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The decision signaled that the court refused to be drawn into President Trump’s losing campaign to overturn the results of the election last month.
Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Supreme Court on Friday rejected an audacious lawsuit by Texas that had asked the court to throw out the presidential election results in four battleground states captured by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

The court, in a brief unsigned order, said Texas lacked standing to pursue the case, saying it “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”

The move, coupled with a one-sentence order on Tuesday turning away a similar request from Pennsylvania Republicans, signaled that the court refused to be drawn into President Trump’s losing campaign to overturn the results of the election last month.

There will continue to be scattered litigation brush fires around the nation from Mr. Trump’s allies, but as a practical matter the Supreme Court’s action puts an end to any prospect that Mr. Trump will win in court what he lost at the polls.

Texas’ lawsuit, filed directly in the Supreme Court, challenged election procedures in four battleground states: Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. It asked the court to bar those states from casting their electoral votes for Mr. Biden and to shift the selection of electors to the states’ legislatures. That would have required the justices to discard millions of votes.

Michael Gwin, a spokesman for the Biden campaign, said in a statement Friday night: “The Supreme Court has decisively and speedily rejected the latest of Donald Trump and his allies’ attacks on the democratic process. This is no surprise — dozens of judges, election officials from both parties, and Trump’s own attorney general have dismissed his baseless attempts to deny that he lost the election. President-elect Biden’s clear and commanding victory will be ratified by the Electoral College on Monday, and he will be sworn in on Jan. 20.”

President Trump departed after speaking at an Operation Warp Speed Vaccine Summit appearance at the White House, on Tuesday.
Credit…Doug Mills/The New York Times

The Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to stop Texas from challenging the election results in four key battleground states did more than merely kill an audacious effort to have nine justices rather than millions of American voters choose the president.

The high court’s ruling also effectively ended President Trump’s road to re-election through the courts. And what a long, strange road it has been.

No previous president has waged as widespread and as relentless a war against the election process itself as Mr. Trump has in the past several weeks. Starting even before Election Day, he and his Republican allies have filed nearly five dozen challenges to the handling, casting and counting of votes in every conceivable level of the courts in at least eight different states.

They have lost all but one of those efforts, often drawing blistering rebukes from the judges who heard them. Along the way Mr. Trump has not come close — even once — to overturning the election results in a single state, let alone the minimum of three he would need to seize victory from President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

If the expansive legal campaign has shown anything, it is that Mr. Trump and his supporters have been willing to stretch the boundaries of the law in seeking to change the outcome of this year’s presidential race, and it is possible that more suits may be filed before Inauguration Day next month.

But the Supreme Court’s decision in the Texas case and other circumstances suggest that Mr. Trump’s chances of success, which were formerly unlikely, are now all but impossible.

First of all, there simply aren’t many election lawsuits left. The Trump campaign and its allies currently have suits still pending in the local courts in Georgia and Arizona, but even wins in both would not be enough to alter the outcome of the election nationwide.

That would require a third win, in the campaign’s last remaining federal suit, which is now before a court in Milwaukee. And the judge in the case, Brett Ludwig, a Trump appointee, signaled at a hearing on Thursday that he was skeptical about the claims the suit made and the timeliness with which it had been filed.

Several suits that the president and his supporters have lost in lower courts are now on appeal, in both the state and federal systems, but the appellate process is quickly running up against a crucial deadline on Monday when the Electoral College is expected to cast its votes for Mr. Biden, all but sealing the results of the election.

After that, Mr. Trump’s last remaining chance to challenge the outcome will arrive on Jan. 6 when Congress will meet to formally accept the Electoral College’s vote, a process that is not likely able to be contested in the courts.

The Texas case landed in the Supreme Court after two previous waves of election suits.

The first batch of actions preceded the election and sought to end or pare back voting measures that states across the country had put in place to deal with the coronavirus crisis. In Texas, for instance, Republicans launched a failed effort in federal court to stop drive-through voting in Harris County, home to Houston. A similar move was made in Pennsylvania to stop the state from accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day.

After the election, Mr. Trump and his allies switched tactics, filing a barrage of suits in Nevada, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Georgia claiming that all manner of fraud had compromised the vote results.

They made accusations that truckloads of illegal ballots were brought in under cover of darkness to a convention center in Detroit; that poll workers in Atlanta were given suitcases full of fake ballots for Mr. Biden; that Iran and China working with local elections officials had hacked into and manipulated algorithms in voting machines.

While some of these claims were supported by sworn statements by witnesses, judge after judge in case after case ruled that the evidence they received was not persuasive, credible or anywhere near enough to give Mr. Trump the extraordinary relief he requested: a judicial order overturning the results of an election.

The filing of the Texas case to the Supreme Court marked a third turn in Mr. Trump’s litigation strategy, one that was presaged in other matters like the federal case in Milwaukee.

Having largely failed in their attempts to restrict expansions of the vote and in their efforts to tar the election as marred by fraud, the campaign and its allies have now tried to suggest that the way in which mail-in and absentee ballots were used in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Georgia was illegal. If that was true, they argued, then the entire elections in those states should be nullified, and Mr. Trump should win.

That is what Christopher M. Carr, Georgia’s attorney general, seemed to be referring on Thursday when he filed his response to the Texas suit.

“This election cycle,” he wrote, “Georgia did what the Constitution empowered it to do: it implemented processes for the election in the face of logistical challenges brought on by Covid-19 and confirmed and certified the election results — again and again and again.”

With its ruling on Friday, the Supreme Court gave one last confirmation to Mr. Carr’s claims.

Troops returning on Thursday from a deployment to Afghanistan at Fort Drum, in New York.
Credit…John Moore/Getty Images

The Senate on Friday overwhelmingly passed a sweeping military policy bill that would require that Confederate names be stripped from American military bases, clearing the measure for enactment and sending it to President Trump’s desk in defiance of his threats of a veto.

The 84-13 vote to approve the legislation reflected broad bipartisan support for the measure that authorizes pay for American troops for the next year and was intended to signal to Mr. Trump that lawmakers, including many Republicans, were determined to pass the critical bill even if it meant potentially delivering the first veto override of his presidency.

The margin surpassed the two-thirds majority needed in both houses to force enactment of the bill over Mr. Trump’s objections. The House also met that threshold in passing the measure on Tuesday, raising the prospect of a potential veto showdown during Mr. Trump’s final weeks in office.

The scene that played out on the Senate floor on Friday underscored how Republicans, who have been reluctant to challenge the president on any other issue during his four years in office, have been extraordinarily willing to break with Mr. Trump over one of the party’s key orthodoxies — projecting military strength.

“I encourage all of us to do what we have to do to get this bill done,” Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma and the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, told his colleagues in a speech from the Senate floor. “There’s no one more deserving in America than our troops that are out there in harm’s way, and we’re going to make sure we do the right thing for them.”

Congress has succeeded in passing the military bill each year for 60 years. But Mr. Trump has threatened to upend that tradition, pledging since the summer to veto the legislation even as leaders in his own party privately implored him to support it.

Mr. Trump first objected to a provision supported overwhelmingly by lawmakers in both parties in both chambers that would strip the names of Confederate leaders from military bases. In recent weeks, his attention shifted, and he demanded that the bill include an unrelated repeal of a legal shield for social media companies.

That demand, registered late in the legislative process, found little support among lawmakers in either party, who regard shoehorning a major unrelated policy move into defense bill as untenable. They have hoped that strong votes in both chambers would cow Mr. Trump into retreating from his veto threat. But the president has given no indication to date that he will do so.

If Mr. Trump were to follow through with his veto, the House would be the first to try at an override.

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Congress is still divided over a stimulus deal, but on Friday senators voted to stave off a shutdown with a one-week stopgap bill.CreditCredit…Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

The Senate on Friday approved a one-week stopgap bill to fund the government, buying additional time for negotiators to reach agreement on both a catchall government spending package and a coronavirus aid plan to address the economic toll of the pandemic.

President Trump has to sign the bill or funding runs out at midnight, and the government would shut down.

While lawmakers and staff on Capitol Hill continue to haggle over an aid plan, the two policy divides that have long impaired a coronavirus relief deal — a Republican insistence on sweeping coronavirus liability protections and Democratic demands for state and local funding — remain sticking points. Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, has suggested jettisoning both provisions in order to get a swift agreement on a narrower package, but many lawmakers are reluctant to resort to that.

Democratic leaders have said the starting point for talks should be a $908 billion bipartisan compromise being drafted by a group of moderates. It would include limited liability protections, $160 billion in state and local funding, $288 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program that extends loans to small businesses, and $300-a-week supplemental federal jobless payments until the spring. The proposal, for now, does not include direct payments from stimulus checks.

“These problems don’t go away,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, who is part of the group that is working on the bipartisan plan. “If anything, they just get bigger. So if we can just stick to it, get a proposal that we can advance that resolves not only goals like unemployment, P.P.P., food security, but also the state and local and tribal and the liability issue — this is what we’ve been working on. This is what we need to keep doing.”

A voter dropped off her ballot in Madison, Wis., last month.
Credit…Lauren Justice for The New York Times

In a hearing that suggested Wisconsin faced election interference from the dead dictators Hugo Chavez and Joseph Stalin, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, and Kanye West, Republicans heard from aggrieved President Trump supporters who offered an array of conspiracy theories to argue that Mr. Trump was the rightful winner of the state’s election he lost by 20,000 votes.

The daylong hearing was the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature’s first formal investigation into the Nov. 3 election, which nearly all of the state’s elected Republicans have refused to admit was won by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Wisconsin certified Mr. Biden’s victory on Nov. 30. Its 10 Electoral College members are set to cast their ballots for Mr. Biden on Monday.

The hearing featured complaints about ballot drop boxes, about early-morning reporting of results hours after Election Day voting ended, and about the increased number of votes from people who declared themselves indefinitely confined in their homes. Many speakers insisted that the state’s nursing-home residents had their votes manipulated by their caregivers.

It was the latest instance of Republican lawmakers in a battleground state amplifying false claims of fraud while seeking to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters in the lawmakers’ continuing effort to retroactively deliver the 2020 election to Mr. Trump.

Republican lawmakers who sought an avenue for appointing Mr. Trump’s slate of Electoral College members were told explicitly by the legislature’s lawyer that such a maneuver is not legally possible because state law gave that authority to the Wisconsin Elections Commission, which had already certified Mr. Biden the winner.

“I do not think simply having one lawyer say one thing makes it so,” said Shae Sortwell, a Republican state assemblyman. “It hasn’t been done before — it doesn’t mean it can’t be done.”

There was little new evidence presented five hours and 10 witnesses into the hearing, and even Mr. Trump’s attorney, who stated the president’s case for overturning the results of the election in Wisconsin, said his argument did not depend on finding systemic fraud.

“A lot of what is happening right now is not contingent on fraud being proven,” said Tom Sylke, the Trump lawyer.

Most Democrats on the committee announced they were leaving three hours into the hearing because they had not been allowed to question witnesses. Most of them attended via video and complained that the Republicans refused to unmute them.

“This hearing is a sham,” said JoCasta Zamarripa, a Democratic assemblywoman from Milwaukee.

Dean Knudson, a Republican on the bipartisan Wisconsin Elections Commission, repeated his contention that there had been no “credible evidence of large-scale voter fraud in Wisconsin.”

Yet Mr. Knudson did propose a series of new state laws, including changes to how municipalities report their results the night of the election, limit which voters can declare themselves indefinitely confined and provide a clear definition of the legality of ballot drop boxes.

Hunter Biden is being investigated by the Justice Department.
Credit…Paul Morigi/Getty Images

The newly disclosed federal tax investigation into his son will test President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s stated commitment to independent law enforcement while leaving him in a no-win situation that could prove distracting at best and politically and legally perilous at worst.

Unless President Trump’s Justice Department clears Hunter Biden of wrongdoing before leaving office, the new president will confront the prospect of his own newly installed administration deciding how or whether to proceed with an inquiry that could expose his son to criminal prosecution. Already some Republicans are demanding a special counsel be appointed to insulate the case from political influence.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Biden excoriated Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the F.B.I. and Justice Department to go after his enemies and go easy on his friends, vowing to restore a measure of autonomy for law enforcement if he won the election. News of the investigation into Hunter Biden now focuses even more attention on the incoming president’s choice for attorney general.

“That should not be investigated by someone appointed by the president any more than if one of his cabinet members is accused of something or his national security adviser,” said Richard W. Painter, a former ethics counsel to President George W. Bush who became a leading critic of Mr. Trump and switched parties.

Mr. Painter said Mr. Biden should establish a permanent special counsel to handle politically sensitive cases and restore faith that the Justice Department is not simply a tool of the president. “This is the opportunity for the incoming president and attorney general, whoever he chooses, to say this is exactly why we need an office of special counsel,” he said.

The president-elect has made no comment since Hunter Biden disclosed Wednesday that he had been informed about the investigation being conducted by the U.S. attorney in Delaware beyond a statement issued by his staff expressing support for his son. His office had no further comment on Thursday on how he would handle the matter once he becomes president.

Trump supporters take part in a demonstration on Nov. 7 at the Michigan State Capitol in Lansing.
Credit…John Moore/Getty Images

Michigan’s 16 electors have been assured that they will receive a police escort from their cars to the state’s Capitol on Monday when they cast their votes in the Electoral College for President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.

Stop the Steal, a group that believes, against overwhelming evidence, that the election was rife with fraud and stolen from President Trump, has posted on social media that they will protest the Electoral College vote from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the State Capitol in Lansing. It is the latest example of the influence Mr. Trump’s messages, even in his last days in office, have within his base.

And because Michigan is an open-carry state, demonstrations at the Capitol often include armed protesters both inside the building and on the grounds outside, although the Capitol building will be closed to the public on Monday.

“I’ve been rallying at the Capitol for many years and the only time I felt uncomfortable is when there were people milling around with guns,” said Bobbie Walton, 84, a lifelong political activist from Davison and first-time elector. “It’s terrible when those things are used to intimidate people. I might have to wear one of my favorite T-shirts: ‘Don’t push, I’m old.’”

County, state and federal judges in Michigan have dismissed efforts to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory in the state, calling allegations of voting fraud baseless and witness claims of nefarious activities at the TCF Center in Detroit, where absentee ballots were tallied, not credible. Michigan’s 83 counties and the state Board of Canvassers have certified the results of the election, which found Mr. Biden won by more than 154,000 votes.

Mark E. Miller, the clerk for the Kalamazoo Township, is looking forward to Monday despite the prospects for chaos at the Capitol.

“We will be doing our duty,” he said. “And while you’ve had armed people coming into the Capitol, there is no law against it, but that is strange to a lot of us.

“I’m trusting that the situation will be under control, so I’m not really worried,” he added. “But perhaps I’m being naïve.”

The Michigan State Capitol Commission, which runs the building made the initial decision to close the building for the Monday vote, said member John Truscott. The state Democratic Party, which is in charge of running the Electoral College vote, agreed with the move.

“Given the number of people who have been testing positive for Covid, we’re trying to keep everybody safe,” Mr. Truscott said. At least eight lawmakers and several dozen legislative staffers have tested positive for coronavirus.

The support of key Democrats, including Richard E. Neal, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, could be strong motivation for initiating trade talks.
Credit…Andrew Harnik/Associated Press

The chairman of the powerful House Ways and Means Committee urged the incoming administration to renew trade negotiations with the European Union, countering a pledge by President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. to postpone any new trade talks until after the United States has made significant domestic investments.

The statement on Friday, from Representative Richard E. Neal, Democrat of Massachusetts, raises the question of whether congressional pressure could persuade the Biden administration to take a more aggressive approach to trade negotiations with close allies.

Mr. Biden has downplayed expectations for new trade negotiations early in his term, saying he wants to first wrest control of the pandemic and make substantial investments in American industries like energy, biotech and artificial intelligence.

“I’m not going to enter any new trade agreement with anybody until we have made major investments here at home and in our workers,” Mr. Biden said in a New York Times interview last week.

But since congressional opposition would be one of the main obstacles to any new trade agreement, the support of key Democrats could be strong motivation for initiating talks.

Despite deep historic ties, the United States and Europe have not always had an easy trading relationship. The governments have argued for decades over tariffs, farm subsidies and food safety standards, and efforts to reach a comprehensive trade pact under both the Obama and Trump administrations were ultimately scrapped.

Marquette University in Milwaukee last month. Student debt has tripled since 2006 and eclipsed credit cards and auto loans as the largest source of household debt outside mortgages.
Credit…Taylor Glascock for The New York Times

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. is facing pressure from congressional Democrats to cancel student loan debt on a vast scale, quickly and by executive action, a campaign that will be one of the first tests of his relationship with the liberal wing of his party.

Mr. Biden has endorsed canceling $10,000 in federal student debt per borrower through legislation, and insisted that chipping away at the $1.7 trillion in loan debt held by more than 43 million borrowers is integral to his economic plan. But Democratic leaders, backed by the party’s left flank, are pressing for up to $50,000 of debt relief per borrower, executed on Day 1 of his presidency.

“I’ve got people with $130,000 in student debt. What’s $10,000 going to do for that person?” asked Representative James E. Clyburn of South Carolina in an interview. Mr. Clyburn, who speaks with Mr. Biden frequently, added that he did not think that what Mr. Biden proposed during the campaign “goes quite far enough.”

More than 200 organizations — including the American Federation of Teachers, the N.A.A.C.P. and others that were integral to his campaign — have joined the push.

The Education Department is effectively the country’s largest consumer bank and the primary lender, since 2010, for higher education. It owns student loans totaling $1.4 trillion, so forgiveness of some of that debt would be a rapid injection of cash into the pockets of many people suffering from the economic effects of the pandemic.

Many economists, including liberals, say higher education debt forgiveness is an inefficient way to help struggling Americans who face foreclosure, evictions and hunger. The working poor largely are not college graduates — more than 70 percent of currently unemployed workers do not have a bachelor’s degree, and 43 percent did not attend college at all, according to a report by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota, said he hoped the two parties could find common ground on the issue. He introduced a bipartisan bill that would allow employers to contribute up to $5,250 tax-free to their employees’ student loans, which was included as a temporary provision in the coronavirus relief law this spring.

A line of cars waiting for coronavirus testing at the Dodger Stadium testing location in Los Angeles on Thursday.
Credit…David Walter Banks for The New York Times

The Food and Drug Administration accelerated its timeline for issuing an emergency authorization for Pfizer’s Covid-19 vaccine after President Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, told Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, the agency’s leader, to consider looking for another job if the vaccine was not approved Friday, according to a senior administration official.

Regulators had been planning to authorize the vaccine for emergency use early Saturday. But on Friday morning, Dr. Hahn told officials at the agency’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research to act by the end of the day, according to one person familiar with his directive.

It is unclear whether shaving a half-day off the timetable for authorization would speed up the delivery of vaccine shipments to sites around the country or simply placate the White House’s desire for action. Several officials said that the delivery timetable was already set.

The pressure also did not alter the outcome of the process. F.D.A. had already determined it would approve Pfizer’s vaccine for emergency authorization after an advisory panel of experts on Thursday recommended that it do so, according to multiple administration officials.

But it nonetheless showed that even at the 11th hour, the White House was unwilling to allow regulators the independence to work according to their own plan as they processed key documents, including instructions to physicians for use of the vaccine and a fact sheet on the product. Pfizer was also required to review certain documents to ensure accuracy.

According to the senior administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, Mr. Meadows called Dr. Hahn to warn that he should consider looking for his next job if the authorization was not issued on Friday. The threat to the commissioner’s job was reported earlier by The Washington Post.

In a statement, Dr. Hahn denied that account. “This is an untrue representation of the phone call with the chief of staff,” he said. “The F.D.A. was encouraged to continue working expeditiously” on the Pfizer vaccine.

Shortly before 7 a.m., the F.D.A. put out an unusual statement, saying that it was moving rapidly to authorize Pfizer’s vaccine — comments that were later echoed by Alex M. Azar, the secretary of health and human services.

Minutes later, Mr. Trump lashed out at the agency and Dr. Hahn directly in a tweet, demanding that Dr. Hahn “stop playing games and start saving lives!!!” He called the F.D.A. “a big, old, slow turtle,” flush with funds but mired in bureaucracy.

Federal officials have said 2.9 million doses could be sent around the country within days of an authorization. That is only about half of the doses that Pfizer will provide in the first week. The other half will be reserved so that the initial recipients can have the second, required dose about three weeks later.

First in line to get it are health care workers and nursing home residents.

“We could see people getting vaccinated Monday, Tuesday of next week,” Mr. Azar said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” on Friday.

The new vaccine could not arrive at a better time — or, perhaps, a worse one.

The day before the panel endorsed it, the United States set another record for daily virus-related deaths, breaking the 3,000 mark. And on Thursday, reported deaths neared 3,000, and the case count — at least 223,570 new infections reported — made it the second-worst day since the virus reached American shores.



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