Court Jesters

 

Right after my last blog post the Supreme Court shot Texas down.

I argued that the court would likely take a look and make those wayward states (Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania) pay. Of course that didn’t happen. It’s why I try not to make specific predictions. The court’s refusal to even hear it made me realize what I already knew about lower courts, they don’t want anything to do with deciding elections. The Supreme Court wrote that Texas didn’t show a “cognizable interest” in how other states run their affairs. Which I guess means “Mind you own business and let cities get back to running scams and defrauding the rubes in the rest of the state”. Or at least that’s my reading of it. There was an issue of standing as well, Texas didn't have any.

 I was pretty upset about yet another setback for bringing this case to court and making these states pay for bypassing their own rules. But it’s probably better if election matters are handled in congress and not the courts. Conservatives don’t like ‘activist’ judges and if Americans keep pushing all matters of legislation to the courts we lose. We lose, because the race to put partisans in place at every bench opening will look like fantasy football-get wins or get lost. After a few decades they won’t bother interpreting the law, they’ll just figure out which side is the ‘home’ team and vote likewise.

Cynics might argue we’ve been there for years (I wonder myself). But it could get much worse without attempts to curtail the number of issues they rule on. At least in theory the Roberts court is more conservative in that way. When they aren’t though (Obamacare/ Obergefell) it seems SCOTUS manages all sorts of language to justify their ruling. Justice Roberts famously helped the Obama team by calling the penalty for not carrying insurance a tax. Penalties were illegal, taxes were not. It turned an illegal law into a legal one with a flourish that only a pompous judge can manage.

 During the Obergefell v Hodges (the same-sex marriage one) opinion Justice Kennedy stated “The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity.” Express their identity? What nonsense. Identity is not a legal term. It’s barely a concrete one. I didn’t even mention the more poetic stuff where he talks about “devotion” and “commitment”. This is not the language of an opinion or a dissent. Yet with a 5-4 majority vote the Supreme Court changed the plain meaning of the Constitution to pretend it always had same-sex unions in mind.

So spare me the argument that Texas doesn’t have standing. Anyone who the court wants to have standing can have it with some legal bullshit phrasing. But just the same, I get why they passed on it. I just wish they were consistent. If you think this court is bad try to imagine one with 6 Democrat appointed judges.

It reflects the larger problem of disenfranchisement. If big cities like Philadelphia and Detroit and Atlanta will use their party machines to manufacture votes for the Dem candidate then what’s to be done? Republicans won’t also cheat just to even the score, not on a party scale anyway. If these states get away with this we are in for a new day of lawlessness and corruption. What do you tell those who think their vote doesn’t count because it will get overwhelmed by ballots in trunks of cars that show up at 4:00 in the morning? If enough people believe the system is corrupted and that no legal recourse exists, where to from here?

We aren’t there yet. Believe it or not the Trump administration still has a few cards but no aces. I don’t think this election gets fixed in the courts and that’s probably a good thing. We might get a situation where governors refuse to certify electors, or congress refuses to accept the votes of electors. Or some states’ electors abstain from voting. This is why you don’t quit though. I’ve heard others say the longer the process goes the more it favors Trump. We have to pray too, that a lot of this fraud will be exposed to the point where the legacy media can’t ignore it.