Donald Trump lost a federal court challenge on Saturday in Wisconsin while judges said yet another case being fought there “smacks of racism”.
The slap-downs came less than 24 hours after the abrupt dismissal by the US supreme court of the most audacious Republican attempt yet to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in the election almost six weeks ago.
But despite the latest stinging legal defeats and rebukes, Trump took to the skies in the Marine One presidential helicopter on Saturday on his way to an engagement in New York and flew above a protest of several hundred diehard supporters in Washington DC, who persist in bolstering his false claims that the election was “stolen” from him by fraud and conspiracy.
This as the US electoral college will vote on Monday to confirm Biden’s resounding victory, alongside his Democratic vice president-elect, Kamala Harris.
And a trickle of Republicans joined leading Democrats in speaking up about the increasing futility but also the insidiousness of the lame duck president’s aggressive clinging to power.
After the supreme court decision, Christine Todd Whitman, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said of the Trump campaign challenges to the election result: “It is now truly over. Trump and his acolytes need to stop all efforts to deny millions of votes.”
More than 120 Republican members of the House of Representatives wrote an amicus brief to the supreme court last week in support of the lawsuit brought by Texas, which had been joined by Trump and aimed to overturn Biden’s victory in four key swing states, which the court on Friday night abruptly refused to consider.
Michael Steele, the former chair of the Republican National Committee, called the effort “an affront to the country”.
“It’s an offense to the constitution and it leaves an indelible stain that will be hard for these 126 members to wipe off their political skin,” he told the New York Times.
In Wisconsin on Saturday, the US district judge Brett Ludwig dismissed one of Trump’s latest lawsuits there that asked the court to order the state’s Republican-controlled legislature to name him as the winner, whereas in fact Biden won Wisconsin on his way to winning the White House.
Even as Ludwig said Trump’s arguments “fail as a matter of law and fact” an attorney for the president, Jim Troupis, was busy arguing in another case, before a skeptical Wisconsin state supreme court, a lawsuit that, if successful, would disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters in Wisconsin’s most diverse counties, Dane and Milwaukee, where Biden won.
Trump is not challenging any votes in Wisconsin counties that he won.
“This lawsuit, Mr Troupis, smacks of racism,“ the justice Jill Karofsky said to Trump’s attorney early in his arguments.
“I do not know how you can come before this court and possibly ask for a remedy that is unheard of in US history … It is not normal,” she added.
One of Karofsky’s fellow judges in that case, where a decision is now awaited, pointed out that Trump also did not make such challenges when he won Wisconsin on his way to the White House in 2016.
Source: Elections - theguardian.com
