Trump’s strategy to have the courts swing the election
lies in tatters
Opinion by
Columnist
November 13, 2020 at 2:50 p.m. CST
“You’re
going to need nine justices up there, I think it’s going to be very important,”
President Trump said in September, explaining why it was vital
to get Amy Coney Barrett confirmed to the Supreme Court before the election.
“Because what they’re doing is a hoax, with the ballots.”
In
saying this, Trump was utterly candid about the fact that he expected the
court’s conservatives to deliver him a second term.
And yet
it has all fallen apart.
Again
and again, Trump and his allies have filed suit to stop the counting of
ballots, or throw out ballots, or otherwise keep Joe Biden from being declared
the winner. Again and again, their preposterous arguments have been almost
laughed out of court, even by Republican-appointed judges.
Here
are the latest developments:
·
In Michigan, a state judge threw out a Republican suit attempting to
stop the certification of the state for Biden, saying the plaintiff’s charges
of voter fraud were “not credible.”
·
Another Republican lawsuit in Michigan seeks to have all the
votes in three heavily Democratic counties thrown out, which would hand the
state to Trump. Biden leads Trump in Michigan by nearly 150,000 votes.
·
In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign claims in a lawsuit that
because its observers in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh couldn’t stand close
enough to “meaningfully observe” the counting of votes, 600,000 votes should be
invalidated, a claim as absurd as the other ones the campaign is making. The
law firm that had been representing Trump in the case withdrew its participation, apparently
out of sheer embarrassment.
·
In another case in Pennsylvania, a federal appeals court rejected a Republican attempt to throw
out mail ballots that were postmarked by Election Day but arrived later that
week. Biden leads in the state by just under 60,000 votes.
·
In Arizona, the Trump campaign dropped its lawsuit, unable to come up with
any grounds on which the results should be reversed. Biden leads there by
11,000 votes.
These
cases are so weak that it appears the Supreme Court will be spared the need to
intercede on Trump’s behalf, surely to the relief of the justices. Not that the
court’s six conservatives didn’t want to see Trump win, but they were no doubt
uncomfortable with the idea of handing him a victory in the way he wanted.
That’s
because while Trump was hoping for something like a repeat of 2000 — when the
entire election hinged on a few hundred disputed votes in Florida — the problem
he faces now is that he’s so far behind that his lawyers can’t come up with any
good reason the results in any state should be reversed to
give him the state’s electoral votes, let alone in the multiple states he’d
need to flip to prevail.
Which
means it would take a partisan intervention so extraordinary, so unjustified,
so appalling to any notion of democracy that if the Supreme Court actually gave
Trump what he wanted, it could cause a constitutional crisis unprecedented in
American history.
Not
only that, while Trump is loudly and repeatedly alleging fraud, when his
lawyers actually get before courts, they’ve been unable to provide any evidence
of fraud at all.
They
can’t even claim to have found fraud most of the time.
Instead, they’ve been telling judges that there’s
some irregularity here or some unanswered questions there, but they assume that
election officials are acting in good faith. It’s almost reached the level of
farce.
So
while any or all of these cases can be appealed as far as Trump and others are
willing to take them, they stand virtually no chance of winning. To any sane
observer, they’re nothing more than the increasingly desperate whining of a
sore loser.
But of
course, this is not a nation full of sane observers, particularly when they’re
being fed conspiracy theories by the president, the conservative media and Republican
politicians who see an advantage in playing to the party’s unhinged base.
Which
is why, despite the steady stream of legal setbacks, Trump’s efforts to have
the election reversed are still incredibly damaging. It’s now standard practice for any Republican
anywhere to claim that if they lost, it can only be because Democrats stole the
election. As Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.) said earlier this
week, “We win because of our ideas, we lose elections because they cheat us.”
This is
now the central Republican narrative of this election: not that a majority of
voters had simply had enough of Trump — who knows, maybe it was the
quarter-million Americans dead from covid-19 because of his malignant
mismanagement — but that it was a theft, the election stolen from its rightful
and righteous winner.
That
noxious idea will poison our politics for years to come. It’s just one of the
ways we’ll be living with Trump’s legacy long after he’s gone.