces mounting pressure from members of his own party to admit defeat in the US election that Biden won by 6 million votes. Giuliani and other Trump attorneys have said there are multiple “paths to victory,” even outside of the court system. Republican state lawmakers are also being pressured to ignore the popular vote and assign their constituents to Trump when the Electoral College meets Dec. 14.
Chris Christie, a former Republican governor of New Jersey and typically Trump ally, said Sunday that the conduct of the president’s legal team had been “outrageous” and a “national disgrace.”
“They allege fraud outside of the courtroom, but when they enter the courtroom, they are not alleging fraud or arguing fraud,” Christie said on ABC’s “This Week.” “You have the obligation to present the evidence. The evidence has not been presented. “
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