President Donald Trump has lashed out after the US Supreme Court rejected a bid by Texas' Attorney General Ken Paxton to overturn the results of the election.
In a series of tweets, the President lambasted the high court for cowardice and declared that if the swing states certified their election results they would be committing a "severely punishable crime".
Paxton's lawsuit argued that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin "exploited the Covid-19 pandemic" to enact "last-minute changes" to their electoral rules, "skewing" the outcome of the election.
Legal experts immediately predicted that the case would be rejected by the Supreme Court because individual states have no say over how other states conduct their elections. Pennsylvania does not get to sue Texas if it doesn't like how that state's system works, and vice versa.
Those experts were proven correct when the court rejected the lawsuit on Friday (US time). A Republican senator, Nebraska's Ben Sasse, delivered a stinging summary of the court's rebuke to Trump and his allies, saying "every American who cares about the rule of law should take comfort that the Supreme Court — including all three of President Trump's picks — closed the book on the nonsense".
Paxton's lawsuit was backed by 18 other Republican attorneys general and 126 GOP members of the House of Representatives. It asked the court to take the unprecedented, even outlandish, step of setting aside the 62 combined electoral votes for Joe Biden in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
The Supreme Court justices ended the suit as quickly as it began, saying in a mundane, three-sentence order that Texas had no right to question how other states conduct their elections.
The justices appeared to be unanimous in concluding that they would not disturb the electoral votes.
Presidential electors will meet tomorrow to formally choose Biden as president.
- additional reporting AP
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