25 min ago
Supreme Court denies GOP effort to block certification of Pennsylvania election results
From CNN's Ariane de Vogue
People participate in a "Stop the Steal" protest outside the U.S. Supreme Court in support of President Donald Trump in Washington on December 8. Erin Scott/Reuters
The Supreme Court denied a request from Pennsylvania Republicans to block certification of Pennsylvania’s election results, delivering a near fatal blow to efforts by Republicans in their longshot bid to invalidate President-elect Joe Biden’s victory.
There were no noted dissents, and it marks the first vote of Justice Amy Coney Barrett in an election-related dispute.
The court acted quickly, just after the final brief in the court was filed, suggesting that the justices wanted to send a decisive message.
“Although we don’t know whether the vote was actually unanimous or why the court refused Rep. Kelly’s emergency request, the fact that the justices issued a one-sentence order with no separate opinions is a powerful sign that the court intends to stay out of election-related disputes, and that it’s going to leave things to the electoral process going forward,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN legal analyst and University of Texas law school professor. “It’s hard to imagine a more quietly resounding rejection of these challenges from this court.”
The Supreme Court’s action is a crushing loss for President Trump who suggested as late as Tuesday that he thought the justices — including three of his nominees — might step in and take his side as he has continually and falsely suggested there was massive voter fraud during the election.
Rep. Mike Kelly had challenged the Commonwealth’s “no-excuse” absentee ballot law that was adopted in October 2019.
The effort faced steep odds at the Supreme Court, particularly because the dispute turned mostly on issues of state law. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court
dismissed the challenge last weekend holding that Kelly and others failed to file their challenge in a timely manner.
“It is beyond cavil that petitioners failed to act with due diligence” in presenting the case, the court held noting that they filed the suit more than one year after the enactment of the law at issue.
Tuesday also marked the “safe harbor” deadline for the state under federal law. That means that when Congress tallies the electoral votes in January, it must accept electoral results that were certified before the deadline.
The emergency petition was addressed to Justice Samuel Alito who has jurisdiction over the Pennsylvania courts. He referred it to the whole court.
Lawyers for Kelly argued that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court violated his “right to petition and right to due process, guaranteed by the First and Fourteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution, respectively, by closing all avenues of relief for past and future harms.”
But Pennsylvania officials called the petition “fundamentally frivolous.”
“No court has ever issued an order nullifying a governor’s certification of presidential election results,” argued J. Bart Delone, the state’s chief deputy attorney general.
“The loss of public trust in our constitutional order resulting in this kind of judicial power would be incalculable,” he said.
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