The Trump campaign has filed a petition with the U.S. Supreme Court asking for a direct intervention in the election outcome in Pennsylvania, where President-elect Joe Biden scored a win that was crucial to his overall victory. This new petition, in which the Trump campaign asks the Supreme Court to apparently throw out millions of ballots in the state, emerged well after the electoral college cast their votes last week, which in turn took place well after every single state certified its election results as judges around the country roundly rejected the Trump campaign’s claims and efforts. When is the Trump team going to finally abandon this anti-democratic crusade against the election?
In their new filing with the U.S. Supreme Court, the Trump campaign “asks the justices to reverse three decisions from the Pennsylvania Supreme Court easing some of the state’s election rules related to signature verification, Election Day observation and mail-in ballot declarations,” CNBC explains. As in other GOP-backed post-election cases, the campaign alleges that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court inappropriately intervened in election-related policy that should have been left to the state legislature. In reality, the post-Election Day Republican view of the appropriate separation of powers on election policy-related issues would leave little room for state courts to fulfill any oversight functions.
In the Supreme Court filing, Trump campaign attorney John Eastman — who previously gained notoriety for pushing a racist lie that Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is ineligible to serve as president — insisted that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court decisions that the campaign is challenging “resulted in counting approximately 2.6 million mail ballots in violation of the law as enacted by the Pennsylvania Legislature.” There is no legitimate evidence confirming the idea that about 2.6 million votes in the state of Pennsylvania were counted “in violation of the law.”
Nevertheless, Eastman requested swift consideration from the court of the campaign’s anti-democratic filing, asking for the court to require a response from Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Kathy Boockvar by noon on Wednesday. Separately, the court has already rejected a Texas-led lawsuit in which plaintiffs sought the invalidation of the election outcome in four states, including Pennsylvania. In this case, Eastman claimed that “the intense national and worldwide attention on the 2020 Presidential election only foreshadows the disruption that may well follow if the uncertainty and unfairness shrouding this election are allowed to persist,” but in reality, there’s no “uncertainty” and “unfairness” surrounding the election. The results are clear, and President-elect Joe Biden won.
