The court turned away Raland Brunson’s lawsuit that accused the justices of misconduct for dismissing his prior lawsuit.
In a rare move, all three liberal Supreme Court justices recused themselves on May 28 from a case involving a lawsuit filed against them for rejecting a previous lawsuit that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
In the case, the Supreme Court turned away a longshot bid by Raland J. Brunson of Ogden, Utah, who has gained notoriety among Trump supporters for his legal activism.
The case at hand is Brunson v. Sotomayor. The petitioner sued Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson in their official capacities for voting on Feb. 21, 2023, to deny the petition for certiorari, or review, in his previous lawsuit, Brunson v. Adams.
The three Democrat-appointed justices recused themselves, citing judicial disqualification mandates in the U.S. Code and the Code of Conduct for Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, which the nation’s highest court adopted in November 2023.
In Brunson v. Adams, Mr. Brunson sued hundreds of members of Congress in 2021, claiming that they violated their oath of office by not investigating election fraud in the 2020 election and by certifying the election victory of then-challenger Joe Biden over then-incumbent President Donald Trump in a vote that concluded in the early morning of Jan. 7, 2021, following the U.S. Capitol breach.
Rep. Alma Adams (D-N.C.) appears in the short title of the petition filed in the appeal because she was named first in the list of 388 respondents. Also included as respondents were President Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Vice President Mike Pence. The lawsuit sought the removal from office of President Biden, Ms. Harris, and the members of Congress.
In the unorthodox lawsuit, Mr. Brunson argued that avoiding an investigation of how President Biden won the election “is an act of treason and an act of levying war against the U.S. Constitution which violated Brunson’s unfettered right to vote in an honest and fair election and as such it wrongfully invalidated his vote.”
