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“The Supreme Court on Friday rebuffed Texas’ request to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in four states – Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – that provided key electoral votes to President-elect Joe Biden. In a brief order issued just before 6:30 p.m., the justices explained that Texas lacked a legal right to sue, known as standing, and did not have a legal interest in how other states carried out their elections. As a result, the court rejected Texas’ lawsuit without considering the merits of the state’s case…
“Justice Samuel Alito filed a short statement regarding the court’s disposition of the case that was joined by Justice Clarence Thomas. Alito and Thomas have previously argued that the Supreme Court must take up any case that properly invokes its original jurisdiction, and Alito repeated that belief here. Therefore, Alito explained, he would allow Texas to file its lawsuit, but he ‘would not grant other relief.’” SCOTUSblog
The right agrees with the ruling and argues that it is now time for Trump to concede.
“This was the right (and very predictable) decision. Texas may have brought up legitimate concerns about mail-in voting and the way in which Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia conducted their elections. But that does not mean Texas can then take those states to court. The proper forum for this dispute is the political process at both the state and federal levels because that is where election laws are decided…
“The Supreme Court upheld two important principles: federalism and the separation of powers. Federalism, because this rejection affirmed that states have the right to conduct their elections as they see fit without the interference of others. The separation of powers, because its denial made certain that the judiciary will not wade into the thick of electoral politics unless absolutely necessary. In a normal era, one would expect Republicans to be pleased that the Supreme Court is sticking to its constitutional role.”
Kaylee McGhee White, Washington Examiner
“The suit rehearses arguments against the validity of the outcomes in the four battleground states that have been extensively litigated and rejected in other courts. Texas, for instance, makes much of the Pennsylvania secretary of state issuing guidance allowing counties to give voters the opportunity to ‘cure’ faulty absentee ballots and the Pennsylvania supreme court permitting late-arriving absentee ballots to count, but there is no reason to believe either of these jerry-rigged measures involved enough votes to call into question Biden’s 80,000-vote margin in the state…
“Texas argues that such acts contravened the electors clause of the Constitution that gives state legislatures the power to determine the manner of selecting electors. And in some instances, it might be correct. But the answer is not for the Supreme Court, at the urging of one state a month after the election, to reverse the duly certified election results in four other states…
“There is a proper, but limited, role for the federal courts in election cases: They can rein in violations of federal law based on evidence that the violation was large enough to affect the outcome. They do not have a free-floating mandate to oversee state election procedures.”
The Editors, National Review
“Texas filed a totally unworthy lawsuit, which even its own solicitor general (the lawyer who usually represents the state before the Supreme Court) did not endorse. The Supreme Court gave the suit exactly the curt denial it deserved. What remains mystifying is why GOP officials in 18 Republican-leaning states, along with over 100 Republican House members — including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., who would like to be speaker someday — lined up to back an absurd legal theory that, if successful, would have invited blue states, through lawsuits, to dictate how red states govern themselves.”
Andrew McCarthy, Fox News
“This is one more example in which the claims that Mr. Trump would somehow hijack American democracy have been proven false. The President huffs and tweets but he never blows the country’s core institutions down. The checks and balances have held. The spectacle of so many House Republicans endorsing the Texas suit is depressing, and they aren’t profiles in courage. But their critics would have more credibility if they hadn’t promoted the Russia ‘collusion’ lies for four years and indulged Hillary Clinton’s claims to this day that the Russians elected Mr. Trump in 2016…
“There’s a time to fight, and a time to concede. Mr. Trump has had his innumerable days in court and lost. He would do far better now to tout his accomplishments in office, which are many, and accept his not so horrible fate as one of 45 former American Presidents.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“President Trump's defenders have pointed out many times, correctly, that he has every right to pursue legal challenges to election results in states he lost narrowly. Going to court is not staging a coup or plotting to destroy democracy, as some of Trump's adversaries have charged. It is the way people, even the president of the United States, pursue claims in the system. So, even though many of the cases brought by Trump and his allies have been far-fetched, and he has lost nearly all of them, there was no great harm in bringing them. But the time has come to end it…
“That's not to say Republicans have not uncovered serious problems with the way some states conducted their elections. To take one example, as the Trump legal team has pointed out, the actions of ballot counters at the State Farm Arena in Fulton County, Georgia, on election night are suspicious and need investigation. The official explanation of events has changed, and there should be a trustworthy accounting of what happened. There are questionable events in other states that need to be pursued as well…
“Perhaps a conservative philanthropist could endow an Institute for the Study of the 2020 Election… [But Trump] can no longer sustain challenges to [the] verdict. It's time to move on.”
Byron York, Washington Examiner
The left applauds the ruling and condemns Republican politicians who supported the lawsuit.
The left applauds the ruling and condemns Republican politicians who supported the lawsuit.
“In a remarkable show of near-unanimity across the nation’s judiciary, at least 86 judges — ranging from jurists serving at the lowest levels of state court systems to members of the United States Supreme Court — rejected at least one post-election lawsuit filed by Trump or his supporters…
“As of Friday, more than 50 of their cases had failed or been tossed out of court. Just one minor suit — which shortened the period of time in which Pennsylvania voters could fix errors on certain mail ballots — was successful. Judges consistently found there was no substantive evidence to support claims of fraud and irregularities — that Biden’s votes were, in fact, legal votes.”
Rosalind S. Helderman and Elise Viebeck, Washington Post
“The premise of [the Texas] lawsuit was completely preposterous — arguing in effect that states should not be allowed to set their own election rules if that means more Democrats can vote — and provides no evidence whatsoever for false allegations of tens of thousands of instances of voter fraud. Indeed, several of the representatives who support the lawsuit were themselves just elected by the very votes they now say are fraudulent. The proposed remedy — having Republican-dominated legislatures in only the four states that gave Biden his margin of victory select Trump electors — would be straight-up election theft.”
Ryan Cooper, The Week
“Mr. Paxton’s filing repeatedly cites an analysis by an economist in California that statisticians have said is nonsensical. Mr. Biden’s chances of winning the four battleground states in question, the analysis says, were ‘less than one in a quadrillion.’ The economist, Charles J. Cicchetti, who donated to Mr. Trump’s campaign in 2016, arrived at the minuscule probability by purporting to use the results of the 2016 election as a backstop. His flawed reasoning was this: If Mr. Biden had received the same number of votes as Hillary Clinton did in 2016, he wrote, a victory would have been all but impossible. But Mr. Biden, of course, did not receive the same number of votes as Mrs. Clinton; he received over 15 million more.”
Jeremy W. Peters, David Montgomery, Linda Qiu and Adam Liptak, New York Times
“The Bulwark reported this week that far-right websites have been posting addresses and other personal information about Republican elected officials in Georgia, superimposing target crosshairs over images of their faces… Armed protesters have gathered outside the home of the Michigan secretary of state…
“The New York Times reported this week that the chair of the Wisconsin Elections Commission has said that ‘people on Twitter have posted photographs of my house.’ Another tweet mentioned her children and threatened ‘I've heard you'll have quite a crowd of patriots showing up at your door.’…This kind of stuff is not a joke. The fantastic lie that has gripped the Republican Party started out with everyone going along with Trump's fantasy and kind of humoring him. But now it's taken a deadly turn.”
Lucian K. Truscott IV, Salon
“It was never enough for Republicans who supported the suit to tell themselves that they could be as ridiculous as they liked, because the Supreme Court wouldn’t go for the argument, anyway. If they didn’t know how much Trump’s efforts had eroded his supporters’ faith in the integrity of the electoral system, they should have realized it from reading the briefs that Texas and Trump filed, which, perversely enough, cited those doubts as a rationale for why the Supreme Court should intervene. ‘The nation needs this Court’s clarity,’ Texas argued—as if the Court should reward them for creating confusion by throwing out electors…
“Trump’s brief made that point even more crassly. ‘The fact that nearly half of the country believes the election was stolen should come as no surprise,’ it said, arguing that, by ruling in Texas’s favor, the Court would allow voters to ‘find solace’ in an election result that excluded ‘illegal votes.’ (All indications are that, by ‘illegal,’ Trump means votes that were not cast for him; actual, specific allegations that there was fraud, backed by evidence, are conspicuously absent from the Texas and Trump briefs.) In short, Trump argued that because he threw mud on the election system’s machinery, the Court was obliged to junk it.”
Amy Davidson Sorkin, New Yorker
“Republicans everywhere had folded to Trump’s fantasies. It took an independent judiciary to shut him down… Friday night’s Supreme Court decision to put an abrupt end to the bizarre Texas lawsuit that sought to overturn the results of this year’s presidential election illustrates the wisdom of giving justices a lifetime appointment — or, at the very least, an appointment so long that the members of the court are unafraid to incur the wrath of a vindictive president who would be king…
“Whatever reform is in the court’s future — and there may not be any, even if Democrats manage to win control of the Senate next month — the justices should retain lengthy enough appointments so that their jobs are secure enough to keep them above politics.”
Teri Kanefield, Washington Post
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