‘It's a mess’: Trump’s ‘insane’ final plot to flip election result
US president Donald Trump has launched a desperate final bid to overturn his election loss in a plan described as “insane” by legal experts.
Trump hopes to disenfranchise millions of American voters with a long-shot lawsuit in Texas seeking to scrub his defeat by asking the US Supreme Court to throw out the voting results in four states.
Rather stunningly, 17 US states (all but three have Republican governors) threw their support behind the move on Wednesday (local time).
The lawsuit filed by Republican-governed Texas is aimed at Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – states which president-elect Joe Biden managed to flip back to the Democrats on his way to victory last month.
Officials from each of the four states have called the lawsuit a reckless attack on democracy. It was filed directly with the Supreme Court rather than with a lower court as is permitted for certain litigation between states.
Like almost every one of the post-election litigation Trump and his Republican allies have brought in recent weeks, election law experts have said the Texas suit stands little chance of success and lacks legal merit.
If one was to use a sports analogy, it would be tempting to characterise the move as a last-second Hail Mary in the fourth quarter of the championship game. But given the fact Biden’s election win has been certified by the states, this is more like the fans of the losing team quibbling over the rules long after the refs have called the game and everyone has gone home.
Long-shot lawsuit takes aim at voting procedures
Speaking to Reuters, Justin Levitt, an election law professor at Loyola Law School in California, said of the Texas lawsuit: “Both procedurally and substantively, it’s a mess.
“There’s zero chance the court agrees to take the case.”
The Texas suit argues changes made by the four states to voting procedures amid the coronavirus pandemic to expand mail-in voting were unlawful.
My goodness. Here is what Donald Trump is asking SCOTUS to do: nullify the results in those four states and permit the state legislatures to install their own slates of electors, or no electors at all.
I'll add: my goodness. pic.twitter.com/SlRErWGuF8— Steven Mazie (@stevenmazie) December 9, 2020
Texas asked the Supreme Court to immediately block the four states from using the voting results to appoint presidential electors to the Electoral College.
North Carolina actually had the longest extension of the mail-in voting deadline in the country, but is not mentioned in the suit. Trump won the state.
‘Laughable’: Texas lawsuit slammed as ‘absurd’
Republican lawyer George Conway (the husband of Trump’s long-time senior adviser Kellyanne Conway and once on the shortlist for Trump’s pick for Solicitor General) was among the many to blast the litigation.
“The notion that the Supreme Court is going to have a litigation... where states are attacking each others' rules for choosing electors is insane,” he said in an interview on CNN.
“This cake has been baked for a long time, it’s just crazy that all of this is still going on... It’s got to the point of just delusion, a combination of delusion and absolute mendacity.”
Other election law experts have called the lawsuit “absurd” and “laughable”.
Joshua Douglas, an election law professor at the University of Kentucky, said: “The claims and requested relief are laughable. It’s an absurd lawsuit and we shouldn’t treat it as anything other than that.”
Meanwhile Rebecca Green, a professor at William & Mary Law School in Virginia, says the premise of the lawsuit involved a precedent Supreme Court justices would be very unlikely to establish.
“It is so outlandish. It is totally contrary to how our Constitution mandates that elections be run,” she told Reuters.
Writing on Twitter in reference to the suit, Trump said: “This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”
He also tweeted a falsehood, also contained in the suit, that no candidate has won Ohio and Florida but lost the election. Richard Nixon did just that in 1960.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 9, 2020
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by the outgoing president. Before the election, Trump said he expected its outcome to be decided by the Supreme Court.
Biden has amassed 306 electoral votes – far higher than the necessary 270 – compared to Trump’s 232 in the state-by-state Electoral College system. Despite that reality, Trump always said he would strive to use the Supreme Court in the event he was voted out of office.
To date, Trump and his GOP allies have lost at least 50 post-election lawsuits. Only one has not failed, and that related to the moving of a deadline for certain Pennsylvania voters to produce personal identification.
with Reuters
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