With a single sentence, the U.S. Supreme Court has denied a late request from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn the state's election results.
The terse order read: "The application for injunctive relief presented to Justice Alito and by him referred to the court is denied." There was no opinion attached.
This is a huge blow for President Donald Trump and his allies seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
CBS News election law expert David Becker says this was not a surprise. "There were no fax or law to support the claims made by representative (Mike) Kelly and others in this case, which sought to throw out millions of legally cast votes in Pennsylvania."
This request came from U.S. Rep. Mike Kelly from Erie. He argued that Pennsylvania's vote-by-mail law, Act 77, that was signed last year is unconstitutional.
This was a bill that almost every Republican in the state House supported last year. It was bipartisan legislation, negotiated by Republicans and Gov. Tom Wolf. The final product even drew some criticism from Democratic lawmakers.
Whatever the case, Wolf certified the election results, and the commonwealth's 20 electors will meet next week to cast their ballots for Joe Biden.
Not quite the last nail in the coffin
CBS News legal analyst Thane Rosenbaum says there's really nothing to read into the one-sentence output from the Court.
"They're basically saying, 'We don't want to hear it,' .. which is different from a case that they heard," he said.
"Had they decided to hear the case and have the attorneys brief the material, have an oral argument, then they would have provided a real opinion, but because they chose literally not to hear it at all, it's not that uncommon for them to do it in one sentence."
He says he thinks Trump's legal team had been banking on the Pennsylvania case that the Supreme Court refused to hear.
"They actually thought that Justice Alito ... was leading the charge among the Supreme Court justices, and that hopefully he could have brought along with him the other conservative justices. But apparently not."
Rosenbaum says he's "a little surprised" that Alito was unable to get his colleagues to take up the issue, but he understands there are reasons why individually the justices would want to stay away from the case.
"You can almost imagine (Justice) Amy Coney Barrett not wanting this job, right?" he said. "Even though she was the last one appointed, she doesn't want her legacy to be that she was appointed merely for the purposes of preserving President Trump's presidency."
Rosenbaum says this is not quite the last nail in the coffin for Trump's attempts to overturn the election results. There is one more case that will go to the Supreme Court in the next few days, brought by the Texas attorney general against four states: Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
"The Texas case to me is much more complicated, truly unprecedented," Rosenbaum said
"When states sue states, the Supreme Court does have original jurisdiction. But when state sue states, it's usually -- water rights is a very good example -- encroachment by one state over another. Never before have we had one state say to four other states, 'We'd like you to overturn your your state election results for the presidency.'"
