On Tuesday afternoon – on what is known as “safe harbor day” – the Supreme Court dealt the Trump administration a potential death blow in its dying quest to overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential Election, as they declined to hear a Pennsylvania case that sought to block the certification of its state’s election results.
The court denied a petition from U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., to review a case that had already been dismissed by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court last month, which claimed that the Pennsylvania Legislature improperly expanded mail-in voting, violating the Pennsylvania Constitution and the U.S. Constitution.
“Beginning with the Military Absentee Ballot Act of 1839, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court consistently rejected all attempts to expand absentee voting by statute — uniformly holding that a constitutional amendment is required to expand absentee voting beyond the categories provided in the Pennsylvania Constitution,” the petition said.
“Safe Harbor Day” is the federally mandated deadline by which states must resolve legal challenges to the certification of presidential elections.
Mail-in ballots strongly favored President-elect Joe Biden, and invalidating those mail-in ballots could result in President Trump winning the state’s 20 Electoral College votes (which would still put him behind Biden, 286-252 if that had been allowed). On Nov. 28, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court vacated an order from a lower court that had prohibited state officials from taking any further action regarding the certification of the results, with the higher court essentially ruling that Kelly’s challenge had come too late.
The Trump campaign had said throughout the post-election period that they wanted to make the Supreme Court the deciding factor in the election due to unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud (as of now, the Trump campaign is 1-50 in court cases), due to its 6-3 conservative majority – including three Trump appointees. However, the Court issued a one sentence ruling that essentially made clear they wanted no part of this legal battle:
This case, however, is not the last case that the Supreme Court has been asked to hear regarding the election. On Monday, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sued Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan and Wisconsin, looking to prevent those states from appointing Democratic electors and asking to delay the Electoral College meeting, currently slated for Dec. 14. Paxton’s case alleges that the states violated the Electors Clause of the U.S. Constitution — which allows each state to appoint a number of electors based on the number of senators and representatives the state has in Congress, and empowers state legislatures to determine the manner of choosing them — by “taking non-legislative actions to change the election rules that would govern the appointment of presidential electors,” specifically actions regarding the casting and counting of ballots.
Most law professors have said that this case holds no merit and will also likely be turned down by the Supreme Court.
