The Supreme Court Has Refused To Hear Trump’s Failed Election Lawsuits Before Biden Is Sworn In

WASHINGTON — The US Supreme Court on Monday once again refused to interfere with President-elect Joe Biden’s win, rejecting efforts by President Donald Trump and his allies to get the justices to reconsider another round of failed election challenges before Biden is sworn in next week.

Less than a week after Trump supporters launched a violent attack on the US Capitol fueled by false voter fraud conspiracy theories that Trump and his supporters have pushed in court over the past two months, the Supreme Court rebuffed requests to immediately hear eight cases challenging Biden’s wins in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

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The court on Monday didn’t rule on the merits of the latest batch of election cases to come up, but the justices’ refusal to consider them before Biden is sworn in shuts down any delusional hope Trump may have had that the court would step in at the last-minute to hand him a second term.

The one-sentence orders didn’t include any other information. The court generally doesn’t provide a breakdown of how each of the justices vote on these types of motions, but the orders didn’t note that any justice dissented.

“The motions of petitioners to expedite consideration of the petitions for writs of certiorari are denied,” the orders stated.

Trump and his supporters have lost dozens of legal challenges to the results of the presidential election at every level of the state and federal courts since November. The Supreme Court rebuffed previous efforts by Republicans to get the justices to intervene in the election, and refused to allow Texas — with support from Trump and more than 100 Republican members of Congress — to file an unprecedented lawsuit against four swing states that Biden won.

Trump had filed another three cases in the Supreme Court in recent weeks — two of them stemmed from election challenges he lost in Wisconsin, and the third appealed a set of cases he lost in Pennsylvania. In the Pennsylvania case, Trump’s lawyers warned in a brief filed Dec. 20 that if the justices didn’t hear the cases right away and rule for Trump, there could be “disruption.”

“[I]f this matter is not timely resolved, not only Petitioner, but the Nation as а whole may suffer injury from the resulting confusion. Indeed, the intense national and worldwide attention on the 2020 Presidential election only foreshadows the disruption that may well follow if the uncertainty and unfairness shrouding this election are allowed to persist,” the president’s lawyers wrote.

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The court also refused to immediately hear two lawsuits filed by Sidney Powell, a conservative attorney now facing a billion-dollar defamation lawsuit for pushing false conspiracy theories about a company that makes US voting technology; a case filed by Rep. Mike Kelly and other Pennsylvania Republicans; a case brought by another conspiracy theory-pushing conservative lawyer, Lin Wood, who was recently banned from Twitter for promoting last week’s insurrection at the Capitol; and a case brought by Kelli Ward, the chair of the Arizona Republican Party.

Trump has attacked the Supreme Court for refusing to indulge cases that numerous judges of all ideological backgrounds — including federal judges nominated by Trump — have tossed out on both procedural and substantive grounds.

“The U.S. Supreme Court has been totally incompetent and weak on the massive Election Fraud that took place in the 2020 Presidential Election,” Trump tweeted on Dec. 26, before he was banned from the platform. “We have absolute PROOF, but they don’t want to see it – No ‘standing’, they say. If we have corrupt elections, we have no country!”