If Trump goes to the court, how likely is it that the court will cancel the election? And why? I may sound like too lazy to research on my own but I assure you that I did my research. Sadly, I haven’t seen anyone give an elaborate opinion about it. 
Assuming you mean Supreme Court, I’m pretty sure the SCOTUS can’t cancel an election even if they wanted to. Unless they issued the most wildly bizarre ‘interpretation’ of all time. Not even Clarence Thomas would. It would probably be a 9-0 vote against Trump.
As I understand it the SCOTUS can say for instance the freedom of the press in the 1st amendment allows Trump to be king for life for whatever reason they chose and there is no constitution path past that, final decision, case closed.
Zero. Zip. Zilch. None. Nada.
Did you forget your sarcasm tags?
No, there is no way they can do that.
And they can’t “cancel” the election. They can weigh in on whether a particular state has held/is holding its part of the election in a constitutional fashion; but they’re not likely to do so unless an at least halfway reasonable argument can be made that said state hasn’t done/isn’t doing so.
By “cancel”, do you really mean “invalidate”?
Nope, not gonna happen.
The SCOTUS can re-interpret the Constitution, but they don’t have the power to nullify or ignore it.
Maybe you haven’t been following the news but the general election was last Tuesday. So at this time, the possibility of the Supreme Court or anyone else cancelling it is zero.
The question now is whether the Supreme Court will invalidate the results from that election. And the possibility of that is pretty close to zero.
Trump had no desire to cancel the cancelation and he has no desire to invalidate all of the results. He just wants to have a set of results that declare he won the election. So his goal is to selectively invalidate a portion of the results in order to produce that outcome.
So he wants the cancellation to go ahead?
Let’s just say he didn’t not have no lack of desire to have it not done.
The Supreme Court can issue any ruling they want, no matter how twisted the legal argument be. What’s to stop them? “Norms”? Trump and McConnell have found that “norms” don’t apply to them. So why not the Supreme Court, too? What’s to stop them? The only people who would care would be all those socialist protesting in the streets. The Constitution is just a bunch of “norms” written in old timey English.
Agree. Further …
As a different President once famously said (maybe): “The {Chief Justice} has made his decision. Now let him enforce it.” Said another way, the Prez has the practical discretion to do, or not do, whatever the Supreme Court tells him to. Which practical reality has been demonstrated in spades over the last 4 years.
It gets more interesting when the Supremes are issuing edicts to various states that may or may not much care what SCOTUS says.
All of this is to say that it’s the good civilized behavior of the people in charge that give life to the Constitution, the laws, and the norms. Or in the absence, kill those same things.
The “rules of the game” will be abided by until somebody decides they don’t want to abide by them any more. That way lies anarchy, coups, revolution, dysfunction, paralysis, and all the rest. Some people in high places may be willing to run that risk in exchange for Power; Untrammeled Power!
Trump keeps getting farther and farther afield, and so far there’s no sign of a border beyond which he won’t be supported by enough of the government to let him prevail. Is there such a border? We’ll soon find out.
Likelyhood? Unlikely, but not impossible, if you’re referring to specific state rulings regarding how the election works. Trump (and his appointees on the SCOTUS) would have an uphill battle proving that somehow, just the votes for Biden aren’t valid, but that isn’t stopping him from making the claim. Demanding a careful recount considering how close the election is in key states would be legal, and well within precedent.
If he tried to get various votes thrown out, then things get a lot trickier. The states have the right to determine how the voting is done, and while there are always going to be errors (humans and machines aren’t perfect after all) I don’t see any legitimate grounds under which he’s going to get many votes thrown out. Would he be able to get enough thrown out . . . well that comes down to a final count and the inevitable lawsuits.
The last point brought up is the one that is worrisome, in that if he stands on his soapbox and proclaims to his teeming millions that everything anyone other than him says is wrong, and his appointees in the SCOTUS throw enough shade, that we might end up in a deadlock where no one is certain enough of the results to do anything. We’ve had threads before about what would happen if Trump lost, but the election has shown clearly that Republicans in power and their supporters DO NOT CARE about protecting their Democracy, but preserving their ‘winning’ at all cost.
As great as trilobites becoming unextinct in 2021.
Ways that an unpopular SC decision can be contradicted:
*Pass a constitutional amendment.
*Pass a new ordinary law that is tailored to avoid the basis of the prior decision.
*Just ignore the decision and dare anyone to do something about it. This happens more than we’d like to admit e.g. states continuing to outlaw abortion post-Roe.
*Coup/insurrection etc - if something as outrageous as “the Court declares someone president for life because we say so” were to happen, this is at least something of a possibility.
Hmmmmmm. Nah, not even that is worth a Trump win.
Andrew Jackson: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!”
I never feared the Court cancelling the election, for that is something they cannot do.
What they can do is issue a ruling on how to count votes, which ones to count, whether to extend deadlines, etc. But they can’t cancel elections.
I think that’s the theoretical argument that I would make.
I truly doubt they’d support mutiny, even in SCOTUS’s current configuration.
But in a recent conversation, I asked how SCOTUS could be stopped – by a really passionate dissenting opinion written by the minority ?
Is there another Court of Last Resort that none of us knows about ?
Enacting an amendment that overrides the Supreme Court’s decision. This is the reason we have the Eleventh and Sixteenth Amendments. They both overrode specific SCOTUS decisions ( Chisholm v. Georgia and Pollock v. Farmers’ Loan & Trust Co).
Personally, I’d like to see an amendment overturning Buckley v. Valeo.