“Nope,” I told my friends at the Prime Minister’s Office on Dec. 9 when asked if anything will change as President-elect Joe Biden tries to survive the barrage of conservative legal challenges to overturn the 2020 presidential election. “Washington will just move ahead as if nothing unusual happened on Election Day,” I said.
Even though conspiracy theories remain popular in Tokyo, I knew that the U.S. Supreme Court rejected just a day earlier a legal request from Pennsylvania Republicans to overturn Mr. Biden’s victory over Donald Trump in the state. When I said “no” to my friends with great confidence, however, I did not know at the time that the State of Texas had submitted another lawsuit with the nation's top court challenging the conduct of the election in four other battleground states.
When I learned about the amicus brief signed by 126 Republican congressmen in support of the Texas lawsuit, I grew nervous and asked myself whether I had misled my friends. I also wondered if SCOTUS this time might take up and approve the motion by Texas. Fortunately, just 48 hours later, it was “denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution.” What a relief that was!