FACT CHECK: Biden Falsely Claims Supreme Court Heard 2020 Election Challenges

CLAIM: The Supreme Court, among other courts, heard the challenges to the 2020 presidential election results, twice.

VERDICT: FALSE. The Supreme Court declined to hear the election challenges, and never considered the evidence.

President Joe Biden gave a speech Tuesday in support of Democrats’ controversial voting reform bill, H.R. 1/S. 1, the “For the People Act.” As Breitbart News has previously explained, the legislation “would radically change American democracy, nationalizing elections and making permanent changes to voting rules that would virtually ensure Democrats never lose another election.”

In the course of his speech, Biden made several alarming claims, referring to voting reforms passed in Georgia as a “vicious anti-voting law” though it is more liberal than the rules in Biden’s own state of Delaware, and adding: “The 21st Century Jim Crow assault is real, it’s unrelenting, and we’re gonna challenge it vigorously.” He claimed that Republicans were “targeting people of color,” though voters of every race favor voter ID and other Republican voter integrity policies.

Biden also attacked what he called the “big lie” that the election was stolen. To do so, he claimed that the Supreme Court, among other courts and legislatures, had heard the merits of the challenges to the 2020 election result. He said:

The 2020 election was the most scrutinized election ever in American history. Challenge after challenge brought to local state election officials, state legislature, state and federal courts, even to the United States Supreme Court. Not once. but twice.  More than 80 judges, including those appointed my predecessor, heard the arguments. Every case. Neither cause nor evidence was found.

Biden’s statement is false as regards the Supreme Court, which never heard about any “cause” or “evidence,” but simply declined to hear the challenges brought by Republicans. It declined, for instance, to hear an appeal from a Pennsylvania Supreme Court case that rejected a challenge to the state’s vote-by-mail law; and it also declined to hear a challenge that Texas filed against election law changes in Pennsylvania and three other states, saying that Texas lacked standing to sue.

Rightly or wrongly, the Supreme Court stayed out of the 2020 election — perhaps fearing the political fallout were it to intervene, as it did in Bush v. Gore (2000), a case that caused Democrats to accelerate their attacks on the judiciary.

Biden’s claim that the election was “the most scrutinized election ever in American history” also misses the point. The election laws were changed, in the middle of the campaign, to allow mass vote by mail — at the behest of Democrats, and over the objections of Republicans. The rate of rejection of absentee ballots dropped dramatically from the primary to the general election, despite millions more ballots being delivered by mail. And private money from left-wing billionaires such as Mark Zuckerberg was used to fund local vote by mail efforts in Democratic counties in key battleground states.

Republican challenges were not only about claims of election fraud, but about the legitimacy and constitutionality of changes that legalized voting practices that until recently were considered vulnerable to fraud and partisan manipulation.

Biden also said: “In America, if you lose, you accept the results.” He and his party spent years hyping false claims that “Russian collusion” was responsible for the 2016 election result. They have neither recanted for that, nor apologized.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.