The rejection came swiftly. The celebrations came just as fast.
The Supreme Court’s unsigned order on Friday rejecting Texas’ bid to toss the results of the presidential election in four states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. unceremoniously ended a case that President Trump had teased only hours earlier as “perhaps the most important case in history.”
Democrats cheered the ruling as a symbolic final blow to more than a month of failed legal challenges by Mr. Trump and his allies and a victory for the will of voters who delivered Mr. Biden 306 Electoral College votes and a margin of more than seven million in the popular vote.
“The will of the people will be heard,” New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, said on Twitter. Josh Shapiro, the attorney general of Pennsylvania and a Democrat, said that the Supreme Court had recognized the lawsuit as a “seditious abuse of the judicial process.”
Though legal experts never gave the case much of a chance, it drew support from more than 120 Republican members of Congress and 17 Republican attorneys general. On Friday night, Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska was the highest-level Republican to break with Mr. Trump and much of his own party in applauding the ruling….
Rick Hasen, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, said the ruling, while unsurprising, was significant for the country.
“The good news is that our institutions held,” Mr. Hasen said. “While many Republican legislators and attorneys general signed onto Texas’s antidemocratic effort, Republican election officials who count the votes and Republican judges did not.”
Yet even among those who celebrated the outcome of the case, many feared the longer term impact of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric on public trust in democracy and the mechanics of elections.
“Pleased with the SCOTUS ruling, but also immediately slightly terrified of where this crazy train goes next,” Brendan Buck, an adviser to the last two Republican speakers, Paul Ryan and John Boehner, wrote on Twitter. He later added, “We should know by now there’s a bottomless supply of crazy.”
Not long after, Allen West, a former congressman and the chairman of the Texas Republican Party, slashed at the Supreme Court and said in a statement that hinted at secession that “perhaps law-abiding states should bond together and form a union of states that will abide by the Constitution.”