As the Electoral College voted on Monday to affirm President-elect Joe Biden’s victory on Monday, President Donald Trump moved to add yet another loss to his almost-unblemished record of post-election legal defeats.
Like a boxer attempting to rise from the mat hours after the last bell has rung, the crowd has left, and the janitor has swept up the popcorn, the lame-duck president’s team filed a federal suit in New Mexico—a state Biden carried by close to 100,000 votes—seeking an injunction against “any official action” by the state’s five electors. The motion appears dead-on-arrival, since the filing roughly coincided with the panel Land of Enchantment voting to award the state to Biden.
The suit largely repeats arguments Republicans have made regarding far-closer states than New Mexico, and which state and federal judges, all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, have dismissed with varying degrees of derision: that state executives usurped the legislature’s constitutional powers by instituting new mail-in voting rules in response to the pandemic.
