Biden elected President as Supreme Court rejects pro-Trump challenge

Biden elected President as Supreme Court rejects pro-Trump challenge
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Joe Biden was elected president Monday by members of the electoral college. Upon receiving California’s 55 electoral votes, Biden crossed the 270-vote threshold needed to win the White House. The vote followed Friday’s Supreme Court ruling in which the high court rejected a challenge by Texas to the election results in four states that Trump needed to win in order to get reelected.

Texas’s challenge to the election results was so meritless that none of Trump’s own appointees to the Supreme Court voted for it. All three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices voted to reject the challenge to the election results. Texas’s solicitor general, who usually files briefs on behalf of Texas, declined to sign Texas’s brief, probably because he knew it was frivolous. The “expert” affidavit supporting Texas’s lawsuit was so “dumb in every possible way” that it could be summed up as saying, “Biden can’t possibly have outperformed Clinton if we assume that Biden got the same votes as Clinton.” But that assumption was silly. No president ever gets the same votes in one election as in another. Indeed, every poll taken in 2020 revealed that Biden wasn’t getting the same votes as Clinton, because he was doing better with whites, and worse with minorities, than Hillary Clinton did in 2016. In any event, Texas’s challenge failed without even getting to the merits, because Texas lacked legal standing to challenge how other states conduct their elections.

As bad as it was, Texas’s challenge looked good compared to the pathetic, hopeless lawsuits filed against the election results by other lawyers, such as long-time Democrat Lin Wood and Sidney Powell. Those grifters filed legal briefs filled with mistakes, typos, and sentence fragments, in their frivolous lawsuits challenging the election results. Their legal briefs were so badly written that they made Trump look like a fool, and damaged the President’s reputation.

Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?

As Politico notes, in “a filing in federal district court signed by Powell misspelled ‘district’ twice in the first few lines.” As the Tribune notes, “the word district in the court name was misspelled twice on the first page of the document. First there was an extra c for ‘DISTRICCT’ and then, a few words later, ‘DISTRCOICT.’” Powell also misspelled the word “declaration” as “decleration,” cited fraud in non-existent places, and filed appeals in the wrong courts.

Lin Wood challenged Biden’s narrow win in Georgia, even though Wood has long donated to progressive Democrats such as Barack Obama, voted in Democratic primaries through 2018, and donated to Georgia Democratic politicians as recently as 2014. Wood made Trump look stupid by filing error-filled briefs that were full of misspellings, such as misspelling his own last name.

Why did such bad lawyers end up bringing the challenges to the election? Because good lawyers won’t bring a frivolous lawsuit, and the challenges to the 2020 election were frivolous and guaranteed to lose. None of the Trump’s usual high-quality lawyers — like the Consovoy McCarthy firm, which specializes in constitutional law — would touch these lawsuits challenging the election results, because they were so weak and doomed to failure.

None of these challenges to the election results had any chance of making Trump president for another term. None. Zero. Nada. Zip. I say this as a lawyer, who has litigated voting rights issues in the Supreme Court. Any otherwise viable theories for challenging state voting regimes were barred by the centuries-old doctrine of laches.

I didn’t vote for Joe Biden. I criticized Biden many times this year, in publications across America — like in the National Review; the Tampa Bay Times; several newspapers in Pennsylvania; and many, many other places.

But there is no getting around the fact that Joe Biden won the election. He just did. Part of being a grown-up is accepting realities, whether they are unpleasant or not. Living in a pleasant fantasy is for children.

Hans Bader

Hans Bader

Hans Bader practices law in Washington, D.C. After studying economics and history at the University of Virginia and law at Harvard, he practiced civil-rights, international-trade, and constitutional law. He also once worked in the Education Department. Hans writes for CNSNews.com and has appeared on C-SPAN’s “Washington Journal.” Contact him at hfb138@yahoo.com

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