The word came down yesterday from the highest court in the land, and how succinctly sweet it was:
“The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the Court is denied.”
Let’s translate that into everyday English:
“We’re being asked to overthrow a presidential election despite a dearth of evidence that it was rigged. Get the hell out of our court.”
Thus, the lame-duck loser and his addled MAGA saps suffered their 50th and most humiliating judicial defeat. It was a sad day for Trump, who had assumed, with his transactional mentality, that his three Supreme Court appointees would duly don his armband and desecrate democracy. And it was surely a sad day for performance artist Ted Cruz, who had volunteered to argue the baseless case for an overthrow; alas, he won’t get the chance to defend the guy who smeared his wife and father.
I won’t waste your time parsing the rejected lawsuit – a Trump-toadying Pennsylvania congressman had asked the high court to invalidate Joe Biden’s Pennsylvania victory because too many people voted by mail, or something like that – because it’s already in the trash bin. What these people still can’t seem to grasp is that judges tend to be persuaded by solid evidence, not mindless tweets. Trump can twiddle his paws on the keyboard all he wants (yesterday: “We were leading by so much more than they ever thought possible. Late night ballot ‘dumps’ went crazy!”), but Lady Justice refuses to be groped.
Another bat-crazy bid to overthrow the election – this one concocted by Texas’ attorney general, who’s currently the target of an FBI investigation – isn’t likely to fly either. We should be thankful. Stressed to the max at democracy’s eleventh hour, the judicial system has held firm.
This time.
We should also be thankful that the presidential result wasn’t even close. Biden’s share of the popular vote (51.4 percent) was bigger than Obama’s in 2012, bigger than Bush’s in 2004 and 2000, bigger than Clinton’s in 1992 and 1996, bigger than Reagan’s in 1980, bigger than Carter’s in 1976, and bigger than JFK’s in 1960. Biden’s combined winning margin in the repaired blue well (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania) was three times larger than Trump’s combined margin in 2016. And Biden’s success in flipping two red states, Arizona and repeatedly-certified Georgia, made it all the more difficult for Trump’s Little League legal team to scramble on multiple fronts.
But imagine what could happen in a hair-splitting election that boils down to the results in one contested state. Imagine what could happen if a demagogic Republican far smarter than Trump marshals his or her forces for a sustained assault on a judicial system increasingly staffed with Trump-McConnell judges – by arguing that state legislatures (most of which are dominated by Republicans) are free to appoint whatever electors they want, defying the will of the people. Indeed, some loopholes in federal election law are ripe for exploitation.
Jeff Greenfield, the former CBS Newsman and seasoned political analyst, rightly points out: “What Republicans have learned from this election – apart from their willingness to dismiss as utterly irrelevant the fact that their candidate lost by 7 million popular votes – is that the ancient machinery of conducting elections is rusted, frail and highly vulnerable. They have seen exactly where the stress points of the system are…They have already shown their willingness, even eagerness, to discredit the entire democratic process in the hopes of retaining power. There is every reason to believe they will seek to collapse that system the next chance they get.”
We dodged a bullet this time. Next time, absent sufficient vigilance by the defenders of democracy, we may not be so lucky.