REUTERS/Joshua Roberts
- Former President Trump said the Supreme Court "should be ashamed of themselves."
- Trump slammed all the justices, except for Justices Alito and Thomas, in an interview with Lisa Boothe.
- The Court declined to take up several cases over the 2020 election results.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Former President Donald Trump said the Supreme Court, including justices he nominated, "should be ashamed of themselves" for not taking up cases relating to the 2020 election in a podcast interview with Fox News' Lisa Boothe released on Monday.
"The Supreme Court should be ashamed of themselves. Now Justice Thomas, Justice Alito, I'm going to take them about because they felt obviously different about what happened, but the Supreme Court should be ashamed of themselves," Trump said.
In the interview, Trump continued to falsely claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him and pushed misleading claims that entire states' election results were invalid because courts or other officials made changes to election rules without an act of legislation from a state legislature.
The Court declined to take up a last-minute, wide-ranging original jurisdiction lawsuit launched by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton that sought to have the Court overturn election results in five states that voted for President Joe Biden on the basis that election rule changes were made without the approval of the state legislature.
The order dismissing the case cited Texas' lack of standing in bringing the suit, stating that Texas had no "judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections." Justices Alito and Thomas said that they would have agreed to take the case, but would "not grant any other relief."
Both Trump and several Republican lawmakers signed on as amici in the suit.
The Court deadlocked 4-4 in a case where Republicans challenged the Pennsylvania Supreme Court's ruling to extend the deadline when mail ballots had to be received, from Election Day, November 3, to Friday, November 6. The Supreme Court's tie left the lower court ruling in place, but the Court instructed Pennsylvania election officials to sequester all ballots that arrived in that timeframe.
Around 10,000 mail ballots arrived in that timeframe, not enough to affect the outcome of the election either way.
After the election, the Court also dismissed two remaining cases over Pennsylvania's mail ballot deadline as moot in late February. Republican litigants in those cases advanced a theory known as the independent state legislature doctrine, which posits that only state legislatures and not courts or other officials have jurisdiction to change election rules.
In his dissent, Justice Thomas argued that the cases present a rare chance for the Court to definitively rule on a pressing issue in a case that isn't taking place in the midst of an election cycle.
"These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable," he wrote.
Notably, the justices included in the group that Trump said "should be ashamed" included the three he nominated between 2017 and 2020: Justice Neil Gorsuch, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, nominations that Trump heavily emphasized throughout his presidency.
In the months leading up to the election, however, the Court handed down several rulings that sided with Republicans or GOP-controlled states in blocking election changes like extensions of mail ballot receipt deadlines, lessening of witness signature requirements, and expansions of curbside voting, for example.