THE Republican majority-led Supreme Court has rejected another bid to reverse Pennsylvania’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden’s victory, while Sidney Powell has lost two further cases due to a complete lack of evidence.
Despite the fact that even if the result in PA were overturned, President-Elect Joe Biden would have more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president, the lawsuits – mainly led by Rudi Giuliani and Qanon conspiracy theorist Sidney Powell – continue to go through the courts; albeit it without the outcomes many Trump supporters had hoped for.
Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly of northwestern Pennsylvania and other plaintiffs pleaded with the justices to intervene after the state Supreme Court turned away their case in the key state, arguing that Pennsylvania’s vote-by-mail law is unconstitutional because it required a constitutional amendment to authorise its provisions – despite this not being the case as all states are permitted to make such changes to their electoral processes.
Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016.
The state’s high court said the plaintiffs waited too long to file the challenge and noted the Republicans’ staggering demand that an entire election be overturned retroactively.
In the underlying lawsuit, Kelly and the other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either throw out the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law or to wipe out the election results and direct the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors.
As a series of judges have done in the weeks since Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden, U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten, a Bush appointee, rejected the notion that the president’s supporters could re-litigate the outcome in the courts.
“They want this court to substitute its judgment for that of two and a half million Georgia voters who voted for Joe Biden,” Batten said in a Monday morning hearing. “This I am unwilling to do.”
At the same time, a Michigan court was issuing a stinging 36-page order in which the judge took issue with nearly every aspect of Sidney Powell’s lawsuit – saying it was filed too late, lacked evidence, and sought from the court an “extraordinary” outcome.
“This case represents well the phrase: ‘this ship has sailed,’ wrote U.S. District Judge Linda Parker.
An attorney working on the cases with Powell told ABC News that they planned to appeal both rulings.
The lawsuits Powell filed in Michigan and Georgia are virtually identical to ones brought earlier in Wisconsin and Arizona — and legal experts observed that some sections appeared to be copied and pasted so hurriedly that references to the wrong state appeared in several of them.
Judge Parker offered the most direct rebuke to date to the unfounded allegation Powell has been repeating in press conferences, at rallies, and on social media — that the election machines manufactured by Dominion Voting Systems were somehow tainted or rigged by powerful outside forces.
The judge called the notion that votes were secretly switched from Trump to Biden on Dominion machines “an amalgamation of theories, conjecture, and speculation that such alterations were possible.” And she noted that Powell’s crusade against the voting systems only came after the election tilted to Biden.
“If Plaintiffs had legitimate concerns about the election machines and software, they could have filed this lawsuit well before the 2020 General Election – yet they sat back and did nothing,” Parker wrote.
Other lawsuits launched by Sidney Powell, who has used the Qanon-style slogan “ReleaseTheKraken” to raise public donations and promote a series of unsubtantiated claims (including a number that have since been proven false), have fallen by the wayside.
Trump has recently distanced himself from Powell and no longer retweets her claims or accusations despite initially stating that she was a member of his legal team. The President is, however, continuing to challenge the overall result, and has told his supporters that if, as predicted, the remainder of his lawsuits fail, “you will see me in 2024”.
