Donald Trump’s futile battle against his resounding presidential re-election defeat by Democrat Joe Biden could end this week in Wisconsin much the same way Trump’s destructive political career began. After descending on a golden escalator from his Trump Tower penthouse five years ago, Trump launched his candidacy spewing racist attacks on Mexican immigrants as rapists and murderers. He’s ending his presidency trying to throw out more than 238,000 legally cast votes from racially diverse urban neighborhoods in Milwaukee and Madison.
It’s a victory for American democracy that Trump’s similar racist attempts to disenfranchise black and brown voters in Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Savannah have been unanimously struck down by judges appointed by both Democratic and Republican presidents and by Trump himself. Trump claims President Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights laws haven’t made any difference, but they’re what prevented Republican voter suppression tactics from recreating the virulent racial apartheid that existed for decades in the Jim Crow South. They enabled Biden to win Georgia and Arizona.
But every responsible Wisconsin citizen should be concerned how eagerly elected Republicans joined Trump’s battle to destroy democracy itself in their state. Trump not only attempted to disenfranchise voters based on race and where they live, but he’s tried to invalidate hundreds of thousands of legally cast votes including lots of legitimate Republican votes in local elections if that might reverse Biden’s 20,000-vote victory over Trump in Wisconsin.
Trump’s challenge to Wisconsin’s voting has never made any sense. The corruptly gerrymandered Republican state legislature rewrote voting regulations over the past decade to give their party every possible advantage. Trump’s campaign funded a vote recount only in the two largest Democratic counties of Milwaukee and Dane, ignoring more than two-thirds of state votes cast in 70 other predominantly white counties. All the recount did was increase Biden’s lead over Trump by 87 votes to a winning margin of 20,695.
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Trump Sabotages GOP Votes
Trump, who claims all early votes cast in person in Milwaukee and Dane counties are invalid, now says he’ll legally challenge Wisconsin’s vote. That could throw out the votes of Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, just elected to succeed retiring Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner; Republican State Sen. Alberta Darling of River Hills and Republican State Rep. Jessie Rodriguez of Oak Creek; Jim Troupis, Trump’s attorney leading the Wisconsin vote recount, and Mark Jefferson, executive director of the state Republican Party. Jefferson absurdly sent out a text message saying he’s willing to give up his right to vote to assure proper election procedures are followed. Other voters, Republican and Democrat, probably aren’t nearly as eager to lose their constitutional voting rights.
Federal judges in other states have ruled against Trump’s attempts to change voting regulations after elections because he doesn’t like the results. Voters in a democracy shouldn’t be disenfranchised for following their state’s voting laws.
Trump is still hoping to get the U.S. Supreme Court to hear one of his bombastic, evidence-free cases claiming Democratic and Republican election officials engaged a nationwide conspiracy to declare Biden the winner and steal an election that Trump won “by a lot.” Trump publicly urged Republicans to rush Senate confirmation of extreme right-wing Justice Amy Coney Barrett so he would have three appointees on the court to hear the charges of Democratic vote fraud Trump began making months before the election. Biden made it a lot harder for Trump’s new majority on the Supreme Court to overturn the election results by winning more than 80 million votes, the largest presidential vote in American history, and 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, exactly the same margin Trump called “a landslide” four years ago when he was on top.
Clownish Lawyers
There’s another simple reason legal scholars believe Trump’s court challenges are unlikely to reach the Supreme Court. The few clownish lawyers like Rudy Giuliani continuing to argue on Trump’s behalf have never presented a coherent legal case or actual evidence to support Trump’s fabricated claims.
A three-judge panel of Republican-appointed judges on Pennsylvania’s U.S. Court of Appeals summed up Trump’s legal difficulties dismissing Trump’s attempt to stop certification of Biden’s Pennsylvania victory. Judge Stephanos Bibas, appointed by Trump, wrote the decision: “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
Justin Levitt, a voting rights expert at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, said there’s little chance of the Supreme Court accepting any of the nearly three dozen Trump cases dismissed by state and federal courts. “At this point, this is zombie litigation, but it’s not one of those zombies anybody is afraid of. It’s just slowly rotting in the corner.” The Supreme Court sometimes accepts strange cases, Levitt said. “But they only take cases where the facts or the law — and usually both — present some sort of credible legal question and that’s not even close to true here.”
Joel McNally was a critic and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal for 27 years. He has written the weekly Taking Liberties column for the Shepherd Express since 1996.
