Elections in the US: Trump thought judges were key to winning, judges disagreed

President Donald Trump and his allies say their demands aimed at subverting the 2020 election and reversing his loss to Joe Biden would be substantiated if only judges were allowed to hear the cases.

There is a central flaw in the argument. Justices have heard the cases and been among the harshest critics of the legal arguments put forward by Trump’s legal team, often dismissing them with scathing language of repudiation.

This has been true whether the judge has been appointed by a Democrat or a Republican, including those appointed by Trump himself.

Court rulings that have rejected Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of widespread election fraud have underscored not only the futility of the lame president’s brazen attempt to sabotage the will of the people, but also the role of the courts in verifying his unprecedented efforts to stay in power.

The reprimands have not stopped the litigation. On Tuesday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, alleging they violated the Constitution based on a litany of complaints already rejected. Paxton asked the United States Supreme Court to invalidate his 62 Electoral College votes for Biden, a move that would tip the election toward Trump and would be unprecedented in American history.

On Monday, US District Judge Linda Parker dismissed a lawsuit challenging Michigan’s election results that had been filed two days after the state certified Biden’s results. Parker, appointed by President Barack Obama, said the case contained the phrase: “This ship has sailed.”

“This lawsuit appears to have less to do with achieving the relief that the plaintiffs are seeking … and more to do with the impact of their allegations on people’s faith in the democratic process and their confidence in our government.”

The lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of voters claimed that Biden profited from the fraud, alleging, as in much of the other litigation, a massive conspiracy led by Democrats to change the results. He tried to reverse certification and confiscate all voting machines for inspection: “a relief that is astonishing in scope and astonishing in scope,” the judge said.

“The plaintiffs ask this court to ignore the orderly statutory scheme established to challenge the elections and to ignore the will of millions of voters. This, the court cannot and will not do.

“People have spoken.”

His ruling coincides with others in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada that have a common thread: They all rejected Trump’s claims.

Even in the face of these losses in court, Trump has maintained that, in fact, he won the election. And he has come out of court to appeal directly to lawmakers as his losses mount.

He brought Michigan lawmakers to the White House in a failed attempt to override the vote count, and called on Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to ask him to order a special legislative session to override the state results. Kemp refused. Trump also called Republican Pennsylvania House Speaker Bryan Cutler, who said state law did not give the legislature the power to override the will of the voters.

And Trump tweeted in capital letters: “I WON THE ELECTION, BIG.”

While that’s not the case, what is certain is that Trump is quickly running out of legal leads. Of approximately 50 lawsuits filed, more than 35 have been dropped or dismissed.

The United States Supreme Court was expected to intervene later this week in a Pennsylvania case. Much of the lawsuits highlight a lack of understanding of how elections actually work.

In Georgia, US District Judge Timothy Batten, appointed by President George W. Bush, dismissed a lawsuit filed by attorney Sidney Powell, who was removed from Trump’s legal team a few weeks ago but continues to spread electoral claims. wrong.

The lawsuit alleged widespread fraud aimed at illegally manipulating the vote count in favor of Biden. The lawsuit says the plan was carried out in a number of ways, including ballot filling, votes traded by the electoral system from Trump to Biden, and problems with missing ballots. The judge summarily rejected those claims.

Batten said the lawsuit sought “perhaps the most extraordinary relief ever sought in federal court in connection with an election.”

He said the lawsuit sought to ignore the will of voters in Georgia, which certified Biden’s status again on Monday after three vote recounts.

“They want this court to replace their ruling with the 2.5 million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden and I am not willing to do that,” Batten said.

Trump has appointed more than 150 federal court justices who have been confirmed by the Senate and approved by three justices of the Supreme Court.

Like Trump, his lawyers attempt to blame the judge’s political leanings after his legal arguments are flayed.

When a federal appeals panel in Philadelphia rejected Trump’s election challenge just five days after it arrived in court, Trump’s legal adviser Jenna Ellis called his work the product of “the activist judicial machine in Pennsylvania.”

But Trump appointed the judge who drafted the Nov. 27 opinion.

“Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not reports, decide elections,” Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote as the US Third Circuit panel refused to prevent the state from certifying its results for the Democrat Joe Biden, a lawsuit he called “impressive.” .

The three members of the panel were appointed by Republican presidents.

And they were supporting the decision of a fourth Republican, US District Judge Matthew Brann, a conservative jurist and member of the Federalist Society. Brann had called the campaign’s legal case, which was argued in court by Rudy Giuliani, a “random” jumble that resembled “Frankenstein’s monster.”

In state courts, too, lawsuits have failed. In Arizona on Friday, Judge Randall Warner, an independent appointed in 2007 by former Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano, launched an attempt to undo Biden’s victory.

Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward challenged ballots in the Phoenix metropolitan area that doubled because voters’ previous ballots were damaged or could not be tabulated.

Warner wrote: “There is no evidence that the inaccuracies were intentional or part of a fraudulent scheme. They were errors. And given both the small number of duplicate ballots and the low error rate, the evidence shows no impact on the outcome.”

In Nevada, on Friday, Judge James Todd Russell in Carson City ruled that attorneys for Republican voters did not provide clear or convincing evidence of fraud or illegality.

Nevada judges are not partisan. But Russell’s father was a Republican governor of the state from 1951 to 1959. – AP