Monday, December 21, 2020
New lawsuit in the Supreme Court
Trump continues to fight windmills
Donald Trump has long since lost the fight for the White House – but he does not see it. His team files another futile complaint before the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, the outgoing president is considering whether he could instrumentalize the military for his cause.
Despite dozens of setbacks in court, the incumbent US President Donald Trump continues the legal battle against his defeat in the presidential election. On Sunday, Trump's campaign team filed a motion with the Supreme Court to review and overturn decisions by the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court. The Trump camp claims that the court there violated constitutional rights through several postal voting decisions. As a result, invalid votes were counted in large numbers in the state.
The objection is unlikely to be promising – and the overall election result cannot shake the Trump camp anyway. The Republican had lost the presidential election at the beginning of November by a clear margin against the Democrat Joe Biden. So far, Trump has not admitted his defeat in the election, but stubbornly claims that he was deprived of victory through massive fraud. No evidence followed the claims. More than 50 lawsuits from the Trump camp have so far been rejected, two of them before the Supreme Court.
Just two weeks ago, the Supreme Court rejected an application for an injunction with which Trump and his supporters wanted to overturn the election result in Pennsylvania in Trump's favor. Just over a week ago, the Supreme Court also dismissed a lawsuit by the state of Texas against the election results in the four states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan. The Republican Justice Minister of Texas, Ken Paxton, – supported by heads of department from other states and Republican MPs from the House of Representatives – brought the lawsuit to overturn Biden's victory over his fellow party member Trump.
A conservative majority of judges does not help Trump
After the death of the liberal judge Ruth Bader Ginsburg in September, Trump had put pressure on to quickly fill the seat on the Supreme Court with the conservative lawyer Amy Coney Barrett before the Supreme Court election. He also referred explicitly to a possible dispute over the outcome of the election. The Conservatives now dominate the court with a majority of six to three votes. The Trump camp's previous lawsuits were so unsound that they were rejected equally by all judges, regardless of whether they were nominated by Democratic or Republican presidents.
Meanwhile, the electorate in the states officially confirmed Biden's victory over Trump – with 306 votes to 232. So the 20 votes from Pennsylvania voters are not decisive. In the application for the Supreme Court, the Trump camp argues that the question of the electoral process in the state should basically be clarified with a view to future elections – also for the election in 2024, in which Trump is "constitutionally entitled" to run.
So far, the Republican has not commented on whether he wants to run again in four years' time, but is sticking to the myth that he has already won this election for a second term. Hardly a day goes by when Trump does not rage on Twitter about the election results and spread unsubstantiated allegations of fraud. Several US media reported over the weekend that Trump was still busy discussing scenarios of how the election outcome could be turned around, even behind the scenes.
Adviser worried
The "New York Times" reported on Saturday, citing unspecified sources, that on Friday evening there had been a – at times heated – meeting of Trump with advisors in the Oval Office. Among other things, Trump discussed using a controversial lawyer on his campaign team, Sidney Powell, as the government's special investigator for alleged electoral fraud. Powell had recently made headlines with the conspiracy theory that Venezuela's leadership had manipulated vote counting software to influence the US election outcome.
The report said that at the meeting in the Oval Office, Trump also asked about the possible use of military forces – an idea launched by his former National Security Advisor, Michael Flynn. The news site Axios writes that high-ranking officials in Trump's administration are increasingly concerned that the president is engaging in such mind games and surrounding conspiracy theorists.
The final result of the presidential election will be officially announced in Congress in Washington on January 6th. Biden is to be sworn in on January 20th. On that day, according to the constitution, Trump's term of office ends automatically – even if he does not admit defeat.
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