Trump Counted on the Courts to Deliver Him a Win. He Lost

 Trump learned an important lesson in the nature of America's democracy: Presidents can appoint hundreds of jurists to the federal bench, but they have zero obligation to do his bidding.

President was hedging his bets on a judicial branch that now carries a powerful Trump imprint, hoping judges and justices would do what voters and state secretaries of state did not: give him a second term.

But in the end, the courts didn't come through for Trump, who Friday evening lost what was almost certainly his last, long-shot effort to hang onto power after failing in his reelection bid against President-elect Joe Biden by more than 7 million votes. A Supreme Court that is one-third Trump appointees rejected a lawsuit led by the state of Texas and joined by 17 other GOP-led states to challenge the results in several battleground states that voted for Biden.

For Trump, a former CEO and reality TV character used to publicly firing and belittling people who cross him, the experience was a final and important lesson in the nature of America's democracy and system of checks and balances. Presidents can appoint hundreds of jurists to the federal bench, but once in the job judges and justices don't work for the president and have zero obligation to do his bidding.

"It's not inaccurate to say that the three (Supreme Court) Trump appointees are extremely conservative. That doesn't mean they are going to do whatever the incumbent president or the conservative majority in the Senate or congressional minority in the House want them to do. It just doesn't work like that," says Mark Tushnet, a Harvard Law School professor who clerked for the late Justice Thurgood Marshall.

"They're conservative in an ideological sense, not in a partisan policy sense," Tushnet adds. The case launched by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was so weak, Tushnet says, that it was always going to be nearly impossible for the high court to rule in team Trump's favor.

"Even if they were extremely driven by pure politics – which they aren't, but even if they were – you have to give them something to work with," Tushnet adds. And Paxton's claim – that Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin conducted fraudulent elections, harming Trump-supporting Texas – was the thinnest of legal stretches, he says.

The high court order Friday – which said Texas had no standing to challenge other states' election results – followed an earlier abrupt rebuff of the Trump camp's efforts to overturn the election results. In a single-sentence with no stated dissents, the Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a lawsuit to throw out Pennsylvania's election results because of the use of mail-in ballots. Voting by mail had been approved by the GOP-controlled Pennsylvania legislature in 2019.

In Friday's brief rejection of Texas's case, two justices – Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas – said they would grant the plaintiff's right to make a complaint but would not provide any relief. Even that mild dissent, which went to a procedural matter, was not joined by any of Trump's three nominees to the Supreme Court.

In a separate case challenging Pennsylvania's majority vote for Biden, a federal judge who was nominated by Trump wrote a scathing opinion for the circuit court in denying the case.

"Calling an election unfair does not make it so," Judge Stephanos Bibas wrote. "Voters, not lawyers, choose the president. Ballots, not briefs, decide elections."

Presidents throughout history have been disappointed – sometimes vociferously so – by the jurists they have nominated to the court. Theodore Roosevelt was so upset by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes' vote on an antitrust case, it brought an "abrupt halt" to the friendship between the two men, Richard H. Wagner wrote in the Journal of Supreme Court History.

"The bitterness that grew between them reflected more than a difference of opinion over law and economic principles; it reflected the type of disillusionment that comes only when a friend fails to live up to expectations," Wagner wrote.

Surprises can go the other way, too. Barack Obama voted against the nomination of Chief Justice John Roberts, but it was Roberts who cast a pivotal vote upholding Obama's signature policy achievement, the Affordable Care Act.

Trump, however, has taken the expectation of judicial appointees to a new, highly political, level, says Columbia Law School professor Vincent Blasi, who has written about the unpredictability of courts and justices.

Trump flatly stated in September, when his trailing position in public opinion polls was foreshadowing his eventual loss, that the high court would decide if he kept his job.

"I think this will end up in the Supreme Court. And I think it's very important that we have nine justices," Trump said, days before he nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett to fill the seat of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

In recent weeks, Trump has called on the high court to show the "courage" he said is needed to discard the election results.

"It does seem that Trump is in a whole different world compared to previous presidents, in what he expects of people he puts in various positions of power," Blasi says.

But judges and justices don't typically view their jobs that way, Blasi adds.

"They are life-tenure judges. These people are not in the kind of bubble that some of these Trump true believers are, getting their facts from a whole different world. They take a lot of pride in their independence."

Independence from the man who gave them their jobs meant Trump will not keep his.