How many lawsuits did Donald Trump lose over Thanksgiving?
Alllllll the lawsuits. And we are not tired of winning!
The most fearsome smackdown was delivered by Third Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas, a Trump appointee.
"Free, fair elections are the lifeblood of our democracy. Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so. Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here," he wrote for a three-judge panel deciding the fate of the Trump campaign's appeal in Pennsylvania. The Third Circuit will not be hosting a repeat performance of Rudy Giuliani pantsing himself in open court. Which is a win for democracy, but a loss for our collective amusement as lawyers and non-lawyers alike.
At their various wackass pressers, Giuliani et al have leaked nonsense about a nationwide, fraudulent conspiracy to steal the election from Trump. But in court, where you have to back up your words with actual facts, their claims are narrower. Nonetheless, they presented zero proof of an alleged scheme to deny Republican poll watchers access to the vote count in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh — the backbone of their Equal Protection argument.
"'Upon information and belief' is a lawyerly way of saying that the Campaign does not know that something is a fact but just suspects it or has heard it," Judge Bibas wrote. Which is lawspeak for "Don't make shit up and expect us to treat it as gospel, you mendacious hack."
As the court noted, they'd already litigated and lost a case on the legality of different voting procedures in different counties. Which doomed their claims that due process and Equal Protection were violated when only some counties took the Secretary of Commonwealth up on her recommendation to allow voters to cure defective mail-in ballots.
Finally, the court snorted derisively — more or less — at the Trump campaign's whining about US District Judge Matthew Brann's refusal to allow it to amend its complaint again, noting that the campaign itself imposed a hard deadline of November 23 when Pennsylvania certified the count, and allowing it yet another bite at the apple would necessitate another week of briefs and hearings.
Having repeatedly stressed the certification deadline, the Campaign cannot now pivot and object that the District Court abused its discretion by holding the Campaign to that very deadline. It did not.
You can't sleep on your rights and then go running to a judge to bail you out. It's the doctrine of laches, bitches! And it's playing an outsize role in these garbage elections suits, as Pennsylvania's Republican legislators fucked around and found out yesterday.
This is the suit where the Keystone Gippers decided mail-in voting was UNLEGAL in Pennsylvania, despite having themselves passed a law enacting it and subsequently running two elections using the procedure. Pennsylvania's Supreme Court was not having it.
The want of due diligence demonstrated in this matter is unmistakable. Petitioners filed this facial challenge to the mail-in voting statutory provisions more than one year after the enactment of Act 77. At the time this action was filed on November 21, 2020, millions of Pennsylvania voters had already expressed their will in both the June 2020 Primary Election and the November 2020 General Election and the final ballots in the 2020 General Election were being tallied, with the results becoming seemingly apparent. Nevertheless, Petitioners waited to commence this litigation until days before the county boards of election were required to certify the election results to the Secretary of the Commonwealth. Thus, it is beyond cavil that Petitioners failed to act with due diligence in presenting the instant claim. Equally clear is the substantial prejudice arising from Petitioners' failure to institute promptly a facial challenge to the mail-in voting statutory scheme, as such inaction would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of Pennsylvania voters.
In other news, Mike Flynn's batshit lawyer Sidney Powell has teamed up with Kyle Rittenhouse's batshit lawyer Lin Wood to unleash the wave of crackhead oh, sorry we mean KRAKEN lawsuits. Here's the header from their Georgia filing, in which they manage to misspell "district" twice and the name of at least one plaintiff.
It's a wild ride, light on evidence but heavy on bizarro shit like an expert witness who calls himself "Statistician to the Stars!", another expert witness whose name is redacted in its entirety, and assumptions about voting patterns based on "ethnic distributions." Sure, Georgia just completed a hand recount of the paper ballots that confirmed the state's original machine tally, but here's a mathematician who says that's UNPOSSIBLE because ... white people never change their minds? Honestly, who can even tell?
As seen from the expert analysis of Eric Quinnell, mathematical anomalies further support these findings, when in various districts within Fulton County such as vote gains that exceed reasonable expectations when compared to 2016, and a failure of gains to be normally distributed but instead shifting substantially toward the tail of the distribution in what is known as a platykurtic distribution. Dr. Quinell identifies numerous anomalies such as votes to Biden in excess of 2016 exceed the registrations that are in excess of 2016.
Ummm, okay. Can we get back to the stuff about Hugo Chavez? Because that actually made more sense.
The court seems to have ordered Georgia not to reset the machines in preparation for the January 5 senate runoffs, before hastily dumping the case on the appeals court.
In summary and in conclusion, these cases are garbage. Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Georgia already certified their votes, Arizona and Nevada will do it today, and the recount in Wisconsin changed nothing. Hold tight, we're almost there.
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