In his latest attempt to explain away his failure to overturn the 2020 election through the courts, President Donald Trump on Saturday suggested federal judges, including some he appointed, were just too scared to do their jobs. Speaking with Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade, Trump falsely claimed to have “proven” election fraud—even as dozens of judges have dismissed his outlandish claims as lacking sufficient evidence or legal merit—and said “no judge, including in the Supreme Court of the United States, has had the courage to allow it to be heard.” Prior to Election Day, Trump brazenly laid out how he expected those he named to the bench to rule in potential post-election lawsuits, and continued to do so earlier this week. But all three Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices ruled against his cause on Friday, dismantling a bid led by the state of Texas to throw out election results in four states that Biden won. Trump hit back at the high court on Saturday, telling Fox he is “so disappointed in them.”
Trump’s comments come as court filings, the Washington Post reports, illustrate the sweep of the president’s unprecedented legal effort and how the nation’s judiciary held up against it. At least 86 judges, including dozens of Republican-appointed ones, were involved in shutting down at least one lawsuit filed by Trump or his allies after the election. More than 50 such cases had failed or been tossed out of court as of Friday, according to the Post, and only one, a minor suit, had prevailed. “In an era when so many institutions of American life have bowed to partisan tribalism, the dozens of opinions serve as a resounding reaffirmation of the judiciary’s nonpartisan commitment to basic principles of reason, fact and law,” according to the Post. The Supreme Court’s “repudiation” of Trump’s efforts, noted the New York Times, “was a blunt rebuke to Republican leaders in Congress and the states who were willing to damage American democracy by embracing a partisan power grab over a free and fair election.”
The Post’s court filings review revealed “striking diversity in the political orientation and experience” among the judges who rejected post-election suits, a group made up of 54 men and 32 women who ranged from age 42 to 82 but that nevertheless offered a “remarkable show of near-unanimity.” “What we saw here were a bunch of overzealous lawyers trying to make the transition from the political realm, where facts and law have ceased to be very important, into the judicial realm, where the norms are still hard and fast,” said Charles Gardner Geyh, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law.
Perhaps even more troubling than Trump’s month-long disinformation campaign targeting the democratic process is the fact that 126 Republican House members and 18 attorneys general supported it. Doing so, Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele told the Times, “is an offense to the Constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin for a long time to come.” Despite relentless political pressure coming from the president and his supporters within the party, 38 judges appointed by Republicans ruled against the Trump campaign or allied groups, the Post reports. Trump has appointed more judges to the federal appeals courts than any other president during the first three years of office, and many of those court picks have expressed shock at his post-election legal effort.
“Voters, not lawyers, choose the President,” U.S. Circuit Court Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee, said in a rejection of an attempt to throw out votes for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania. Writing on behalf of two other GOP-appointed judges, Bibas added: “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.” In a lawsuit aimed at blocking certification of Biden’s win in Georgia, U.S. District Court Judge Steven D. Grimberg, who Trump appointed last year, said the effort “would breed confusion and potentially disenfranchisement that I find has no basis in fact or in law.”
The latest blow came Saturday, when federal District Judge Brett H. Ludwig, a Trump appointee who assumed the bench in September, called Trump’s sweeping request to throw out the election results in Wisconsin “extraordinary” and stopped short of declaring him a sore loser. “A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred,” he said. The Wisconsin ruling occurred while Trump’s attorney Jim Troupis was attempting to advance unfounded fraud claims before the state Supreme Court in another lawsuit, the Associated Press reports. Both liberal and conservative justices questioned the request to disqualify more than 221,000 ballots only in Milwaukee and Dane counties, Wisconsin’s most liberal counties with the largest non-white populations, but not more conservative counties where Trump prevailed and where elections officials followed the same allegedly fraudulent procedures. “This lawsuit, Mr. Troupis, smacks of racism,” liberal Justice Jill Karofsky said. “I do not know how you can come before this court and possibly ask for a remedy that is unheard of in U.S. history. … It is not normal.”
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