The US Supreme Court rejects Texas' longshot bid to overturn the 2020 election

Trump rose garden sad — President Donald Trump arrives to speak at an event on "protecting seniors with diabetes" in the Rose Garden White House, Tuesday, May 26, 2020, in Washington.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci

The US Supreme Court on Friday rejected a brazen and legally dubious request from Texas and other Republican-led states to overturn the election results in four states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia.
The high court said in its opinion that Texas lacked standing to bring the case and had not proven it had a right to interfere in how other states administer their elections.
In addition to 17 Republican attorneys general, a majority of House Republicans filed an amicus brief supporting Texas' longshot effort, and President Donald Trump hyped the case as being "the big one."
Friday's decision is the Supreme Court's second denial this week of Republican efforts to nullify the results of the election; on Tuesday, the high court rejected Pennsylvania legislators' request to void Joe Biden's win in the state.
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The US Supreme Court on Friday struck down Republicans' latest longshot effort to nullify the results of the 2020 election.

In a brief order issued Friday evening, the high court denied a lawsuit brought by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton due to a lack of standing. The decision is the latest in a long string of defeats for the Trump campaign and Republican officials, who have filed nearly 40 lawsuits since Election Day and haven't won a single case.

The case was supported by 17 Republican attorneys general, as well as a majority of House Republicans. Texas' lawsuit argued that President-elect Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia should be overturned over unsubstantiated allegations of widespread voter fraud. Texas said that as a result, the Republican-led legislatures in all four states should be allowed to select a pro-Trump slate of electors instead to throw the election to the president.

The president, for his part, significantly hyped the Texas case before Friday's decision.

"We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!" he tweeted on Wednesday.

Texas' demand was immediately decried as legally dubious and an unprecedented request for judges to intervene in and overrule a democratic outcome in a free and fair election. Indeed, as Business Insider has reported, despite Trump and Republicans' cries of election malfeasance and voter fraud, the 2020 race was the safest and most secure in US history.

"That doesn't sound like a very Republican argument to me," Republican Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said in an interview airing Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," citing federalism and the right of states to administer their own elections.

One of Texas' Republican senators, John Cornyn, echoed that view, telling CNN's Manu Raju earlier this week that he didn't understand the legal theory of the case.

"You know, it's very unusual because when a state sues a state, the Supreme Court of the United States has original jurisdiction, so you don't have to go through the ordinary procedure," he told Raju. "I read just the summary of it, and I frankly struggle to understand the legal theory of it."

"Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say so on how other states administer their elections?" Cornyn added. "We have a diffused and dispersed system and even though we might not like it, they may think it's unfair ... those are decided at the state and local level and not at the national level. So it's an interesting theory, but I'm not convinced."

That argument was echoed by the Supreme Court. "Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections," the justices wrote.

In a statement, a spokesperson for President-elect Joe Biden welcomed the decision, saying the court "decisively and speedily rejected the latest of Donald Trump and his allies' attacks on the democratic process."

Other Democrats, however, sounded the alarm about the precedent even filing such a case could set. Speaking to The Washington Post, Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut warned that the legitimization of efforts to subvert democracy bodes ill for the future.

"If this becomes at all normalized more broadly than it already is, they will steal an election two years from now or four years from now," Murphy said.

Indeed, the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, Allen West, said efforts to subvert the democratic process are not over, adopting rhetoric associated with secession.

"This decision will have far reaching ramifications for the future of our constitutional republic," West said in a statement. "Perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution."

The high court's move on Friday follows its decision earlier this week to reject a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to void Biden's win in the state.

"This was not my case as has been so incorrectly reported," the president tweeted after the Pennsylvania decision, adding that, "the case that everyone has been waiting for is the State's case with Texas and numerous others joining. It is very strong, ALL CRITERIA MET. How can you have a presidency when a vast majority think the election was RIGGED?"

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