All 50 states have certified their election results and determined the electors who will vote when the Electoral College meets Monday. The “safe harbor” deadline passed on Tuesday. We will learn if there will be any “rogue electors” who write in the candidate they personally prefer instead of the candidate they took an oath to support. If no one goes rogue, Joe Biden will win 306 electoral votes, and President Trump will win 232.
On social media, if someone refers to “President-elect Biden,” it is not hard to find someone responding, with vehement insistence, that Biden did not win, that his fraudulent election will soon be proven beyond any reasonable doubt, and that the Democratic nominee will not take the oath of office on January 20. I guess at this point, the fervent faith is in the lawsuit that President Trump called “the big one,” the suit from Texas attorney general Ken Paxton, seeking a Supreme Court ruling that Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania must throw out their presidential-election results and have the state legislature select their electors.
You really must read Andy McCarthy’s analysis; he notices that Texas solicitor general, Kyle Hawkins, did not join the lawsuit. Hawkins is likely to have to argue other cases before the Supreme Court in the future, and he probably doesn’t want to be associated with this argument.
Ladies and gentlemen . . . five Supreme Court justices are not going to throw out roughly 20.2 million votes in four key states and tell four Republican-controlled state legislatures to nominate the electors they prefer. It is unlikely that any Supreme Court justices will vote to throw out any votes.
For a while now, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis and Lin Wood and the rest have told us they were going to release “the kraken.” But we haven’t even gotten a plate of calamari. The “Sharpie lawsuit” in Arizona was dismissed. A federal judge dismissed the suit aiming to bar the results from seven Pennsylvania counties with prejudice. The president’s team has lost in state courts, federal courts, appeals courts, and state supreme courts. Several times, after losing in court, Giuliani insisted the decision was really good news because it gets their case closer to the U.S. Supreme Court. There is little sign that the U.S. Supreme Court will see the arguments any differently than the lower courts; the Supreme Court declined to review Representative Mike Kelly’s suit. (Kelly insists that his lawsuit isn’t over.)
Even a Trump-sympathetic observer such as Chris Christie concluded, “The president’s legal team has been a national embarrassment.” Trump’s legal team cannot conjure enough compelling evidence to convince judges that Trump himself appointed.
If five or more Supreme Court justices agree with Ken Paxton, and conclude that the election results from four states should be thrown out . . . well, I guess I’ll have quite a bit of egg on my face. If that comes to pass, I’ll have to seriously reevaluate what I thought I knew about election law, results, the legal arguments, and the thinking of the justices.
But if the Supreme Court declines to consider Paxton’s case . . . will anyone who is currently insisting that Biden didn’t win and will never become president reevaluate anything?