High Court Rejects Republicans’ Bid to Halt Biden’s Pennsylvania Win

On December 8, 2020, the Supreme Court rejected the Republicans’ bid to reverse Pennsylvania’s certification of President-elect Joe Biden. Democratic Gov., Tom Wolf has already certified Biden’s victory over President Donald Trump.

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No matter the case, Biden won 306 electoral votes, so even if Pennsylvania’s results had been in doubt, Biden would have more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president. The court’s decision to not intervene came in a lawsuit led by Republican U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, GOP congressional candidate, and Sean Parnell. Parnell lost to Pittsburgh-area U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb, a Democrat.

On Twitter, Lamb said that even Republicans and Trump appointees saw this for what it was – a charade. For court filings, lawyers for Pennsylvania and Gov. Tom Wolf, who is a Democrat, had called the lawsuit’s claims “one of the most dramatic, disruptive invocations of judicial power in the history of the Republic” and “fundamentally frivolous”. Tom Wolf also stated that no court has ever issued an order nullifying a governor’s certification of the presidential election results.

Republican U.S. Sen., Ted Cruz of Texas offered to argue the case if the high court took it. After losing the request for the court to intervene immediately, Greg Teufel, a lawyer for Parnell and Kelly, said he will file a separate request to ask the court to review the case on an expedited basis and its underlying merits.

Trump was defeated by Biden by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016. A majority of mail-in ballots were submitted by Democrats. In the lawsuit, Parnell, Kelly, and the other Republican plaintiffs had sought to either direct the state’s Republican-controlled Legislature to pick Pennsylvania’s presidential electors or throw out the 2.5 million mail-in ballots that were submitted.

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