Washington, Dec 12: The US Supreme Court has rejected a lawsuit filed by Texas, along with 17 other States, and backed by President Donald Trump seeking to overturn the results of the presidential elections in several key battleground States won by Democratic candidate Joe Biden who now is the president-elect.
“Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognisable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot,” the Supreme Court said in a brief unsigned order on Thursday, delivering a devastating blow to the efforts of Trump to challenge and overturn the election results decisively won by Biden.
Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas said they believed the court was required to hear the case but expressed no position on Texas’ claim.
As many as 126 Republican Congressmen had also backed the lawsuit. Biden not only bagged the most popular votes in the presidential electoral history of the United States, his tally in the electoral college was also more than 300 out of the 538 votes. The halfway mark is 270. The election results are scheduled to be formally certified next week. Trump and his campaign team have been making unsubstantiated allegations of massive voter fraud and electoral malpractice.
State election officials and mainstream media say they have not found any such evidence. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton in his lawsuit has alleged that four battle ground States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — had violated their own state laws, and thus the US Constitution.
The lawsuit urged the court to bar these four states from casting their electoral votes for President-elect Biden and as such shift the selection of electors to the States’ legislatures. Trump had said he expected to prevail in the Supreme Court. Pennsylvania, in its response to the lawsuit, alleged that Texas wanted the justices to disregard the Constitution, not interpret it.
It said Texas’ filings attempted to construct a surreal alternate reality. “Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” said the response filed by the State of Pennsylvania. (PTI)
