President Donald Trump’s shambolic legal effort to overturn his seven million-vote, four-and-a-half-point, 74 electoral-vote loss to President-elect Joe Biden has been nothing short of a national embarrassment. It has also been wholly ineffective, as the judicial system has stood firm on the rule of law, rejecting one specious Trump claim after another. Having been pummeled in court, the president is now taking his case that he be allowed to stay on as president, overturning Biden’s sizeable victory, to a handful of swing states, most recently Pennsylvania. Trump lost the state by more than 80,000 votes, or just over a point, but has been making calls to the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives Bryan Cutler to explore avenues to undo the election result. “The president said, ‘I’m hearing about all these issues in Philadelphia, and these issues with your law,’ ” a Cutler spokesman said, describing the House speaker’s two conversations with Trump to the Washington Post. “ ‘What can we do to fix it?’ ”
To be clear, the state of Pennsylvania already certified its election results two weeks ago. In fact, all but two states have certified their results, and Biden has well over 270 certified electoral votes, meaning Biden’s win is no longer “reported”; it’s official. But Trump is still scheming. “[Trump] did ask what options were available to the legislature,” Cutler’s spokesman told the New York Times. “Supporters of Mr. Trump’s baseless fraud claims have called on Republican-led legislatures in several states to overturn the results, although Pennsylvania’s General Assembly is out of session and cannot be called back except by Gov. Tom Wolf, a Democrat,” the Times notes. Trump has applied similar state-level pressure in Michigan and Georgia to get the state legislatures to overturn the vote.
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The effort underway by state-level Republicans in Pennsylvania shows the next front in Trumpworld’s ludicrous attempt to hold onto power. The Republican speaker of the House is one of 64 GOP state legislators that have gone so far with this ruse as to call on the Pennsylvania congressional delegation to reject the state’s electoral votes when Congress meets to formally confirm the results of the Electoral Collage on January 6. “The effort is highly unlikely, not least because the Democratic-led House of Representatives would need to agree to it,” the Times notes. “Pennsylvania’s most senior congressional Republican, Senator Pat Toomey, has said through his office that he ‘will not be objecting’ to Mr. Biden’s 20 electoral votes from the state.”
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