The Supreme Court’s 2020 “lack of standing” ruling was about Texas, not Trump

Donald Trump has a fresh grievance about 2020, and he has the wrong plaintiff. In a Saturday Truth Social post, he wrote that the Supreme Court wouldn’t hear “a great case” because the justices said “I, the President of the United States of America, had NO STANDING to bring such a case.” Then the kicker: “Think of it, the President, on a Federal Election, has NO STANDING over himself.”

The 2020 Supreme Court order that turned on standing, Texas v. Pennsylvania on 11 Dec 2020, denied Texas’s request “for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution.” Then: “All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.” That pile included Trump’s own motion to join the case, filed two days earlier, according to the court’s docket. So the plaintiff who lacked standing was Texas. His bid to join it was dismissed as moot.

What set him off was California. Trump wrote that Bill Essayli, the top federal prosecutor in Los Angeles, “caught a massive number of Illegal Votes, 20,000, but potentially Hundreds of Thousands, and maybe even Millions, and the Court has just ruled against it.” The 20,000 are voters the administration alleges may be noncitizens, the Los Angeles Times reports. Judge David O. Carter refused to set their ballots aside, writing that voters “must not be deprived of a core right merely because of unfounded allegations stemming from a procedure rife with uncertainty and errors.” A Ninth Circuit panel majority of one Trump appointee and one Biden appointee turned the administration down again, and late Friday Judge Trina L. Thompson barred it from threatening election workers.

By our math, “maybe even Millions” is at least 50 times the 20,000 his own administration flagged, and even those it only “alleges may be noncitizens,” per the LA Times. Along the way, Trump called Democrats “Trump Deranged Lunatics” and the Senate’s blue-slip custom a “SCAM.” One judge called the allegations unfounded. He answered in capital letters.