Trump is out of options as judges toss out last attempts to overturn election

Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election in court is now over, as the last of the lawsuits filed by the Trump campaign and its GOP allies were tossed out by judges — including the justices of the Supreme Court.

Trump’s aim to enlist the judicial system to overturn his landslide loss to President-elect Joe Biden was all but dead by Tuesday, after state supreme courts and federal judges in critical states had already rejected numerous lawsuits that sought to block the certification of Biden’s victory.

But the death blows officially came Tuesday, when the Supreme Court declined to hear a challenge from Pennsylvania Republicans to nullify the state’s results over the uses of absentee ballots. Those Pennsylvania Republicans — including GOP Rep. Mike Kelly — argued that the state’s expansion of mail-in ballot use was against the Pennsylvania constitution, and thus the results must be invalidated.

Pennsylvania’s state Supreme Court had already tossed the challenge, which would have overturned Biden’s 81,660-vote victory over Trump in the state. The Republicans then took the challenge to the U.S. Supreme Court, which now has a 6-3 conservative majority, with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) offering to argue the case.

But the Supreme Court refused to even hear arguments in the case, rendering the challenge officially dead, more than a month after Election Day.

“It sends a crystal-clear message: It is time for us to move on,” Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro said on CNN Tuesday night.

Meanwhile, the state Supreme Court in Arizona tossed out a lawsuit on Tuesday from Arizona Republican Party Chair Kelli Ward that sought to block Arizona from certifying Biden’s win.

In a unanimous decision, the justice’s eviscerated Ward, saying her challenge, “fails to present any evidence of ‘misconduct,’ ‘illegal votes’ or that the Biden Electors ‘did not in fact receive the highest number of votes for office,’ let alone establish any degree of fraud or a sufficient error rate that would undermine the certainty of the election results.”

The state Supreme Court in Nevada also unanimously threw out a challenge that alleged fraud in the state’s election, which Biden won by 33,596 votes, saying the challenge provided no actual evidence of fraud.

The decisions came on what’s known as “Safe Harbor” day, or the federal deadline for states to resolve any legal challenges to results ahead of the meeting of the Electoral College.

Dozens of lawsuits from Trump and his allies had been thrown out before Tuesday. Yet by the end of the “Safe Harbor” deadline, it became clear that Trump is officially out of pathways.

Thus ends an embarrassing chapter for Trump and the GOP, who refused to accept that Trump fairly and clearly lost to Biden by a margin Trump himself deemed a “landslide” back in 2016 — when Trump won the same number of Electoral College votes that Biden did.

Judges of all stripes dressed down the Trump campaign and its Republican allies for failing to provide any evidence of fraud, calling their efforts a clear attempt to sow discord in a fundamental principle of American democracy.

“Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so,” Third Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephanos Bibas, who was appointed by Trump, wrote in a decision that threw out a lawsuit from the Trump campaign that sought to certify Pennsylvania’s results. Trump’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had argued this case, and was panned for spewing lies and conspiracy theories.

In the end, the Electoral College will vote on Dec. 14, where Biden will receive 306 votes to Trump’s 232.

Some House Republicans want to try to block Congress from accepting the results.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) said Tuesday that last-ditch effort will also fail.

“This is madness,” Romney said Tuesday, according to NBC News’ Frank Thorp. “We have a process, recounts are appropriate, going to the court is appropriate and pursuing every legal avenue is appropriate, but trying to get electors not to do what the people voted to do is madness.”

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.