Trump's various attempts to challenge election results

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I’m not a Trump fanboy myself. I think he’s a fraud. I would have preferred him to beat Biden, since I view him as the lesser of two evils, but I don’t think the election result is going to be overturned. I think if there was fraud in the recent election (which seems quite likely), then there has probably also been fraud of varying degrees in other US elections. Personally, I have mainly joined this thread to see if the liberals here are capable of thinking objectively about all this. I shouldn’t have expected much. After all, here are some of the things liberals on this sub-forum (and in the wider society) actually do believe these days-

A Hanukkah gathering on Wednesday—the worst day yet of this unparalleled public-health crisis—featured hundreds of attendees, many unmasked, jammed together, according to a grainy leaked video. The crowd chanted “Four more years!” as President Donald Trump said, “We’re gonna win this election in a landslide,” more than a month after losing the election. In a sign of the mordant times, Thursday night’s Congressional Ball, also hosted at the White House, was dubbed the “covid Ball,” and hundreds more revellers were expected to attend. Even before all this entertaining, more than fifty people in Trump’s orbit have come down with the coronavirus—including, this week, the lawyers who have been flying around the country challenging the election on his behalf, Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis. Welcome to late-stage Trumpism: defiant decadence with a potentially deadly edge.

After four years of the unthinkable becoming reality under Trump, I thought I was prepared for the various unprecedented scenarios that might unfold in this post-election, pre-Inauguration period. We knew, because Trump told us, that he would not accept a loss to Joe Biden, no matter what. We knew, because Trump told us, that he would not suddenly get serious about the pandemic after hundreds of thousands of Americans died from it. We knew, in other words, that the country had to brace for an alarming confluence of virus denialism and election denialism between November 3rd and January 20th. As devastating as it is for American democracy, it is no longer news that the President insists, as he did in a tweet the other day, that he is the victim of the “greatest Election Fraud in the history of the United States.”

In the days immediately following the election, Trump said that his goal was to “STOP THE COUNT.” Then it was to “stop the steal,” or to demand recounts, or to discover evidence of fraud. During this period, one senior Republican official said there was no real harm in letting Trump have his temper tantrum; it would not affect the outcome anyway. “What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change,” the Republican told the Washington Post.

But, rather than merely taking a few days to come to terms with his loss, and then sulk off to Florida once the courts threw out his lawsuits, Trump has escalated and escalated, culminating on Wednesday with a single-word tweet announcing his new goal: not to win the election but to “#OVERTURN” the results. Even more strikingly, while his allies have lost fifty-plus cases since the election, Trump has convinced millions of Americans to believe that the election was rigged against him—seventy-seven per cent of Republicans now say mass fraud occurred, according to a new Quinnipiac poll out Thursday—and enlisted virtually the entire national leadership of the Republican Party in his concerted attack on the legitimacy of the results..

This week, twenty-seven House Republicans asked the Justice Department to appoint a special counsel to investigate the election—the same number as House and Senate Republicans who, as the Post found in a survey, will publicly recognize Biden’s victory. Not only have both Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy refused to recognize his win; they both voted against a ceremonial motion of the committee organizing the January 20th handover of power to “notify the American people” of plans to inaugurate Biden.

On Tuesday evening, the Supreme Court rebuffed the Trump team’s Pennsylvania lawsuit, an evidence-free concoction demanding that every single mail-in ballot from the state be thrown out. It did so in a single-sentence order: “The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.” No need even to rule on the merits of such an absurdity.

That should have been the end of the line for Trump. Tuesday, after all, was also, by federal law, the national “safe harbor” date—the deadline by which states certify their election results in advance of the Electoral College’s upcoming meeting, on December 14th.

Undaunted, in the space of a few hours on Wednesday, Trump had his campaign join an even more far-fetched lawsuit, by Texas, asking the Court to throw out millions of votes in battleground states that decided the election’s outcome—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—all of which have already certified their results.

What came as a gut punch, though, and still, even after all this time, a real surprise to me, was the announcement that seventeen other states—or at least their attorneys general—had filed a brief supporting the spurious Texas lawsuit, representing, from South Carolina to Utah, an array of pro-Trump red states. Eighteen states, in other words, are making the preposterous—and democratically devastating—argument that the Supreme Court should throw out other states’ votes because they do not like the results.

Up on Capitol Hill, meanwhile, a hundred and six House Republicans filed an amicus brief of their own supporting the Texas lawsuit. Some of these same Trump supporters in Congress are also now considering objecting to the Electoral College results when they are presented to the House, on January 6th, in what is meant to be a purely pro-forma procedural move. Mitt Romney dismissed the idea as “madness,” but he remains a lonely public voice against Trump, as his fellow-Republicans either fall in line or remain inexcusably silent. This has gone far beyond just humoring Trump for a few days.

In filing so many lawsuits and having so many courts across the country reject them, Trump has produced an unintended result: a resounding judicial affirmation of the integrity of our system. Trump appointees have rejected his cases; Obama appointees have rejected his cases. State courts have rejected them. The Supreme Court has, too.

On Monday, there will be another test, another chance to finally, belatedly, get it right. The Electoral College will meet, and it will give Joe Biden a victory, with three hundred and six electoral votes. Will that be enough to end this?

More than half of House Republicans, including their top two leaders, are backing a Texas lawsuit seeking to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in an extraordinary display of the party's willingness to subvert the will of voters.

Seventeen Republican attorneys general and 126 members of Congress have joined Texas and President Donald Trump in urging the U.S. Supreme Court to throw out millions of votes in four battleground states based on baseless claims of fraud. On Friday, House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy of California and Minority Whip Steve Scalise of Louisiana signed onto a brief backing the longshot bid, demonstrating Trump's remarkable political power even even as he spreads false claims that many Democrats and others fear risk deeply damaging democracy.

When liberals in the George W. Bush era referred to themselves as "the reality-based community," it came across as obnoxiously smug. But today, an actual abdication from reality is becoming the Republican party line.

To be sure, there are exceptions — such as Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Gov. Brian Kemp, who have staunchly rebuffed attempts to overturn the state’s election results. But the derangement thickens.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, the two Republican senators facing a runoff election on Jan. 5, Kelly Loeffler and David Purdue — whose win or loss will determine control of the U.S. Senate — have said that they "fully support" Paxton’s complaint. (Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr’s office has called this complaint "constitutionally, legally and factually wrong.") Nearly half of the Republicans in the Georgia State Senate support it as well.

These developments confirm what "Never Trump" Republicans have been saying for some time: that the GOP has become a Trump personality cult.

Writing in the anti-Trump center-right online magazine The Bulwark, veteran conservative commentator Mona Charen writes, "We are now at the stage when a critical mass of the Republican party has adopted Trump’s disordered personality for its own. The Republican party is, in this iteration, a danger to American democracy."

This is particularly alarming because a strong alternative to the Democratic Party — whose current iteration poses its own problems of a strong leftward shift — is absolutely essential to that democracy’s health. Under normal circumstances, I would root for the Senate to remain controlled by Republicans to balance a Democratic White House and House of Representatives. But right now, Loeffler and Purdue deserve to lose.

In her Bulwark column, Charen suggests that sane conservatives need to "repeal and replace" the Republican Party. There is no clear path to doing that. But a thorough defeat in the 2020 election would be a start.

President Donald Trump lost a Wisconsin lawsuit Friday seeking to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots and overturn his loss to Democrat Joe Biden in the battleground state, the latest in a string of legal defeats.

Reserve Judge Stephen Simanek ruled against every argument Trump made challenging ballots in the state's two largest counties, saying the election was properly administered and that there was no wrongdoing as the president alleged.

“The bottom line here is that the court should do everything to ensure that the will of the voters prevail,” the judge said.

Trump quickly appealed the ruling and asked the conservative-controlled Wisconsin Supreme Court to take the case from the lower appeals court. Trump also has a federal lawsuit in Wisconsin where the judge could rule as soon as Friday.

he Supreme Court rejected a bid from Texas' attorney general -- supported by President Donald Trump -- to block the ballots of millions of voters in battleground states that went in favor of President-elect Joe Biden.
The court's move to dismiss the challenge is the strongest indication yet that Trump has no chance of overturning election results in court that even the justices whom he placed there have no interest in allowing his desperate legal bids to continue.

The court did not provide a vote count, but there were no dissents to the order made public.

Separately, justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said they would have allowed the case to be filed, but would grant no other relief.