With his legal options dwindling and time running out before a key electoral college deadline, President Trump on Thursday ramped up pressure on the Supreme Court to help overturn Joe Biden’s victory, gaining the support of more than 100 congressional Republicans in the unprecedented assault on the U.S. election system.
In a morning tweet, Trump called on the court to “save our Country from the greatest Election abuse in the history of the United States,” repeating his baseless claims of widespread fraud. He had a private lunch at the White House with some of the attorneys general from 18 Republican-led states asking the court to dismiss the results in four swing states that Biden won, an effort supported by the Trump administration.
By late afternoon, 106 GOP House members — a majority of the 196-member Republican caucus — had signed on to an amicus brief to support the Texas-led motion, among them Minority Whip Steve Scalise (La.) and Rep. Tom Emmer (Minn.), the chair of the National Republican Congressional Committee.AD
“78% of the people feel (know!) the Election was RIGGED,” Trump falsely declared in his Twitter post.
In fact, his campaign’s legal team has suffered more than three dozen defeats in federal and state courts, including the high court’s ruling Tuesday denying a motion to block Pennsylvania from certifying Biden’s win in that state.
Democrats denounced the last-ditch legal effort — filed this week by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a staunch Trump supporter who attended the White House lunch — to negate 10.4 million votes in favor of Biden in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The appeal to the Supreme Court came days before the statutory deadline Monday for electoral college representatives in each state to vote on final certification of the results and send them to Congress for ratification early next month. The justices could decide as soon as Friday whether to accept the case, which seeks to take advantage of the allowance that lawsuits between states may be filed directly at the Supreme Court.