Supreme Court won’t fast-track Trump challenges to election results

By Robert Barnes,

As expected, the Supreme Court refused Monday to fast-track a batch of challenges to the presidential election filed by President Trump and his allies.

The rejections came without comment or noted dissent and were formal notifications of what already had become clear. Some of the petitions asking for the court to move quickly were filed in early December, and the court had not even called for responses from officials in the states where the results were challenged.

[Supreme Court rejects bid by Trump and Texas to overturn election results]

President-elect Joe Biden will be sworn in Jan. 20, and the cases presumably will become moot after that.

Among the cases the court declined to expedite were Trump v. Biden and Trump v. Boockvar, which challenged the results in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, respectively. Other cases filed by Trump allies objected to the outcomes in Michigan and Georgia.

The Supreme Court has uniformly rejected challenges to the election results.

On Dec. 11, it dismissed a bid by Trump and the state of Texas to overturn the results in those four battleground states won by Biden, blocking the president’s legal path to reverse his reelection loss.

The court’s unsigned order was short, and it denied Texas’s request to sue the states over how they conducted their elections. Texas has not shown it has a legal interest “in the manner in which another state conducts its elections,” the order said. It dismissed all pending motions about the case.

While Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has drawn the ire of the right for the rejection, no justice on the court said they would have granted Texas the remedy it sought, which was to disallow the electors certified by the states.

Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas said they did not think the court had the authority to simply reject a state’s filing and not consider the issue, but both said they were not prepared to grant the relief Texas sought.

Earlier that week, the court without noted dissent had rejected a similar request from Republicans in Pennsylvania. Conservatives hold a ­6-to-3 majority on the court, and Trump has nominated three of the justices.

[Supreme Court denies bid to challenge Pennsylvania results]

He said after the decisions that the Supreme Court “really let us down,” and has expanded his criticism of the justices since then.

The court has taken no action on whether to take up a case from Pennsylvania concerning the ability of state courts and officials to alter voting procedures put in place by the state legislature. It concerns increasing the time for the state to count mail-in ballots, but the number of those votes is too small to affect the outcome of the results there.

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