How the Conservative Legal Movement Stopped Trump’s Attempts to Overturn the Election – By David French (TIME) / Dec 14 2020
On Friday evening, the Supreme Court of the United States unanimously rejected Texas attorney general Ken Paxton’s effort to invalidate the election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Seven justices said Paxton had no standing to bring the case. Two justices – Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito – would have granted Texas’s motion to have its case heard, but they would have denied relief.
To put this plainly, not one justice was willing to overturn the presidential election. Each of Trump’s three judicial appointees rejected the case. And with this single act, the Supreme Court dramatically exposed a fascinating division within the conservative movement. Time and again, elected officials supported quixotic and frivolous judicial challenges to the outcome (for example, Senator Ted Cruz even offered to argue election challenges at the Supreme Court) or remained silent. At the same time, the conservative legal movement—especially its members of the judicial branch—crushed Trump’s fever dream of an improbable second term.
Examples abound beyond SCOTUS. Who wrote these words in a Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision that affirmed the dismissal of the Trump campaign’s Pennsylvania election challenge?
Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.
The answer is Judge Stephanos Bibas, nominated to the court by Donald Trump in June 2017. He was joined in that opinion by two George W. Bush nominees, Brooks Smith and Michael Chagares.
CONTINUE > https://time.com/5921196/conservative-legal-election-blocked-trump/
