Supreme Court Denies Trump's Overturn Attempt

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

Text of the ruling

[homersapien 11,409]

The important thing is that we all remember the names of the Republicans who signed on to the suit.

(This time they went a little beyond their refusal to simply respond to the WAPO poll, right Gumps?)

[DKW 86 7,437]

You know, we all LLLOOONNNGGG ago gave up on you not being a partisan prick.

Why dont we remember the "Conservative Justices" that rejected this on 100% Solid Legal Grounds and disregarded their own partisan thinking?

I submit that that act is the thing to remember here. 

 

 

not what some partisan half-ass pseudo-intellectual thinks...

[Brad_ATX 13,654]

I submit that both things are worth remembering.

It absolutely should be noted that a conservative court summarily dismissed this.

It also absolutely should be remembered that a bunch of elected Republicans put their name on a legal attempt to overturn a landslide election.

[Grumps 3,704]

This is exactly what most people expected. Let the legal system play out. I don't understand why people want to deny the right of people to contest potentially illegal or unconstitutional action. Trump has been a whiny crybaby since the election, but he has a RIGHT to be a whiny crybaby. Let him whine and cry and file lawsuits. It won't change anything except that we can continue to be a nation of laws as opposed to a nation who demands that all follow the will of those who scream the loudest.

Justice is being served. Let it play out.

As far as I am concerned, it matters NONE that the attempt was to overturn a "landslide" election. What matters is that we follow the law and let the legal process play out. Good job America!

[homersapien 11,409]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/republican-party-abandoning-democracy/617359/

Instead of Republican officeholders waiting out Trump’s postelection tantrum, he is waiting them out, and slowly bringing the party around to his side. In this way, Trump is ending his presidency just the way he won it: by correctly recognizing what Republican voters want and giving it to them, and gradually forcing the party’s purported leaders to follow along.

This embrace of the president’s attempt to overturn the results of the election is both shocking and horrifying. As Trump’s fraud claims and legal cases have steadily failed, the arguments he has pursued have become more outlandish and absurd, and they have also become more disturbing. Many Republican voters agree, and in refusing to stand up to him and them, Republican officials have gone from coddling a sore loser to effectively abandoning democracy.

Yesterday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit in the Supreme Court asking the justices to toss out the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (The Court has “original jurisdiction” over cases between states, acting like a trial court.) Trump announced that he would intervene in the case on his own behalf. “This is the big one,” he tweeted.

Legal experts have heaped disdain on the case. Rick Hasen labels it “dangerous garbage, but garbage.” The case complains that the states changed their election rules late in the process, but that is true of many states that sought to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. These states just happen to have been called late and to have voted for Joe Biden.

The case is the apotheosis of Trump’s shifting legal strategies. Initially, he had sought to have some ballots disqualified, alleging fraud. These claims were dangerous; there is no evidence of widespread fraud, disenfranchising legal voters is unjust, and such attacks can undermine faith in future elections. As this strategy failed, undone by the lack of evidence, Trump and his allies began seeking to toss wholesale the results that don’t help him. First, the president tried to pressure Republican elected officials, including legislative leaders in Michigan and Pennsylvania and Georgia’s governor and secretary of state, to throw out results. When they refused, the effort moved on to the Supreme Court’s nine unelected justices.

That Paxton would file such a lawsuit isn’t a huge surprise. He is a hard conservative who has often used the court system to dubious ends. Perhaps more to the point (as Senator Ben Sasse, the Nebraska Republican, notes), Paxton is also facing some serious legal problems, and would benefit from a pardon before Trump leaves offices.

More surprising is that 17 Republican state attorneys general filed a brief in support of Paxton’s suit, a sizable majority of the top Republican law-enforcement officials in the country. Then 106 Republican members of the U.S. House did the same. When Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, a Republican, called the suit “constitutionally, legally and factually wrong,” he received a threatening phone call from Trump. Meanwhile, the state’s two GOP U.S. senators, both of whom are competing in a January runoff, endorsed the lawsuit that seeks to throw out the vote in Georgia. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas has reportedly agreed to Trump’s request that he argue the case if the justices take it up.

Many of these people may be going along not in spite of the fact that the suit is preposterous, but because it is: The stakes appear lower if they don’t have to worry about the Court actually taking them seriously. That is a dangerous calculation. The case seems to face very, very long odds, though it takes only five members of the Court to turn the preposterous into precedent. Even if the case fails, though, these Republicans have set a course of being willing to oppose the results of elections simply because they don’t like them. That is by definition antidemocratic.

The attorneys general, Cruz, and the Georgia senators are in ample (though not good) company. One might have expected that as more time passed since the election, and more of Trump’s lawsuits were tossed out of court, more Republican officeholders would start to acknowledge reality. Some GOP members of Congress have done so, but not many. State and local elections officials, especially in Georgia, have pushed back bravely against Trump. But in Washington, D.C., Sasse and his Senate colleague Mitt Romney, who have been critical of Trump’s antidemocratic actions, remain lonely outliers.

Other Republican officials have offered a range of cop-outs. Some acknowledge that Biden will be the next president but don’t condemn the current president’s actions. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has referred to a Biden administration but won’t call Biden the president-elect. When South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem seemed to acknowledge reality, her spokesperson contacted a local outlet to insist that, no, Noem was still living in a fantasyland, a remarkable act even in this golden age of self-debasement.

GOP leaders will have another chance to do the right thing when the Electoral College meets and elects Biden on December 14, and some are supposedly ready, but the past few years don’t offer much reason for hope. During the 2016 GOP primary, Republican elders fretted over Trump’s coarseness, his open bigotry, and some of his policies, especially his skepticism of free trade. But they mostly decided to humor him, assuming that he wouldn’t win the nomination (or the presidency) but that he was good for ginning up the base. Instead, he ended up owning the party. Over and over, from Access Hollywood to extorting Ukraine, Republican officeholders have first criticized Trump’s actions, then sought to ignore them, and finally ended up defending them.

The customary explanation for Republican timidity is that officeholders are afraid of Trump. Though sometimes intended as apology, this does not say much for GOP leaders. It may miss what is really happening, though. Trump shapes but also reflects the views of Republican voters. A new Quinnipiac poll finds that 70 percent of Republican voters believe Biden’s win was illegitimate. When The New York Times asked Kim Ward, the Republican leader in the Pennsylvania Senate, whether she would have signed a letter declaring there was fraud in the state’s election, she replied, “If I would say to you, ‘I don’t want to do it,’” referring to signing the letter, “I’d get my house bombed tonight.”

Elected officials ought to be responsive to constituents—within reason. But the disposition of the election has long since passed the bounds of reason. Republican officials aren’t afraid of Trump so much as they are afraid of Republican voters. And Republican voters appear to be afraid of democracy.