The Supreme Court does a quick job with Donald Trump’s ‘great’

It didn’t take long for the Supreme Court to finish off what President Donald Trump called “the big one.”

And since the court on Friday rejected a Texas-based lawsuit to overturn the election results, not even the three appointed by Trump’s superior court were willing to stand up in defense of the president. Trump has clung to unsubstantiated claims of fraud in hopes of reversing the election results that made Democrat Joe Biden the next president and deprived Trump of four more years in the White House.

For all Trump’s predictions that the court and its magistrates would fix things, he and his supporters lacked one basic element: a solid legal argument that could plausibly attract some sympathy in a court now dominated by conservative magistrates.

A Republican senator, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, delivered a painful summary of the court’s reprimand of Trump and his allies. Sasse said that “all Americans who care about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court, including President Trump’s three elections, closed the book on nonsense.” Sasse, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, has been one of the few Republicans willing to criticize Trump.

After a series of legal setbacks in battle states he lost in November, Trump had pinned his hopes on a desperate Supreme Court lawsuit that no Republican attorney with superior court experience would touch. The lawsuit was brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and backed by 18 other Republican attorneys general and 126 Republican members of the House of Representatives. He asked the court to take the unprecedented, even outrageous, move of setting aside the 62 combined electoral votes for Biden in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

The justices, who acted late on Friday, ended the lawsuit as quickly as it began, saying in a worldly three-sentence order that Texas had no right to question how other states conduct their elections.

The justices appeared to be unanimous in concluding that they would not disrupt electoral votes, three days before presidential voters meet to formally elect Biden as president. Trump-nominated justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett said nothing to suggest they disagreed with the outcome, and also kept silent when the court rejected an appeal from Pennsylvania Republicans earlier in the week.

The silence stands in stark contrast to what Trump predicted when he nominated Barrett in September, even before Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg was buried, and urged the Senate to confirm Barrett before Election Day. Then Trump said they would need it to help resolve election disputes that Trump had been saying for months would be fraudulent, without any foundation.

The reverse was clearly on his mind Saturday: He retweeted a story from a conservative commentator, with the three people named by the court by the president in the photo, who said they were “missing in action” and accused the court of having ” ZERO interest “in the merits. of the case while lamenting that his allegations were “We NEVER got the day in court!”

As recently as Tuesday, he had retweeted a photo of Barrett from a supporter who bragged that the Democrats had cheated, but that “the wheels are off” of their plan. “They got caught because we were leading with so much more than they thought possible. The nightly ticket ‘dumps’ went crazy!” Trump tweeted, repeating one of his favorite claims that he had an insurmountable advantage that was second only to fraud.

In fact, in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, ballots were counted later on Election Night and in the days that followed, votes were overwhelmingly sent by mail that tended to favor Biden. The change in vote totals was fully expected, and was widely discussed before the election, because laws in those three states prohibited early processing of ballots sent by mail.

Paxton’s lawsuit, which the state’s top Supreme Court attorney unusually did not sign, cited the change in voting, the widespread use of mailed ballots due to the coronavirus pandemic, and the roles played by the courts and state governors, rather than legislatures. , by changing the rules to accommodate voters amid the pandemic. These and other arguments had been presented and eliminated in state and federal courts since shortly after the November 3 elections.

The Supreme Court is not always willing to intervene in political controversies. Twenty years ago, with a presidential election on the line, the court voted 5-4 to stop a recount ordered by a state court in Florida and effectively decided the election in favor of Republican George W. Bush. That case divided most of the court’s conservatives and four liberals.

In 2000, just 537 votes separated Bush and Democrat Al Gore in Florida, and the winner from that state would become president.

Still, the court was heavily criticized for its decision, especially the warning that the opinion was “limited to current circumstances” and should not be cited as precedent. It hasn’t been since.

This year, the elections did not revolve around the outcome in one state, or even two. Trump would have had to reverse Biden’s victories in at least three of the six battlefield states the president has complained about since the election. Arizona and Nevada are the others, although neither was included in the Texas lawsuit.

Two years ago, Chief Justice John Roberts mocked Trump for derisively using the term “Obama Justice” to complain about a court ruling he did not like. Roberts said then that judges are not in the pocket of the presidents who appoint them, even if they tend to share a judicial philosophy.

With such a weak argument and a huge lawsuit from the court, the Trump-backed lawsuit that the court easily dismissed came nowhere near testing Roberts’s claim.