https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/203371np.pdfPennsylvania case
Federal appeals court rejects a Trump election lawsuit: “Calling an election unfair does not make it so”
The Trump campaign can’t stop losing election lawsuits.
President Donald Trump continued to misleadingly cast doubt on the results of the 2020 presidential election — which was won three weeks ago by President-elect Joe Biden — in the early hours of Saturday morning. But with lawsuit after lawsuit failing in courts, and the federal election certification deadline approaching, Trump is quickly running out of road to attempt overturning the election.
The president’s latest legal defeat came Friday when a three-member appeals court rejected a Trump campaign suit against Pennsylvania election officials that alleged the state engaged in “unconstitutional discrimination” against Trump voters in a scathing, unanimous decision that found the president’s lawsuit had “no merit.”
Specifically, the suit asked two things of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals: to reverse a lower court decision blocking Trump’s legal team from amending its complaint to include claims that poll watchers were barred from observing the vote counting process, and to issue an injunction “to prevent the certified vote totals from taking effect.” (Pennsylvania certified its election results on Tuesday.) The court granted neither.
In its decision, the court highlighted the Trump legal team’s lack of evidence of its claims, and rebuked the lawyers for making “vague and conclusory” allegations, and for requesting a remedy “grossly disproportionate to the procedural challenges raised.”
“The Campaign never alleges that any ballot was fraudulent or cast by an illegal voter,” Judge Stephanos Bibas, who was nominated to the court by Trump in 2017, wrote for the court. “It never alleges that any defendant treated the Trump campaign or its votes worse than it treated the Biden campaign or its votes. Calling something discrimination does not make it so.”
“Charges of unfairness are serious,” Bibas wrote. “But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
Previously, Trump’s Pennsylvania lawsuit was dismissed in federal district court in a similar, equally scorching decision by Judge Matthew Brann, who wrote that “this Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence.”
In a tweet after the decision was published, Trump campaign legal adviser Jenna Ellis, who in 2016 referred to Trump as an “unethical, corrupt, lying, criminal, dirtbag,” decried the “activist judicial machinery in Pennsylvania.”
“On to SCOTUS,” Ellis wrote Friday.
However, there’s no guarantee that the Supreme Court will accept the case if the Trump campaign follows through on an appeal, experts say, and even less that the Court would rule in its favor.
“Yes, the Trump campaign can now ‘go to #SCOTUS,’ but with what?” wrote University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck on Twitter. “The Court is never going to take up this dumpster-fire of a lawsuit. And, as today’s unanimous Third Circuit opinion written by a Trump appointee makes clear, there’s no remote basis for an injunction pending appeal.”
The Trump campaign faces equally slim chances of success elsewhere.