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Blame Legislators, not Supreme Court Justices
Don’t blame the Supreme Court for the cowardice or complicity of the fools and knaves who populate far too many of our legislatures. From the federal to the local level, legislatures have been cowering behind the other two branches of government, notably since the end of the “15 days to slow the spread” of a new strain of respiratory virus. Long before then, Republicans at the federal, state, and county legislative levels have largely failed to positively assert the virtue of protecting real voters against the real disenfranchisement of ballot-box stuffing, in all its forms. They have, with exceptions like Ohio and Florida, to name two of a few good examples, failed to zealously protect the franchise at the core of our republic’s continuing viability. So, it is state-level Republican’ts, abetted by the United States congressional delegations of Republican’t fools and knaves, who have created the mess that courts are now being asked to clean up, without the proper political backing.
John Fund and Hugh Hewitt, neither one a conspiracy theorist or fringe media person, both wrote serious books on the entirely real problem of voter fraud in our nation. They both published their books on this topic in 2004, shocked into action by the 2000 presidential election debacle. John Fund wrote Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Hugh Hewitt wrote If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat: Crushing the Democrats in Every Election and Why Your Life Depends on It. That same year, historian Tracy Campbell published Deliver the Vote: A History of Election Fraud, an American Political Tradition-1742-2004 (on loan at archive.org). Fund followed up in 2012 with a co-authored book going further into the subject: Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk. His warning then:
While Americans frequently demand observers and best practices in the elections of other countries, we are often blind to the need to scrutinize our own elections. We may pay the consequences in 2012 if a close election leads us into pitched partisan battles and court fights that will dwarf the Bush-Gore recount wars.
Last last week, we saw Texas and several other states seek the direct intervention of the US Supreme Court, suing other states so that the Supremes would be the proper original court to hear their case. This was doomed to fail, not because of “standing” but because of political reality. Yes, there were very good explanations of “standing” in comments about stories on this very public, serious, newsworthy story. It was well worth public discussion. After all, Senator Ted Cruz, a serious, successful Supreme Court litigator and current important US Senator, was on board with the lawsuit. AND. The result, with all three Trump appointees joining the four leftists on the court, was entirely understandable.
“Standing,” like “ripeness,” and “case or controversy,” is a useful filtering tool that allows courts to avoid directly addressing disputes on their merits. It is true that they also keep every single dispute between two or more people from landing on a court’s docket. There must be limits. You want limits so that you cannot be hauled into any court at any time by anybody who has some bone to pick with you, or who might want to use the legal system to shake you down or ruin you. AND. The Supreme Court will find some party to a dispute has “standing” if they want to rule on/make up law.
Texas and the other states who are outraged by Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Georgia, have a real point that their citizens and their electors have suffered real harm and will do so for at least the next four years, if the states being sued have in fact fraudulently awarded the actual loser the nationwide victory and power of the presidency (at least) by a series of failures to enforce their own state laws designed to protect their citizens from ballot box stuffing. AND. The Supreme Court was put in a no-win position.
Mark Levin rips courts ‘ducking’ lawsuits as Democrats ‘institutionalize corruption and fraud’
Mark Levin said U.S. courts are “ducking left and right” when it comes to 2020 election lawsuits despite the Democratic Party’s attempts to “turn the whole country into California where Republicans can’t win anything statewide.”
The host of Fox’s “Life, Liberty & Levin” warned his audience over the weekend that shrinking from debates regarding President Trump’s election lawsuits is not an option since everything the Founding Fathers fought for is at stake.
Yet, Mark Levin, a serious scholar and former president of the Landmark Legal Foundation, was raising the alarm before Election Day about the failure of the Pennsylvania state legislature, controlled by Republicans, to assert their Article II authority against the governor and the state supreme court’s usurpations. They did less than nothing. They still do less than nothing.
So, we can agree with his latest cry of alarm against the courts. At the same time, we can point to the Republican’t party’s complicity in corrupting our constitutional system and placing us all at risk of possibly irreversible descent into a pseudo-free dominant party system. Such a system has regular elections always producing the politically correct party winner, like in California.
If the five actual (?) conservative justices had granted Texas and their posse’s request, what would happen? Suddenly the Supreme Court would be in the position of a trial court, arguably going through the whole federal pre-trial process of facilitating discovery and motions on an incredibly compressed schedule. How else could they possibly issue a final verdict, one from which there would be no appeal? That final verdict would require some remedy, some final order.
What final order, what remedy, could the Court grant? There is no political possibility of the Supreme Court simply knocking out all these states and throwing the election into the House and Senate. However exciting the fantasy, that is not something that the Court could long survive as an independent branch. Perhaps they could order all the delinquent states to re-run their election on the same day as Georgia’s run-off election, and to do so by a very clearly defined and federally policed set of procedural rules, from ballot issuance through ballot counting and reporting. But, why would the justices bother doing so, at the risk of the Court’s independence?
The situation would be quite different if the Republican-controlled state legislatures in the disputed states were the ones knocking down the Supreme Court’s doors demanding protection of their fundamental Article II powers against illegitimate encroachment by the other branches of government. Then, Texas and its posse would be just adding support with friend of the court briefs, or perhaps seeking to get in as additional litigants, alongside their fellow Republican-majority state legislatures. Then the Supreme Court could have some confidence that they were ruling squarely within the four corners of the written Constitution and just enforcing state law, as reasserted by the very bodies responsible for passage of those laws.
All of this is not to excuse the Supremes, or any other court, from their own failures over the years, and especially this most significant year. They have allowed gross abuse of the executive power, gross negligence by courts and legislatures at every level. They have twisted the First Amendment into a pretzel over governors and smaller dictators privileging favored businesses over the black letter right to religious liberty, free from government restrictions. The courts have largely covered themselves in ignominy this year.
AND.
The fundamental fault lies in the first branch of government, the branch intended from the framing of our Constitution to be the center of government action: our legislatures. Democrats have relentlessly weakened ballot box security with the lie that Republicans want to suppress racial minority votes, the real crime of Democrats. Republicans have largely cowered, while treating stories of Cook County and voting the graveyard as mere jokes, not serious threats to their own interests or our constitutional republic. We are in the very mess of which they were all warned by John Fund in 2012. Do not let a single one of them off the hook.
Published in Elections
Amen!
One issue that deserves attention is that Hugh Hewitt is wrong: Even if it’s not close, they can still cheat a LOT to “win.” We may have seen that this year.
Well, they probably did cheat more than usual.
They wanted to make sure 2016 didn’t repeat, when they didn’t have their cheating machine fully activated because they didn’t think they needed it with Hillary. But this time they had it turned on FULL to be safe, and I think the Trump vote still surprised them which is partly why they cheated even more in ways that turned out to be too obvious to be easily concealed.
“The situation would be quite different if the Republican controlled state legislatures in the disputed states were the ones knocking down the Supreme Court’s doors demanding protection of their fundamental Article II powers against illegitimate encroachment by the other branches of government.”
Did they not do that TWICE before the election? And again after election in the PA case that the SC dismissed just before, or just after, Texas filed its case?
20-542_i3dj.pdf (supremecourt.gov)
“A month ago, the Republican Party of Pennsylvania and
the Pennsylvania Senate leaders asked this Court to stay
the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision pending the filing and disposition of a petition for certiorari. See Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Boockvar, No. 20A54; Scarnati
v. Boockvar, No. 20A53. They argued that the state court
decision violated the previously cited constitutional provisions, as well as the federal statute setting a uniform date
for federal elections. Application for Stay in No. 20A54,
p. 2; Application for Stay in No. 20A53, pp. 2–3. Respondent, Democratic Party of Pennsylvania (DPP), agreed that
the constitutionality of the State Supreme Court’s decision
was a matter of national importance and urged us to grant
review and to decide the issue before the election. DPP Re-sponse to Application for Stay in No. 20A53 etc., p. 9. Instead of doing what either party sought, the Court simply
denied the stay. Although there were four votes to enter a
stay, the application failed by an equally divided vote. Now,
in a last ditch attempt to prevent the election in Pennsylvania from being conducted under a cloud, we have been
asked to grant a petition for a writ of certiorari, to expedite
review, and to decide the constitutional question prior to
the election.
It would be highly desirable to issue a ruling on the constitutionality of the State Supreme Court’s decision before
the election. That question has national importance, and
there is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court
decision violates the Federal Constitution. The provisions
of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures,
not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could
override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by
claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the
courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election. See Art. I, §4,
cl. 1; Art. II, §1, cl. 2.
For these reasons, the question presented by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision calls out for review by
this Court—as both the State Republican and Democratic
Parties agreed when the former applied for a stay. But I
reluctantly conclude that there is simply not enough time
at this late date to decide the question before the election.”
Some legislatures and voters, I might add, have worked to provide a better voting system. North Carolina not only passed a bill through the legislature requiring voter ID, but it was passed by the voters as an amendment to the state constitution only to be nullified by the courts before this year’s election. Now that we have a conservative state Supreme Court, hopefully we can revisit that ruling.
Hey, anyone want want some numbers?
The foundation of this is “Keeping Track of Election Fraud,” where fourteen of the claims that are still standing have numbers attached. Applying a few low estimates here and there, we get this:
(I have this all on Excel, if anyone wants to see more details. It should show up on its own post if and when time allows.)
I just read another Republican “quit” the party over Trump’s reaction to the cheating. We need doers, not showboaters . . .
Amen. The solution is in the Legislatures tightening up things far in advance, not the rear-guard court challenges.
Query: Clifford, you are an Arizona Attorney. We have a Republican Legislature and Governor. How is Arizona doing? What do we need to do?
@St.Augestine I don’t believe your spreadsheet includes the “Indefinitely Confined” or Dane & Milwaukee County “Cured Ballots”. Those both total well above 100,000 illegally counted ballots.
Trump won WI’s legal ballot count. The State Assembly& Senate, along with Supreme Court have been complicit in this farce.
The courts blocked Republicans from contesting election results for generations. The courts held Southern elections to different standards for generations on a presumption if implicit racism. The courts have grossly interfered with elections for decades, so have no excuse to pass on evident voter fraud and violations of state constitutions now.
But yes, legislators and executives also brought us to this point.
I’m in favor of all of the above. The rear-guard court challenges, if intensive and persistent enough, might help push the legislatures to act.
But keeping honest states honest, clearly isn’t the biggest problem.
Concur. We have a “deep state” because legislators don’t have the courage and moral spine to specify exactly what a law means, how it shall be implemented, and how breakers of the law shall be sanctioned. Legislators that don’t/won’t do that aren’t weren’t their salt.
“The Secretary shall determine” anyone?
And, If the worst case comes to fruition, and then the SCOTUS is packed, hope Roberts and the conservative associate justices enjoy their decades of irrelevance.
I think it would be even better if, as I commented earlier or elsewhere, Trump’s challenges succeed and he has another term, and everyone works together to make it so that the current SCOTUS doesn’t have anything to do for the foreseeable future. Let them sit there in their robes, doing nothing.
Mark Davis has good advice for all states.
Whoa! 100k cured ballots? Please tell me more! I don’t think that’s in my post.
(Are you talking about the ones where the witnesses didn’t fill in their addresses? I have that covered in the big post, but I don’t think I ever heard a number!)
I’m not sure what to make of the “indefinitely confined.” Something is definitely wrong there, and of course the situation enables fraud. But I’m not sure I can say all those votes were illegally cast; I am sure that some local officials acted inappropriately. Even there, I’m not sure whether their actions were illegal rather than just massively incompetent.
I dig.
Call me crazy, but I still think this election can be unstolen and a message sent to election fraud criminals that their days are over.
Purely from progress in materials microanalysis and scanning technologies, the notion that fake ballots cannot be separated out from genuine once blended together has not been true for over a decade.
Trump can appoint a Special Counsel to investigate voter fraud who will seize all the ballots in a number of counties in a small number of states that we all know about and subject them to a mass forensic examination.
Forensic methods and technologies exist that can sift through tens of thousands of ballots in a single day and identify, and quantify, real ballots against fake.
There are machines that can tell if an absentee ballot was produced by an authorized printer with the required security features, whether it ever entered the postal system, whether the voting on the ballot was done by a human being or another machine.
Watch this; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgeqGmvQXKs
The Sotos funded Secretary of State (D) called Republicans “Nazis.”
What in the world is this doing at the top of the front page of the main feed?
Into what alternative universe wormhole have I entered?
My eyes! My eyes!
Exactly. I’ve tried to explain this to others and they refuse to comprehend.
Have since added some impressive numbers in NV, but I also personally fact-checked about 167,000 votes in MI. That allegation did not pan out.
The numbers of WI NV GA PA are over than what is listed in your first column when you consider the laughably low mail rejection rates in those states and the lack of real signature verification and postmarks
The NC supreme court nullified an amendment?
How is that even possible?
There were shenanigans in Detroit
When you have NAACP lawyers and liberal judges you can do whatever you like, apparently.
I was afraid you would say that.
This is total BS
I conclude as much myself, even when fact-checking Crowder’s number of 167,000 shady Biden votes. But I don’t have any numbers, that’s all. My current focus is what sort of evidence we have in terms of numbers that illegal actions flipped swing states.
I started off saying we do not have evidence that illegal actions flipped swing states. Since then, we’ve found evidence that they did.
Patrick Basham:
Midwestern states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin always swing in the same direction as Ohio and Iowa, their regional peers. Ohio likewise swings with Florida. Current tallies show that, outside of a few cities, the Rust Belt swung in Trump’s direction. Yet, Biden leads in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin because of an apparent avalanche of black votes in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee. Biden’s ‘winning’ margin was derived almost entirely from such voters in these cities, as coincidentally his black vote spiked only in exactly the locations necessary to secure victory. He did not receive comparable levels of support among comparable demographic groups in comparable states, which is highly unusual for the presidential victor.