The U.S. Supreme Court gave the final straw on Friday to the efforts of Donald Trump and his Republican allies to overturn the result of the Nov. 3 presidential election. Joe Biden won by more than seven million votes.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton – loyal to Trump – filed a lawsuit not to count the results of the polls in four decisive states in which the president lost: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Instead, he asked each state’s legislature – controlled by Republicans – to elect their members of the Electoral College, the delegates who elect the president of the United States.
It was the latest attack by Trump and his allies who defended “mass fraud” and “electoral theft” without providing consistent evidence. Before this, there was pressure on the authorities of the ruling states to avoid certification of the results, attempts to let the state legislative assemblies bypass popular will and send the voters to elect presidents themselves, and a multitude of demands.
The legal system, including several state courts, has urgently rejected these legal actions in 50 cases. Also, the Supreme Court itself, this week, opposed the intention to certify the results in Pennsylvania, which gave Biden the winner.
The Texas trial became an exercise in loyalty to the leader. Trump spent days asking judges and Republicans for “wisdom and courage” to join his offensive.
It was supported by prosecutors from 18 Republican states and 126 Republican deputies in the House of Representatives. Yesterday, before the Supreme Court decision, Trump described the lawsuit as “the big one” among his many legal offensives.
Conservative majority
The Supreme Court dismissed it with a stroke of the pen, with a brief letter saying simply that “Texas has shown no legally recognizable interest in the way another state organizes its elections.” The Supreme Court has a conservative majority, with three judges elected by Democratic presidents and six elected by Republican presidents. Three of them were nominated by Trump himself, the president who has received the most judges to the Supreme Court since Richard Nixon. The consolidation of the conservative majority in the Supreme Court is one of the great legacies Trump will leave and perhaps he hoped it would serve him in his crusade against the election results.
“I think this will end with the Supreme Court,” Trump said in September of the election results, at a time when he was already being charged with massive fraud over the presence of a larger postal vote. It was when Judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the bastion of the Democratic sector, had just passed away, and it was debated whether she should wait for a new president to nominate her deputy. “And I think it is very important that we have nine judges,” he said then to defend an accelerated election process that ended with the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett as Supreme Court Judge a few days before the polls meeting. .
But neither Barrett nor the other two Trump-nominated justices – Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh – were willing to consider the Texas lawsuit, which most legal experts – and the few Republicans who are stubborn with Trump – have no legal base. Two Conservative judges, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, were in favor of accepting the lawsuit, but made it clear that it does not mean they were in favor of Paxton’s claims.
No more options
Trump has suffered overwhelming defeats in his attempt to reverse the election. The chief of cybersecurity for his administration’s Department of Homeland Security, Christopher Krebs, assured that this had been the “safest” election in the country’s history (he was fired shortly afterwards). William Barr, his attorney general and one of his main supporters, had to admit that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread fraud.
Now the Supreme doesn’t change what the recount shows: Biden won the election. Judicial options for Trump are fading, but there remains a strong erosion of the democratic system of his effort, with no basis but to save face and prepare his next political adventure, to reverse popular will.
Shortly after the judicial defeat became known, the president of the Texas Republican Party, Allen West, dropped the idea of secession. “Perhaps the states that follow the law should come together and form a Union that respects the constitution,” he said in a statement.
According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 77% of Republican voters believe there was widespread fraud in the election. It is entirely possible that this will not change with the Supreme Court ruling, as everything indicates that Trump will not stop claiming the election was his. According to The Wall Street Journal, it is proposed that the Justice Department appoint a special investigator for electoral fraud and the charges against Hunter, Biden’s son, under investigation for a tax plot involving China.