SCOTUS Rejects GOP Effort To Block Pennsylvania Election Result

Donald Trump’s post-election legal strategy was always to get a case in front of the U.S. Supreme Court in which “his court” would overturn the will of the voters and award him another four years as president. If it had come down to just one state, like Florida in Bush v. Gore in 2000, his evil plan might have worked. But Trump lost in a popular vote and electoral vote landslide.

Nevertheless, Trump and his sycophant supporters went ahead with this anti-democratic legal strategy. Rep. Mike Kelly (R-PA) has been trying to block Pennsylvania’s certification of the vote, including his own congressional race, and filed a request for injunctive relief with  the U.S. Supreme Court.

It was the first request to delay or overturn the results of the presidential election to reach the court.

Justice Samuel Alito gave the parties a deadline of Tuesday, “Safe Harbor” day, to complete all pleadings, and the court would decide based upon the pleadings.

https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1336429227072217091

That’s 50 losses in court in 35 days, and they’re not done losing yet.

CNN reports the Supreme Court denies GOP effort to block certification of Pennsylvania election results:

The Supreme Court denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block certification of Pennsylvania’s election results, delivering a near fatal blow to efforts by Republicans in their longshot bid to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.

“The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied,” the high court’s one-sentence order states.

There were no noted dissents, and it marks the first vote of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in an election-related dispute.

The court acted quickly, just after the final brief in the court was filed, suggesting that the justices wanted to send a decisive message.

“Although we don’t know whether the vote was actually unanimous or why the court refused Rep. Kelly’s emergency request, the fact that the justices issued a one-sentence order with no separate opinions is a powerful sign that the court intends to stay out of election-related disputes, and that it’s going to leave things to the electoral process going forward,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN legal analyst and University of Texas law school professor. “It’s hard to imagine a more quietly resounding rejection of these challenges from this court.”

The Supreme Court’s action is a crushing loss for President Trump who suggested as late as Tuesday that he thought the justices — including three of his nominees — might step in and take his side as he has continually and falsely suggested there was massive voter fraud during the election.

Rep. Mike Kelly had challenged the Commonwealth’s “no-excuse” absentee ballot law that was adopted in October 2019.

The effort faced steep odds at the Supreme Court, particularly because the dispute turned mostly on issues of state law. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court dismissed the challenge last weekend holding that Kelly and others failed to file their challenge in a timely manner.

“It is beyond cavil that petitioners failed to act with due diligence” in presenting the case, the court held noting that they filed the suit more than one year after the enactment of the law at issue.

Tuesday also marked the “safe harbor” deadline for the state under federal law. That means that when Congress tallies the electoral votes in January, it must accept electoral results that were certified before the deadline.

The emergency petition was addressed to Justice Samuel Alito who has jurisdiction over the Pennsylvania courts. He referred it to the whole court.

Lawyers for Kelly argued that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court violated his “right to petition and right to due process, guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, respectively, by closing all avenues of relief for past and future harms.”

But Pennsylvania officials called the petition “fundamentally frivolous.”

“No court has ever issued an order nullifying a governor’s certification of presidential election results,” argued J. Bart Delone, the state’s chief deputy attorney general.

“The loss of public trust in our constitutional order resulting in this kind of judicial power would be incalculable,” he said.

Rick Hasen explains “Anyone who thought that the Supreme Court was going to save Trump in THIS case has no experience with Supreme Court arguments or election law.” Perhaps the Dumbest Argument Ever Made in Emergency Petition to the Supreme Court Appears in Pennsylvania Election Case.

Rick, have you met Ted Cruz?

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the most hated man in the U.S. Senate according to Sen. Lindsey Graham – “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you” – told Trump’s propaganda minister at Fox News, Sean Hannity, on Monday night that “Petitioners legal team asked me whether I’d be willing to argue it before the Supreme Court if the Court grants certiorari. I have agreed and said if the court takes the appeal, I will stand ready to present the oral argument.”

Ted Cruz is calling on the Supreme Court to discount votes from nearly everyone in the state of Pennsylvania who sent a mail-in ballot.

This insane, hopeless petition would be the most antidemocratic action the country has taken in a half century. It should be covered as such. https://t.co/nceveXAFri

— Tim Miller (@Timodc) December 7, 2020

So much for his Ivy League legal education. This was not a writ of certiorari to the court for review on appeal, but merely a request for injunctive relief, for which the court does not hear oral argument. Your trial skills are getting rusty in the Senate, Ted.

Cruz is shamelessly supporting the undermining of American democracy on behalf of the man he once correctly called a “pathological liar,” “utterly amoral,” “a narcissist at a level I don’t think this country’s ever seen” and “a serial philanderer.” Cruz unloads with epic takedown of ‘pathological liar,’ ‘narcissist’ Donald Trump.