Tuesday December 8 – safe harbor day: each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president.
In the New York Times on Monday: Intensifying his efforts to undo his loss to Joseph R. Biden Jr., President Trump twice called the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives in recent days to encourage challenges to the official results in the state…. Pennsylvania is the third state in which Mr. Trump is known to have reached out to top elected Republicans to try to reverse the will of voters. He earlier summoned Michigan legislative leaders to the White House, and over the weekend he pressed Gov. Brian Kemp of Georgia to call upon that state’s legislature to reverse the election.
Then on Tuesday: The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused a long-shot request from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory in the state, delivering an unmistakable rebuke to President Trump in the forum on which he had pinned his hopes.
The Texas lawsuit to overturn votes in swing states that went for was released on Tuesday December 8. It asked the court to “enjoin the use of unlawful election results without review and ratification by the defendant states’ legislatures,” meaning it would allow GOP held state legislatures to appoint their own slate of electors for the Electoral College.
Here is the original filing.
By Friday the Supreme Court had rejected the Texas case.
Analysis by the New York Times: The court’s decision on Friday night, an inflection point after weeks of legal flailing by Mr. Trump and ahead of the Electoral College vote for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday, leaves the president’s party in an extraordinary position. Through their explicit endorsements or complicity of silence, much of the G.O.P. leadership now shares responsibility for the quixotic attempt to ignore the nation’s founding principles and engineer a different verdict from the one voters cast in November…. And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.
During a Friday night, contentious Oval Office meeting Trump floated the idea of appointing election conspiracy theorist Sydney Powell to his administration, directing Homeland Security to seize voting machines, and using the military to help keep him in power. Flynn and Guilliani were present.
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