The Supreme Court has rejected Republicans' request to overturn Biden's Pennsylvania win
Sonam Sheth and Jacob Shamsian
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a request to overturn President-elect Joe Biden's victory in Pennsylvania.
The case was brought by Rep. Mike Kelly and a group of Pennsylvania state legislators who asked the high court to block the state's certification of its election results. Specifically, Kelly and the other plaintiffs asked the court for an emergency order nullifying Biden's win on the grounds that the state legislature did not have the power to expand mail-in voting.
On December 3, Kelly lost a similar case before the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court, which skewered the lawmaker's "extraordinary proposition that the court disenfranchise all 6.9 million Pennsylvanians who voted in the general election" and let the state legislature decide the election instead.
Pennsylvania and the five other battleground states that decided the election — Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada — all certified their results as of last week.
Tuesday is also the "safe harbor" deadline by which all 50 states and Washington, DC, have to certify their results and resolve any legal disputes surrounding the results. The Electoral College is scheduled to meet on December 14 to formally certify Biden's win.
The Supreme Court's rejection of Kelly and other Republicans' request in Pennsylvania adds to a string of bruising defeats for President Donald Trump and his allies as they seek to nullify the results of the November election. The Trump legal team, spearheaded by attorneys Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis, has repeatedly made broad claims alleging a vast election-rigging conspiracy by Democrats to steal the White House from Trump by conspiring with "big media" and, in some cases, dead communist dictators.
Notably, while representatives of the campaign publicly made those allegations, they did not argue them before a court. Instead, most of the nearly 40 legal challenges the campaign and GOP officials have filed contesting the election results focus on minor voting irregularities like disputes over "curing" ballots and whether Republican poll watchers were able to sufficiently observe the ballot-counting process. As of Tuesday, the campaign hasn't won a single lawsuit it's filed since Election Day.
The high court's decision will likely be particularly frustrating for the president, who has often said he expects the court, on which three justices are Trump appointees, to deliver him a favorable outcome.
"Let's see whether or not somebody has the courage — whether it's legislatures or a justice of the Supreme Court or a number of justices of the Supreme Court — let's see if they have the courage to do what everybody in this country knows is right," Trump said earlier Tuesday. "If somebody has the courage, I know who the next administration will be."
Two more lawsuits contesting the results are pending before the Supreme Court. One challenges a few thousand mail ballots in Pennsylvania that arrived at ballot processing centers after Election Day. The other is a lawsuit brought by the state of Texas against Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Wisconsin seeking to overturn their election results.