The Supreme Court on Monday rejected an audacious lawsuit by Missouri that asked the justices to intervene in the hush money case in New York in which former President Donald J. Trump was convicted of falsifying business records.
Andrew Bailey, Missouri’s attorney general, asked the court to defer Mr. Trump’s sentencing, scheduled for Sept. 18, until after the election and to lift a gag order limiting what he can say.
The Supreme Court’s brief order did not lay out the court’s reasoning. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. said they would have let the state file the suit, but they did not express a view about whether it had merit.
Mr. Bailey told the justices that his “modest request imposes no harm on the state of New York, but it ensures that voters in Missouri and across America are able to make their voices heard this November without one state interfering with the ability of everybody else to hear a major-party candidate campaign.”
Much of Missouri’s proposed suit was devoted to what it said were legal shortcomings in and political motivations behind the case against Mr. Trump.
In response, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, wrote that the suit was flawed in at least three ways. Missouri has not suffered the sort of injury that gave the state standing to sue, she wrote. New York was not a proper defendant, she added, as the case against Mr. Trump was brought by an elected district attorney, Alvin L. Bragg, who had exercised independent discretion. And there were, she wrote, other forums in which the questions raised by Missouri can be adjudicated.
Ms. James added that the trial judge, Juan M. Merchan, had substantially narrowed the gag order. “The trial court maintained only the narrow category of restrictions which prohibit former President Trump from publicly attacking the court’s or Manhattan D.A.’s staff, their families, and the families of the Manhattan D.A. and trial judge,” Ms. James wrote.
In suing New York directly in the Supreme Court, Missouri invoked a clause of the Constitution that gives the court “original jurisdiction” to hear disputes “in which a state shall be party.” In such cases, generally concerning boundary disputes or water rights, the Supreme Court acts much like a trial court, appointing a special master to hear evidence and issue recommendations.
Though the Constitution seems to require the court to hear cases brought by states, the court has ruled that it has discretion to turn them away and often does. In 2016, for instance, the justices turned down a request from Nebraska and Oklahoma to file a challenge to Colorado’s legalization of recreational marijuana. The states said the Colorado law had spillover effects, taxing neighboring states’ criminal justice systems and hurting the health of their residents.
More recently and more significantly, the court in 2020 rejected a lawsuit by Texas, which, in invoking its original jurisdiction, had asked the justices to throw out the election results in four battleground states that Mr. Trump lost that November. The court, in a brief unsigned order, said Texas lacked standing to pursue the case, saying that the state “has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
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