https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/us/politics/supreme-court-election-texas.html
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/11/us/politics/supreme-court-election-texas.html>
Supreme Court Rejects Texas Suit Seeking to Overturn Election
The suit, filed directly in the Supreme Court, sought to bar Georgia, Michigan,
Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from casting their electoral votes for Joseph R.
Biden Jr.
Dec. 11, 2020, 6:37 p.m. ET
The Supreme Court has received more than a dozen friend-of-the-court briefs and
motions seeking to intervene.Stefani Reynolds for The New York Times
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an audacious lawsuit by Texas
that had asked the court to throw out the presidential election results in four
battleground states captured by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The court, in a brief unsigned order
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/121120zr_p860.pdf>, said Texas
lacked standing to pursue the case, saying it “has not demonstrated a
judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts
its elections.”
The move, coupled with a one-sentence order
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/08/us/supreme-court-republican-challenge-pennsylvania-vote.html>
on Tuesday turning away a similar request from Pennsylvania Republicans,
signaled that the court refused to be drawn into President Trump’s losing
campaign to overturn the results of the election last month.
There will continue to be scattered litigation brush fires around the nation
from Mr. Trump’s allies, but as a practical matter the Supreme Court’s action
puts an end to any prospect that Mr. Trump will win in court what he lost at
the polls.
Texas’ lawsuit, filed directly in the Supreme Court, challenged election
procedures in four battleground states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and
Wisconsin. It asked the court to bar those states from casting their electoral
votes for Mr. Biden and to shift the selection of electors to the states’
legislatures. That would have required the justices to discard millions of
votes.
Mr. Trump has said he expected to prevail in the Supreme Court, which includes
three of his appointees. One of them, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, was rushed
onto the court in October in part in the hope that she would vote in Mr.
Trump’s favor in election disputes.
“I think this will end up in the Supreme Court,” Mr. Trump said of the election
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/23/us/elections/trump-supreme-court-election-day.html>
a few days after Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/us/ruth-bader-ginsburg-dead.html> in
September. “And I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”
Cooking: Daily inspiration, delicious recipes and other updates from Sam Sifton
and NYT Cooking.
In the Texas case, the Supreme Court received more than a dozen
friend-of-the-court briefs and motions seeking to intervene, from Mr. Trump,
from coalitions of liberal and conservative states, from politicians and from
scholars.
Among them was a brief
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163403/20201210153048641_Texas%20v.%20Pennsylvania%20Amicus%20Brief%20of%20106%20Representatives.pdf>
filed by more than 100 House Republicans who claimed that the general election
— the same one in which most of them were re-elected — had been “riddled with
an unprecedented number of serious allegations of fraud and irregularities.”
More than a dozen Republican state attorneys general expressed similar support
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/09/us/politics/trump-texas-supreme-court-lawsuit.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage>
on Wednesday.
Legal experts almost universally dismissed Texas’ suit as an unbecoming stunt.
In invoking the Supreme Court’s “original jurisdiction,” Texas asked the
justices to act as a trial court to settle a dispute between states, a
procedure theoretically possible under the Constitution but employed sparingly,
typically in cases concerning water rights or boundary disputes.
In a series of briefs filed Thursday, the four states that Texas sought to sue
condemned the effort. “The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the
judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such
abuse must never be replicated,” a brief for Pennsylvania
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163367/20201210142206254_Pennsylvania%20Opp%20to%20Bill%20of%20Complaint%20v.FINAL.pdf>
said.
On Friday morning, Texas’ attorney general, Ken Paxton, responded in kind in a
reply brief
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163492/20201211095715842_TX-v-State-MPI-Reply-2020-12-11.pdf>.
“Whatever Pennsylvania’s definition of sedition,” he wrote, “moving this court
to cure grave threats to Texas’ right of suffrage in the Senate and its
citizens’ rights of suffrage in presidential elections upholds the
Constitution, which is the very opposite of sedition.”
Claims that the election was tainted by widespread fraud have been debunked
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/us/politics/william-barr-voter-fraud.html>,
including by Attorney General William P. Barr, who said this month that the
Justice Department had uncovered no voting fraud “on a scale that could have
effected a different outcome in the election.”
Some 20 states led by Democrats, in a brief supporting the four battleground
states, urged the Supreme Court
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163379/20201210144443769_Texas%20v.%20Pennsylvania%20-%20Motion%20and%20Br.%20of%20Amici%20DC%20et%20al.pdf>
“to reject Texas’ last-minute attempt to throw out the results of an election
decided by the people and securely overseen and certified by its sister states.”
Georgia, which Mr. Biden won by less than 12,000 votes
<https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/11/03/us/elections/results-georgia.html>
out of nearly five million cast, said in its brief
<https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/22/22O155/163383/20201210145849997_Georgia%20--%20Brief%20in%20Opposition.pdf>
that it had handled its election with integrity and care. “This election
cycle,” the brief said, “Georgia did what the Constitution empowered it to do:
it implemented processes for the election, administered the election in the
face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19, and confirmed and
certified the election results — again and again and again. Yet Texas has sued
Georgia anyway.”
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