Trump Says ‘We Need Nine Justices’ Before Election Day, Justifies by Repeating Conspiracy Theory About Mail-In Ballots

Reed RichardsonSep 22nd, 2020, 8:50 pm
 

During a press scrum outside the White House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump repeatedly insisted that there must be “nine justices” in place prior to Election Day, justifying the rapid replacement of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg by yet again pushing a baseless claim about widespread voting fraud from million of mail-in ballots.

As he prepared to board Marine One and travel to a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, Trump stopped to answer a few questions from the White House press. He was then asked about the nomination process, and announced that he would name his pick to replace Ginsburg on Saturday.

“We are getting close to a decision, going to be doing it on Saturday, meeting on Saturday, a lot of paperwork to do and I think it’s going to go very quickly,” Trump said.

In a follow-up, a reporter could just be heard asking if the president worried that going forward with the nomination in the final stretch of a presidential election might “tear the country apart.”

“I don’t think so,” Trump said casually, before intimating that his Supreme Court pick might be needed to break a tie in a Bush v. Gore-like ruling on counting ballots.

“We need nine justices. You need that,” he insisted, before repeating the baseless conspiracy theory that there would be widespread election fraud via the mail. “With the unsolicited millions of ballots that they are sending, it’s a scam, it’s a hoax, everybody knows that and the Democrats know it better than anybody else, so you’re going to need nine justices up there.”

In fact, conservative election lawyer Ben Ginsberg has thoroughly studied and debunked Trump’s voter fraud rhetoric. And notably, there were only eight justices on the Supreme Court during the 2016 election, after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell blocked President Barack Obama’s nominee Merrick Garland, a move that eventually set a record for the longest vacancy in SCOTUS history, 389 days. Trump wholly supported McConnell’s obstructionism and then got to name conservative Neil Gorsuch to the Court to take that seat.

“Doing it before the election would be a very good thing because you’re going to probably see it because what they are doing is trying to sow confusion and everything else and when they talk about Russia, China, and all these others,” Trump said before again spreading unfounded claims about counterfeiting paper ballots sent through the mail. “All [the Democrats] want to do is go forward with it so I think you are going to need the justices.”

Trump’s comments set off alarm bells in many commentators, who interpreted them as an obvious effort to ensure the majority of the Supreme Court would back any election challenges mounted by his administration and possibly even help he president “steal the election.”

Watch the video above, via Fox News.

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