The front page of The New York Times on Saturday showed history happening in something approaching real time. In an instant one could see the end of an effort by Donald Trump to, as the headline put it, “subvert the vote,” together with a turning point in the effort to end the pandemic.
The headline splashed across the top of the page proclaimed that the Supreme Court on Friday tossed out a lawsuit by Texas that sought to overturn the results of the presidential election. The ruling effectively ends an effort by Donald Trump to change the outcome.
Just below appeared the news that the Food and Drug Administration had authorized Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine for emergency use. The authorization clears the way for millions of people most at risk from the coronavirus to begin receiving the jab.
One commentator likened Saturday’s front page to those proclaiming the end of World War II. Though the latest milestones did not, fortunately, follow the use of a nuclear weapon, the ruling by the Supreme Court exploded an effort by Trump to overturn the results of the presidential election.
In an unsigned, one-page ruling, the justices said that Texas lacked standing (that is, a legally recognizable harm) to object to the ways that four states — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — conducted their elections.
The Trump Administration and more than half the Republicans in the House of Representatives backed the lawsuit, which asked the justices to consider the case as part of the Court’s so-called original jurisdiction.
The Constitution authorizes the Court to hear disputes between states directly, without the requirement that the dispute come through the appellate courts. In such instances the Supreme Court functions essentially as a trial court in which the justices weigh evidence and arrive at a verdict.
Texas had asked the court to delay certification of the voting by the Electoral College because “unconstitutional irregularities” in the four states made it impossible to know who “legitimately won the 2020 election.”
Each of the four states filed briefs attacking the lawsuit. “Texas has not suffered harm simply because it dislikes the result of the election, and nothing in the text, history, or structure of the Constitution supports Texas’s view that it can dictate the manner in which four other states run their elections,” Pennsylvania told the Court.
The justices agreed, writing that Texas “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.” For their part, Justices Samuel Alito and Thomas said that the lawsuit fell within the Court’s original jurisdiction “but would not grant other relief… and express no view on any other issue” in the lawsuit.