The U.S. Supreme Court denied a request by Pennsylvania Republicans to block certification of the state’s election results, a near-fatal blow to the Republican Party’s hopes of invalidating Biden’s victory, CNN reported on Tuesday (8) local time.
The Supreme Court’s decision is a devastating defeat for Trump, who has often bragged about the possibility of the Supreme Court overturning his electoral defeat, according to reports. Just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling, Trump directly called on state officials and Supreme Court justices to assist him in overturning the results of the election, and repeatedly and erroneously implied that there had been massive “voter fraud” during the election.
Trump said, “Let’s see if anybody has the guts, whether it’s legislators, whether it’s legislatures, whether it’s Supreme Court justices. Let’s see if they have the guts to do what everyone in this country knows is right.”
The U.S. Supreme Court issued a one-line decision on Tuesday, with none of the nine justices dissenting or commenting, according to reports. The U.S. Supreme Court currently includes six conservative justices and three liberal justices, with the six conservative justices including Trump nominees Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.
The ruling marks the first time that Barrett has taken a position on an election-related dispute.
CNN Supreme Court analyst Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, said the swift action without a public dissent (the justices can choose whether to announce they have a dissent) is a signal that the Supreme Court may not want to get involved in Trump’s ongoing campaign to challenge the outcome of the election. He said, “The fact that the justices issued a one-sentence order with no separate opinion is a strong signal that the Supreme Court intends to avoid election-related controversy and allow the process to continue.”
Under Pennsylvania law, Tuesday is the deadline for the state’s “safe harbor”. That means that when the U.S. Congress counts the electoral votes next January, it must accept the results of the election that were confirmed before the deadline.
In the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s U.S. Supreme Court order, Trump and his allies had been desperately promoting baseless conspiracies that his second term had been “stolen,” according to the report. Last week, Trump declared in Georgia that “we’re still going to win,” even though he has no way to do so.
So far, lawsuits initiated by the Trump campaign are being quickly dismissed or dropped. And as recently as Tuesday, multiple sources told CNN that Trump’s legal team was beginning to realize within itself that the legal effort was coming to an end.
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