In earlier Supreme Court rulings on COVID, Trump team sees hope for its election challenge

Members of President Trump’s legal team said they are hoping that recent Supreme Court rulings showing the justices believe that COVID-19 health concerns can’t be used to violate the U.S. Constitution will also apply to their legal challenge to the presidential election results in four states.

The Supreme Court late last month struck down New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo's new COVID-19 restrictions on religious gatherings, as new Justice Amy Coney Barrett cast one of her first high-impact votes and Chief Justice John Roberts sided in dissent with the court's liberal bloc. In a 5-4 decision, the court said Cuomo's restrictions violated the Constitution's First Amendment right to freedom of worship and granted an injunction barring the rules from being enforced. The justices in the majority opinion wrote that “even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.”

Trump and eighteen states have now joined a motion filed in Texas asking the Supreme Court to invalidate the Nov. 3 election results in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, arguing officials in those four battleground states violated the Constitution by making changes to how ballots were cast and counted without legislative approval.  

“Well, emergency powers as the Supreme Court has now said in a couple of important COVID-related cases doesn't give you the right to ignore the Constitution, And I think that's true here as well,” John C. Eastman, counsel of record for President Trump and former dean at the Chapman University School of Law, told host Stephen Bannon on “War Room: Pandemic” on Real America’s Voice Thursday morning.

“It was very easy if they thought they needed to have an emergency alteration to their state laws to ask the legislature to pass it, and the Democrats did that in some states. But when they didn't think that the legislature would go along, this is trying to fulfill a long-standing dream of Democrats, to just flood it with absentee ballot so the fraud is hard to prove. And using the COVID as an excuse, I think, is intolerable.”