No one should be surprised that the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday refused to hear a highly unorthodox election challenge brought by the state of Texas, and which was endorsed by President Trump, over a hundred GOP lawmakers in Congress, and almost twenty other states.
If the High Court had opened the door for states to sue each other over how they conduct their elections, we would see Blue states happily dragging southern states before the U.S. Supreme Court over every voting rights issue possible.
That's not the way the system is supposed to work, and a handful of GOP lawmakers admitted as much before the Justices ruled.
"I cannot support an effort that will almost certainly fail on grounds of standing and is inconsistent with my beliefs about protecting Texas," said Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX), a strong supporter of the President.
Maybe more interesting is the large number of Republicans in Congress who decided to publicly endorse a lawsuit which was so constitutionally flawed.
In many ways, it was probably easier to sign on - rather than explain to strong Trump supporters back home why their name was not part of a brief backing the lawsuit.
But the mere presence of their support also raised immediate questions about their own view of the Constitution, and how far they would go to support President Trump.
A few GOP Senators publicly threw cold water on the Texas lawsuit from the start, acknowledging the odd position it might put Red states in for the future.
"Number one, why would a state, even such a great state as Texas, have a say so on how other states administer their elections?” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) told CNN.
Not surprisingly, the President sees it differently.
"The Supreme Court had ZERO interest in the merits of the greatest voter fraud ever perpetrated on the United States of America," the President groused on Saturday, sending out a series of tweets clearly demonstrating his anger with the Court, including the three Justices he put on the bench - Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett.
A few GOP lawmakers say the President is just dead wrong.
“I want to be clear: the Supreme Court is not the deep state,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), who has been a more vocal critic of the President in recent weeks.
“Complaining and bellyaching is not a manly trait, it’s actually sad. Real men accept a loss with grace,” Kinzinger added..
The President keeps claiming there was election fraud, but no judge anywhere around the nation has found such evidence.
Maybe the best summary so far came from a federal judge in Arizona, who tossed out one of the "Kraken" lawsuits a few days before the Supreme Court rejection.
"The allegations they put forth to support their claims of fraud fail in their particularity and plausibility," the judge wrote.
"The various affidavits and expert reports are largely based on anonymous witnesses, hearsay, and irrelevant analysis of unrelated elections," she added.
That's the situation in a nutshell. The Trump Campaign argues that voter fraud is possible - but they don't have any real evidence.
That's why the President, his campaign, state Republican officials, and GOP allies have lost nearly 60 cases in the courts - with just a single small victory several weeks ago in Pennsylvania.
Anyone else would end the fight at this point. But I don't think that will happen with President Trump.
Trump's behavior has been his normal lunacy. But I have been stunned at the number of lawyers who have trotted these asinine cases out, knowing full well their cases were full of dung and zero credible, admissible evidence. The arguments these lawyers have made would flunk them in law school. And the GOP commitment to the Rule of Law and to our Constitution has been dreadful. It is surprising, even when I expect the worst, to see them plumbing the depths of how to destroy the integrity of our system and to undermine faith in the bedrock foundation of our voice.
Is there no way for this to end? Can his legal machine continue to file actions even after the new administration is in? Aren’t there ramifications for filing frivolous lawsuits?