Supreme Court refuses quick action on last-ditch Trump election

The Supreme Court on Monday rejected efforts by President Donald Trump and his allies to get the court to quickly consider challenges to President-elect Joe Biden‘s victory in the November election. The move effectively shut the door on the president’s last-ditch legal strategy to overturn his defeat.

The court released an order in the morning denying expedited consideration to suits filed by Trump’s campaign challenging election procedures in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

It similarly denied requests from the conservative conspiracy theorists L. Lin Wood and Sidney Powell to expedite challenges to the elections in Michigan and Georgia, as well as other suits filed by Trump supporters.

The action by the court was widely expected and was not accompanied by any explanation or opinion, as is typical in such denials. There were no noted dissents from any of the court’s nine justices.

The court could still theoretically agree to take cases related to the election, but likely would not hear arguments before October, well into Biden’s first year in office.

The justices returned from their winter recess to convene for a private conference on Friday. The order list released on Monday is the first since the D.C. riot last week in which a mob of Trump supporters sought to delay the confirmation of Biden’s victory over Trump in the Electoral College.

The court had made it clear that it would not process the cases on the schedule Trump asked for even before issuing the order.

For instance, in Trump v. Boockvar, one of the cases challenging the Pennsylvania election procedures, the president’s attorney, John Eastman, urged the court in a December brief to take up the case before Jan. 6, when Congress met to finalize the Electoral College tally.

Eastman wrote that if the court did not act before Jan. 20, when Biden will be inaugurated, “it will be impossible to repair election results” that included ballots that he alleged were cast unlawfully based on rules approved by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.

Trump has furiously contested his loss to Biden in a manner unprecedented in modern U.S. history.

On Monday, Democrats in the House of Representatives introduced an impeachment article based on his actions at a rally ahead of the Capitol siege, in which he urged supporters to “fight” and his attorney, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, called for “trial by combat.”

The legal challenges that the Supreme Court refused to expedite included a challenge from Kelli Ward, head of the Arizona Republican Party, to the Electoral Count Act; a challenge from Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., to no-excuse mail-in voting in his state; and two conspiracy-theory-laden complaints brought by ex-Trump attorney Powell regarding the elections in Michigan and Georgia.

Powell, who has claimed falsely among other things that…