They are both elected and appointed, selected by Democrats and Republicans alike.
Some have served for decades – while others took the bench only months ago.
One is a former high school teacher, another the first Native American woman appointed to a federal judgeship. A third worked for years for a Republican governor who has been a vocal supporter of President Donald Trump.
Since the November election, they have all ruled in court against Trump or one of his allies seeking to challenge or overturn the presidential vote.
In a remarkable show of near-unanimity across the nation’s judiciary, at least 86 judges – ranging from jurists serving at the lowest levels of state court systems to members of the United States Supreme Court – rejected at least one post-election lawsuit filed by Trump or his supporters, a Washington Post review of court filings found.
The string of losses was punctuated Friday by the brief and blunt order of the Supreme Court, which dismissed an attempt by the state of Texas to thwart the electoral votes of four states that went for President-elect Joe Biden.
Taken together, the judges’s decisions – some short and to the point and others sweeping defenses of American democracy – have comprehensively dismantled the arguments advanced by Trump in his effort to get the courts to subvert Biden’s victory.
In an era when so many institutions of American life have bowed to partisan tribalism, the dozens of opinions serve as a resounding reaffirmation of the judiciary’s nonpartisan commitment to basic principles of reason, fact and law.
“Voters, not lawyers, choose the President,” declared U.S. Circuit Court Judge Stephanos Bibas, a former prosecutor and law professor appointed in 2017 by Trump, as he rejected an attempt to throw out Pennsylvania’s votes for Biden.
“Federal judges do not appoint the president in this country,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Pamela Pepper, who was nominated by President Barack Obama. “One wonders why the plaintiffs came to federal court and asked a federal judge to do so.”
Trump’s attempt to block certification of Biden’s win in Georgia “would breed confusion and potentially disenfranchisement that I find has no basis in fact or in law,” wrote U.S. District Court Judge Steven D. Grimberg, whom Trump named to the bench last year.
Before Election Day, federal judges nominated by Trump largely ruled against efforts to loosen voting rules in the 2020 campaign, siding with Republicans seeking to enforce restrictions, a previous Post analysis found.
But conservative jurists are among those who have balked at the sweeping attempts by Trump and his allies to throw out millions of votes after they were cast – rejecting claims of irregularities as unfounded and challenges to the voting process as belated.
The Post found that 38 judges appointed by Republicans dealt blows to such suits, with some writing searing opinions.
The latest example came Saturday, when federal District Judge Brett H. Ludwig, a Trump nominee who took the bench in September, dismissed a lawsuit filed by the president that sought to throw out the election results in Wisconsin, calling the request “extraordinary.”
“A sitting president who did not prevail in his bid for reelection has asked for federal court help in setting aside the popular vote based on disputed issues of election administration, issues he plainly could have raised before the vote occurred,” he wrote. “This Court has allowed plaintiff the chance to make his case and he has lost on the merits.”
Trump asked for the rule of law to be followed, Ludwig noted, adding: “It has been.”
After appointing more than 200 judges during his administration, including three Supreme Court justices, Trump made clear that he believed the courts would side with his unprecedented attempts to reverse the election results.
“The Supreme Court has a chance to save our Country from the greatest Election abuse in the history of the United States. 78% of the people feel (know!) the Election was RIGGED,” the president tweeted Dec. 10.
After his latest gambit to get before the high court failed, Trump tweeted Saturday: “This is a great and disgraceful miscarriage of justice. The people of the United States were cheated, and our Country disgraced. Never even given our day in Court!”
In fact, Trump was given his day in dozens of courts. The refusal of so many judges to rule as he wished speaks to the limits on his ability to shape the judicial branch.
“Judges are in some ways, the last wall,” said Charles Gardner Geyh, a professor at the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University and an expert on the relationship between the judiciary and the rest of the government. “They are the branch of government that can say, ‘this far and no farther.’ ”
He added: “These are the people who are committed to the rule of law – and they’re the only ones who are right now.”
Since the Nov. 3 vote,Trump’s supporters insisted he be given a chance to challenge the results in court.
“The president has a right for every legal challenge to be heard, and he has a right to go to the Supreme Court with it,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., said on Thursday. He joined 125 other House Republicans in asking the Supreme Court to consider throwing out the results in four states.
Trump and his GOP allies repeated over and over again that they sought only to ensure that every “legal” vote was counted, while the president made outlandish claims about vote-rigging and fraud that he has asserted accounted for Biden’s more than 81 million votes.
In a blizzard of lawsuits across the country, Trump’s campaign and allied groups argued there were widespread problems with both the administration of the election and ballot security.
As of Friday, more than 50 of their cases had failed or been tossed out of court. Just one minor suit – which shortened the period of time in which Pennsylvania voters could fix errors on certain mail ballots – was successful.
Judges consistently found there was no substantive evidence to support claims of fraud and irregularities – that Biden’s votes were, in fact, legal votes.
Trump’s campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, due to voter fraud, nor in an amount equal to or greater than” Biden’s margin in Nevada, wrote state District Court Judge James T. Russell, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Army. A fourth-generation Nevadan, Russell’s grandfather was also a judge, assuming the bench after injuring his leg working on the railroad.
In Pennsylvania, Bibas – who sits on a federal circuit court, just below the U.S. Supreme Court – wrote: “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so.”
