U.S. Supreme Court Rejects Republicans' Bid To Halt Joe Biden's Pennsylvania Win
WASHINGTON (AP/KDKA) - The Supreme Court has rejected Republicans' last-gasp bid to reverse Pennsylvania's certification of President-elect Joe Biden's victory in the electoral battleground.
The court without comment Tuesday refused to call into question the certification process in Pennsylvania. Gov. Tom Wolf already has certified Biden's victory and the state's 20 electors are to meet on Dec. 14 to cast their votes for Biden.
Biden won 306 electoral votes, so even if Pennsylvania's results had been in doubt, he still would have more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president. Biden beat President Donald Trump by more than 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania, a state Trump had won in 2016. Most mail-in ballots were submitted by Democrats.
In the request, U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly, a Butler Republican, and Republican congressional candidate Sean Parnell had sought to either throw out the 2.5 million mail-in ballots submitted under the law or to wipe out the election results and direct the state's Republican-controlled Legislature to pick Pennsylvania's presidential electors.
Kelly and Parnell said Pennsylvania's Legislature did not have the authority under the state Constitution to pass no-excuse voting by mail. When the state Supreme Court said they were too late to raise that argument, Kelly and Parnell appealed to the United States Supreme Court.
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In court filings, lawyers for Pennsylvania and Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat, had called the lawsuit's claims "fundamentally frivolous" and its request "one of the most dramatic, disruptive invocations of judicial power in the history of the Republic."
"No court has ever issued an order nullifying a governor's certification of presidential election results," they wrote.
Having lost the request for the court to intervene immediately, Greg Teufel, a lawyer for Kelly and Parnell, said he will file a separate request to ask the court to consider the case on its underlying merits on an expedited basis.
Voting by mail in Pennsylvania was approved by the Republican-controlled legislature in 2019.
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