Last Thursday, the Trump campaign's challenge to the Wisconsin election results were heard - and firmly denied - in circuit court. Trump immediately appealed it to the Supreme Court of Wisconsin (SCOWIS), which surprisingly agreed to hear the case. Oral arguments were scheduled for noon on Saturday.
As the hearing was about to start, the federal judge who heard that level of Trump's complaint, shot it down, with prejudice, ending that line of pursuit for Trump.
The trial was full of strong questions and heated rhetoric. Justices Jill Karfosky and Rebecca Dallet, were on fire, asking Trump's attorney questions he couldn't or wouldn't answer directly,:
Karofsky, who joined the court in August, came out swinging early on in the oral argument against Trump attorney Jim Troupis, particularly against Trump’s decision to only target voters in Wisconsin’s two largest and most Democratic counties: Dane and Milwaukee. Among the ballots Troupis wants thrown out is his own.
“This lawsuit, Mr. Troupis, smacks of racism, and I do not know how you can come before this court and possibly ask us for a remedy that is unheard of in American history,” Karofsky said. “This is not normal.”
Dallet also questioned why Trump didn’t raise concerns about the same practices during the 2016 election. Troupis said Trump wasn’t an aggrieved party then.
However, the conservatives on the bench were much more sympathetic towards Trump's case, but even then, expressed concern about the overreach that Trump wanted to flip the election results.
Finally, on Monday morning, with less than an hour before the ten Wisconsin delegates were to cast their votes in the Electoral College, SCOWIS issued their decision denying Trump's appeal and confirming that the state was won by Biden. The ruling was 4-3, with the conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn siding with the liberal justices, as he had previously done on all of the other election cases that has come before them:
From the decision (pdf) issued by Hagedorn:
Our laws allow the challenge flag to be thrown regarding various aspects of election administration. The challenges raised by the Campaign in this case, however, come long after the last play or even the last game; the Campaign is challenging the rulebook adopted before the season began. Election claims of this type must be brought expeditiously. The Campaign waited until after the election to raise selective challenges that could have
been raised long before the election. We conclude the challenge to indefinitely confined voter ballots is without merit, and that laches bars relief on the remaining three categories of challenged ballots. The Campaign is not entitled to relief, and therefore does not succeed in its effort to strike votes and alter the certified winner of the 2020 presidential election.
Just as damning, if not moreso, was this footnote:
Granting the relief requested by the Campaign may even be unconstitutional. See Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 104-05 (per curiam) ("The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another.").
The part of this whole affair that bemuses me is not that Trump even carried this even this far. After all, he was merely using these challenges as an avenue to collect more campaign donations to pay off his campaign debt and for the legal defense funding, he will need so desperately after being evicted from the White House.
Surely, even Trump understood at this stage of the game, it wouldn't change a damn thing. Even if he won this case and got the ten electoral delegates, he still lost the national election.
No, the part that perplexes me is how anybody could have kept donating to this fiasco. I mean, didn't they see the writing on the wall, even after the first 40 or 50 straight losses handed to Trump from all over the country, including the Supreme Court of the United States?
