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Supreme Court Told Trump PA Lawyers To Get Bent, And Amy Coney Barrett And Kegs Kavanaugh Helped!
And when the law is against you, let Clarence Thomas bang the table.
It has been almost four months since the election, Joe Biden has been sworn in as the 46th president, and Donald Trump is just a sad old Florida man stewing in his own hate at Mar-a-Lago. But, of course, we are still dealing with the massive shitstorm he created with his election ratfucking bullshit.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court declined to hear Republican Party of Pennsylvania v. Degraffenreid , one of the last remaining cases from that time Trump tried to throw a coup and overturn the election results in all of the swing states that went blue.
By the end, even the lawyers conceded that they weren't trying to change the results of the 2020 election. That's because they couldn't use that particular case to do that, even if they tried. Only around 10,000 mail-in ballots arrived after the Election Day deadline, Joe Biden won the state by 80,555 votes, and there were no allegations that any lower races were affected.
Oh, and there's the fact that Biden won by enough electoral votes that even without Pennsylvania, he still would have won the election. But Republicans aren't about to stop trying to screw over our democracy, so here we are.
Why did they keep fighting after the election was clearly over? They were hoping they could get the Supreme Court to say the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was wrong to extend the deadline for mail-in ballots in the midst of a deadly pandemic. The goal was to create precedent saying state supreme courts have no authority to make rulings based on their own state constitutions about federal elections, just in case some state supreme court tries to step in and guarantee the right to vote in future elections.
Well that's gross
Here's what happened. In response to the ongoing pandemic, a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling extended the deadline for mail-in ballots by three days because of the pandemic and delays at USPS, relying on the state constitution. Republicans then lost their shit, because there's nothing they hate more than voting rights. (Except maybe people of color and women.)
Before the election, Republicans asked SCOTUS to stay the state supreme court's order and not count the votes that arrived after Election Day. The justices tied 4-4 , leaving the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling in place. A couple of weeks later, the Court decided not to hear the case on the merits before the election and sent it back down to the lower courts.
The Republicans just kept losing in this case, but they kept on fighting anyway. The lawyers trying to subvert democracy were, once again, from Jones Day , the Republican Party's favorite go-to firm for screwing the people. While two other law firms succumbed to pressure after the election to not fuck with our democracy, Jones Day would not be deterred. Even after the insurrection, it continued to represent the GOP in its voter suppression cases.
Finally, the attempted ratfucking in Pennsylvania is over. We don't actually know why the Court declined to hear the case; it simply denied the cert petition without comment. But three of the worst justices, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch, dissented from the decision.
And Alito and Thomas felt the need to cry for a combined 15 pages to show just how mad they were about the fact that Democrats managed to win a national election. (Gorsuch joined Alito's dissent.) It only would have taken the support of Justice Kegstand or Amy Coat Hanger for the Court to take up the case, as just four votes are needed to grant cert, but for whatever reason, neither decided to step in.
Endorsing Donald Trump's Big Lie about the election, Thomas in his dissent made up a bunch of bullshit about how "the risk of fraud is 'vastly more prevalent' for mail-in ballots." He also takes issue with "the corresponding safeguards that States put in place to ameliorate that heightened risk of fraud" despite the fact that mail-in ballots are perfectly secure .
Thomas ends his rant with a plea to his fellow justices to please let him screw over voters in the future:
One wonders what this Court waits for. We failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections. The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us. I respectfully dissent.
Of course, that "shroud of doubt" was created by Trump, promising for almost a year before the election that it would be "rigged" and "stolen" from him, but please allow Justice Thomas to help exacerbate it!
It is not a new thing for state supreme courts to find that their state's constitution provides more protection for people's rights than the federal constitution. Before 2013's US v. Windsor , which was the catalyst for all of the marriage equality cases that eventually led to the victory in Obergefell , states like Massachusetts and Iowa ruled that their state constitutions mandated recognition of same-sex marriages.
But in recent years, Republican lawyers have decided that a fun new way to destroy the democratic process would be to have the US Supreme Court tell state supreme courts that their state constitutions don't matter in voting rights cases, because fuck you if you want to vote and you're not a rich white person.
The Republican Party has been using the court system to suppress votes for years, but Trump put those efforts on steroids, trying to get courts all over the country to take up his whiny loser crybaby election cases.
The Court also took the opportunity yesterday to throw out, without comment or dissent, two Trump campaign cases trying to challenge the results in Pennsylvania and California, Sidney Powell's rotting squid cadaver case in Michigan, crazy Lin Wood's Georgia suit , and chemtrail Kelli Ward's attempt to steal the election in Arizona.
With this latest loss, SCOTUS has just a few more opportunities to take up Trump's ratfucking cases, with some more of Powell's "kraken" cases and a Trump challenge to the results in Wisconsin still pending (but unlikely to be heard).
I don't know about you, but I, for one, am absolutely shocked that Donald Trump, who has been accused of rape and sexual assault by like a million different women and tried to stage a coup, doesn't know the meaning of the word no.
Here's the order and the dissents:
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Supreme Court Told Trump PA Lawyers To Get Bent, And Amy Coney Barrett And Kegs Kavanaugh Helped!
We'll see what happens. I completely agree that the Court is political. Reading SCOTUS cases in law school makes one a believer. It's funny that neither the professor or other students seemed to notice this reality. But then the law school I went to wasn't that great. (Not as bad as Cooley Law School through.)
Just watching Roberts, I think he really doesn't want to be the repubs' cray cray Chief Justice. He certainly doesn't want to be the Q Chief Justice. I don't know how much power he has over the rest of them other than assigning who gets to write the majority opinion. The longest serving justice does have power. In this case, it would be thomas, and it would appear that thomas shares the dinner table with a cray cray.
On top of that, Roberts is loaded up with relatively inexperienced justices, amy being the justice with the least experience on the bench. Also too she has cray cray eyes. I'm no big fan of Roberts but he doesn't seem to want to burn down the house.
There is only one shroud I care about with regards to Justice Thomas...when he gets one let me know.