Assuming everything else was the same, but we branch off into a parallel universe where the US Supreme Court just ignore facts and arbitrarily decided by a 5-4 vote (assuming Roberts side with the 3 liberal justices, because that’s probably the most realistic scenario) that Donald J. Trump is the winner of the election. What would happen? Civil war?
Asking because I’m a pessimist and always think of worst-case scenarios.
A case would have to be presented to the court. They don’t pick and choose cases from nowhere. Cases go from local to state to supreme Court (in general). Assuming the court decides to hear it, their decision would be legally binding. But that only applies to that case. There couldn’t and wouldn’t be a case of “who won the election”, it’s decided by the states and is clearly indicated in the Constitution. That’s why Trump desperately wanted to “send it back to the states”. The state legislatures and governors would be able to muck with the results, but thankfully that didn’t happen.
The most important votes are for local officials and don’t forget it.
The supreme court doesn’t decide the president of the unite states so probably nothing would happen. It would be very strange of them to make such an irrelevant declaration though and people would lose faith in the sanity of the courts.
people would lose faith in the sanity of the courts.
I mean, that part played out anyway…
Only for the half of the people that previously thought the Supreme Court to think along their thoughts.
Wait didn’t they decide it with Bush vs Gore? I read that Clarence was the deciding vote for why Bush was declared the winner even though he lost.
The Supreme Court decided on whether or not to recount in Florida. They didn’t directly choose the winning candidate
Your link doesn’t lead to anything, but if you are trying to suggest the supreme arbitrarily decided Bush won the presidency then that is factually incorrect. There was a court case about Florida’s ballots in particular that happened to be enough to sway the outcome of the presidential election.
The Supreme Court decided the election.
More to the point, they stopped the recount.
Which in turn declared Bush the winner when clearly lost.
Had the recount proceeded it was still close enough that either Bush or Gore could have won depending on which counties were recounted and how ballots were counted. Election post-mortems found that, had a limited recount proceeded as advocated by Gore’s lawyers, Bush likely would have won anyway. (Edit: A statewide recount as ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have likely given Gore the win.)
Florida also had those crappy punch card ballots that didn’t always cleanly punch, and eventually started falling apart if they were handled too much. (Anyone remember all the fuss about “hanging chads” and “dimpled chads?”) Any recount result was going to be dubious.
The Supreme Court shouldn’t have intervened IMO, but they didn’t directly decide the election.
Ok, but that’s not a useful statement. If you can arbitrarily change the rules or decide one person has the responsibility instead of another, you can decide the election without any direct involvement. And if they do that, I promise no one will give a shit whether it was direct. They didn’t directly stop abortion either, but birthing parents are still dying because doctors can’t help them. I guarantee their partners and orphaned kids dgaf if the Supreme Court did it directly.
But they didn’t decide it directly and arbitrarily, as OP is suggesting might have happened. The power to elect the President is in the hands of the Electoral College, and the House of Representatives. The most that a Supreme Court can do is tamper with the process of tallying the popular vote.
What would happen to a supreme court who decides that the moon has the shape of a triangle and is pink?
