SCOTUS or Bust

 

I watched Steven Crowder yesterday. 

He had the Texas Attorney General Paxton on to explain the case that 18 states have signed on to. It’s not a terribly complex idea. Your state ruined my vote. I’m sure the legalese we will be subjected to will eventually confuse the hell out of me. But that’s the deal with legislation anyway, it seems designed to turn ordinary people off by using words we no one really uses. Like the Amicus (friend of the court) brief a lot of the states signed on to. Paxton said it just means those states can offer support, but that they aren’t a 'party' in the case. But Texas wants them to be an official party so why the discrepancy? Maybe it's less messy and the states in question can always become a party in the future.

 In a nutshell the case goes like this. Texas argues that because other states( Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia) didn’t follow their own rules on election laws, it affected the national votes of the citizens of Texas. This is how it was explained by Paxton and in a number of summaries I’ve read or listened to. The solution to the mess of fraudulent voting machines, mail in ballots and not separating ‘past deadline’ from ‘under deadline’ might be this--ignore it and show how they abused their own process instead. 

As we’ve seen in all 4 states the testimonies from poll workers almost makes the problem worse. It adds another layer to investigate.  Proving fraud in a neat legal way seems insurmountable.

Federal judges threw out the cases from Trump’s team and Sidney Powell’s team because they didn’t want to open Pandora’s box. Well… that and they’re partisan hacks. Or they’re decent judges who lack the will to really get messy with this. In either case, fraud is easy to prove. Rudy Giuliani and Jenna Ellis already have a full slate of regular people on willing to go under oath and swear to the brazen maleficence. The Texas case doesn’t try to prove fraud even though plenty exists. It only shows how illegalities from governors and judges to change election laws without going through the proper channels, affected the national votes of Texans.

If the Supreme Court takes the case it’s a win right? I don’t pretend to be a legal expert (or even someone with a casual interest) but this seems like a winner. The logic is clean, your illegalities affected my vote. The same way that adding a little bleach to drinking water destroys it. The question for me is how does SCOTUS rule? If Texas is awarded a win, what happens to the votes or electors from the states that ignored their election rules? Are the votes of the citizens thrown out? Do they get a redo? I can’t see them awarding those votes to Trump. If the ballots can’t be sufficiently verified does the state forfeit all its electoral votes? SCOTUS under Roberts mostly takes a limited role in deciding big picture cases. The obvious non-example is the Obamacare mandate clause that he rewrote as a tax. Thanks for nothing Bob!

Otherwise they’ve taken a do no harm approach. I like the idea of kicking decisions back to the lower courts and supporting or rejecting cases based on technicalities. We might be in newish territory here. The last thing we want is a court that starts writing new laws or finding new language is old texts. Texas can’t be the first state to sue other states but with an election hanging in the balance the potential for a monumental decision is imminent. 

Of course they could always reject the whole thing and Trump could hope for better luck in the lower courts. So far though it’s been one defeat after another and I don’t see anyone but the Supreme Court sticking its neck out. Texas has nowhere else to go with their case. There is no lower court that adjudicates state to state disputes. It’s SCOTUS or bust.