People listen to speakers during a Stop the Steal rally in front of the Supreme Court on Tuesday, Jan. 5, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Kent Nishimura | Los Angeles Times | Getty Images
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected efforts by President Donald Trump and his allies to get the court to quickly consider challenges to President-elect Joe Biden’s victory in the November election. The move effectively shut the door on the president’s last-ditch legal strategy to overturn his defeat.
The court released an order in the morning denying expedited consideration to suits filed by Trump’s campaign challenging election procedures in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
It similarly denied a request from the conservative conspiracy theorist L. Lin Wood to expedite his challenge to the election in Georgia, as well as other suits filed by Trump allies.
The action by the court was widely expected and was not accompanied by any explanation or opinion, as is typical in such denials. There were no noted dissents from any of the court’s nine justices.
The justices returned from their winter recess to convene for a private conference on Friday. The order list released on Monday is the first since the D.C. riot last week in which a mob of Trump supporters sought to delay the certification of Biden’s victory over Trump in the Electoral College.
The court had made it clear that it would not process the cases on the schedule Trump asked for even before issuing the order.
For instance, in Trump v. Boockvar, one of the cases challenging the Pennsylvania election procedures, the president’s attorney, John Eastman, urged the court in a December brief to take up the case before Jan. 6, when Congress met to certify the Electoral College tally.
Eastman wrote that if the court did not act before Jan. 20, when Biden will be inaugurated, “it will be impossible to repair election results” that included ballots that he alleged were cast unlawfully based on rules approved by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
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