Good news here from the Court. I’m expecting Trump’s 3 appointees—together with Justices Alito and Thomas—to make some truly outrageous decisions, but at least overturning the duly certified results in PA won’t be one of them. That would be worse than outrageous; it would be a coup. Trump was naive (or frighteningly authoritarian) to think the justices would support such frivolous claims. Not even one of the six Republican appointees had his back. The judiciary has proved itself a worthy guardian of the vote this time around.

As the NYTimes reported, “Mr. Trump and his Republican allies have lost about 50 challenges to the presidential election in the past five weeks, as judges in at least eight states have repeatedly rejected a litany of unproven claims — that mail-in ballots were improperly sent out, that absentee ballots were counted wrongly, that poll observers were not given proper access to the vote count and that foreign powers hacked into and manipulated voting machines. Mr. Trump has not come close — even once — to overturning the results of a single state’s election, let alone the results in at least three states that he would need to take a victory from Mr. Biden. And around the country, judges have started to express their frustration with his attempts to have the courts substitute their will for those of voters.”

Judges have proven themselves unwilling participants in Trump’s attempted coup, unlike Republican officeholders and Trump’s base. So I suppose Trump’s and the GDP’s strategy will now focus on how to eliminate the last vestiges of judicial independence. But for now at least, we can be grateful that judges still care about evidence.