“ The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of
complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.
Statement of Justice Alito, with whom Justice Thomas joins: In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction. See Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. ___
(Feb. 24, 2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting). I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.”
In other words, rigged elections (hypothetically speaking) in one state do not cause any demonstrable damage to another state? I was expecting this to come down to an argument over state sovereignty on election matters, but reality appears more cynical than me. Rigged election are not fine, but if they do happen no harm done.
Rigged elections are not fine. If you have a problem with a state's election, you file a lawsuit on behalf of someone whose rights were actually violated. Oh right, lawsuits were filed in the right locations on behalf of people whose rights might have been violated, and most (all?) were dismissed due to lack of standing, lack of evidence or other deficiencies.
If a state can't have an interest that the constitution is followed, what point is there in even having a union? What did the states actually agree on?
Edit: The answer to this is that the supreme court is there to judge in material matters of difference that independent states would otherwise go to war over. The federal election doesn't fall under this. Election is a sovereign matter especially for the states before each other.
>If a state can't have an interest that the constitution is followed, what point is there in even having a union? What did the states actually agree on?
Among other things, that each state is responsible for it's own elections and just as Texas can't set Tennessee's tax regime or state penal code, they also can't tell PA, MI, GA and WI how to run their elections.
Actually, it goes even further than that. The US Constitution (ratified by all fifty states when they joined the union states (Article II, Clause II):
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
In each state, sole authority for selecting electors is vested in the legislature of that state.
In fact[0], the Constitution provides that the settlement of presidential election disputes first happens within the state legal system under powers granted by Article 2, Section 1. In a 2016 analysis of presidential election disputes, the Congressional Research Service said that “under the United States Constitution, these elections for presidential electors are administered and regulated in the first instance by the states, and state laws have established the procedures for ballot security, tallying the votes, challenging the vote count, recounts, and election contests within their respective jurisdictions.”
In some sense it's still a weird state of affairs. I tried to compare it to the fact that you can't find fault in 'how your neighbor came to decide on his vote', but the federal election is a two level system and they do have to follow the minimal procedure that, as the suit alleges, the legislative and not the executive has sole power in making the rules. Are you disenfranchised if your neighbor doesn't follow this law? It's not a sensible comparison anymore.
>as the suit alleges, the legislative and not the executive has sole power in making the rules.
And (I'm not a lawyer and I don't live in any of the states in question, so I suppose ymmv) just as Congress passes laws that prescribe standards and practices, but often leaves specific implementation details to the Executive Branch, the same is true in most states.
For example, I don't believe that state legislatures mandates specific voting processes or procedures (e.g., scanners of a specific model from a specific manufacturer, the location of polling places, electioneering restrictions, design/layout of ballots, etc.) and leaves those implementation details up to the Secretary of State and/or state election boards/officials.
In fact, each county (all 3,143 of them) run their own individual elections.
And when there are controversies over either the law or the implementation details, the state courts are the venue to review and resolve those controversies.
That's true in pretty much every state, AFAIK.
The idea that state courts will interpret the law as written by the legislature (in terms of constitutionality, both state and federal, as well as whether the state's executive branch is administering those laws appropriately, etc.) is pretty standard in both state and federal courts ever since Marbury v. Madison[0].
In situations where the court has re-interpreted statutes (and those statutes are how every state has codified its election procedures, whether they be local, state or federal elections), the remedy for the legislature is to modify the law so that it comports with the state and/or federal constitution or making the law more specific in its verbiage.
As far as other states are concerned, they can't be harmed by the outcome of other states' elections, as they either are internal to the state, or they are represented in the Federal government by those elected in the congressional districts as apportioned after each census, or by two senators.
My understanding of Texas' argument of harm is that by certifying the electors fro Biden/Harris, if the two Georgia Senate seats flip Democratic, then, if there is a tie vote in the Senate, Harris is the deciding vote, and as such, Texas' representation in that body is diminished.
But that doesn't make sense, because regardless of who is Vice President, Texas will always have the same two Senate seats.
Again, IIUC, in order to have standing, one must be able to identify specific harm from the issue in controversy. Since Texas' claim was based on one hypothetical (Both Georgia seats flipping to 'D') on top of another hypothetical (a potential tie vote in the Senate), they cannot show specific, concrete harm.
As such they have no standing to sue.
But there are further problems in several of the claims Texas makes against the various states. That of 'laches'.
The idea is that when voters are given a specific set of rules before an election, they must rely on those to hold for that election.
Texas has made claims that a number of provisions of state law in WI, PA and MI (not sure about GA) are either unconstitutional or invalid.
The problem with a number of those claims is that the laws in question were in place far (one, in WI I believe, since 2016) in advance of the election.
The idea of 'laches' is that if those rules were already in place months to years before the election, the time to challenge them was before the election -- before the voters had to rely on those laws when casting their votes.
Since Texas did not do so (as well as many of the other lawsuits filed), changing the rules ex post-facto would disenfranchise the voters who relied on those rules when the election was held.
This article[1] explains all this and more much more succinctly than I did.
And this article[2] goes into other details of the issues, again explained better than I ever...
Electoral college is a quite fascinating subject. There are a lot of pros and cons for it. How each state choses electors has been explicitly given to the states. Each state tends to have slightly different criteria. How different can they be before there is an issue? There appears to be a huge divide between the states and the parties. There is a big different between given the entire electoral votes to the party that has a plurality, vs a state and its population passing a law to allow binky the clown to choose those electors. Somewhere in that continuum of possibility, you would get a majority that would deem it improper for the clown case, but if a state and its voters decided that was the best way, how does another state get to say no to those people? The supreme court has said over and over they shouldn't adjucate political questions, unfortunately the makeup of it is extremely politicized now, could you imagine a SC justice getting 80-90 votes now? The question then becomes is where does it stop? If you allow standing, every state will flood the SC with all manner of good bad or other. The only solution I see to this current problem is to have a constitutional amendment to change how electors are chosen, or change the system outright. That is a near impossibility.
>Rigged election are not fine, but if they do happen no harm done.
What evidence do you have that "rigging" occurred? No actionable evidence was presented in any of the 50 or so cases already filed (and uniformly rejected by the courts) in AZ, GA, MI, NV, PA and WI.
Are you claiming that not only thousands of election workers, party officials, elected and appointed government officials, but also a couple dozen state and Federal judges, including the US Supreme Court (cf. Kelly v. Pennsylvania), Democrats and Republicans conspired (and succeeded) to steal the election from Donald Trump?
That assertion would be laughable if it weren't so corrosive to our election systems and our federal constitutional form of government.
But don't take my word for it. Or anyone else's for that matter. Read the case records, including complaints, briefs, arguments from both sides and the judicial opinions.
You're not arguing in good faith and what you're saying is, "I don't want to live in a democracy, I want to live in an authoritarian one-party state."
There was no election fraud of any kind and every single one of these lawsuits is really intended to undermine small-d democracy and invalidate the election.
12 comments
[ 6.5 ms ] story [ 42.1 ms ] threadhttps://www.supremecourt.gov/orders/courtorders/121120zr_p86...
Full text of order:
“ The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot. Statement of Justice Alito, with whom Justice Thomas joins: In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original jurisdiction. See Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. ___ (Feb. 24, 2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting). I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.”
Edit: The answer to this is that the supreme court is there to judge in material matters of difference that independent states would otherwise go to war over. The federal election doesn't fall under this. Election is a sovereign matter especially for the states before each other.
Among other things, that each state is responsible for it's own elections and just as Texas can't set Tennessee's tax regime or state penal code, they also can't tell PA, MI, GA and WI how to run their elections.
Actually, it goes even further than that. The US Constitution (ratified by all fifty states when they joined the union states (Article II, Clause II):
"Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector."
In each state, sole authority for selecting electors is vested in the legislature of that state.
In fact[0], the Constitution provides that the settlement of presidential election disputes first happens within the state legal system under powers granted by Article 2, Section 1. In a 2016 analysis of presidential election disputes, the Congressional Research Service said that “under the United States Constitution, these elections for presidential electors are administered and regulated in the first instance by the states, and state laws have established the procedures for ballot security, tallying the votes, challenging the vote count, recounts, and election contests within their respective jurisdictions.”
[0] https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/the-constitution-and-con...
And (I'm not a lawyer and I don't live in any of the states in question, so I suppose ymmv) just as Congress passes laws that prescribe standards and practices, but often leaves specific implementation details to the Executive Branch, the same is true in most states.
For example, I don't believe that state legislatures mandates specific voting processes or procedures (e.g., scanners of a specific model from a specific manufacturer, the location of polling places, electioneering restrictions, design/layout of ballots, etc.) and leaves those implementation details up to the Secretary of State and/or state election boards/officials.
In fact, each county (all 3,143 of them) run their own individual elections.
And when there are controversies over either the law or the implementation details, the state courts are the venue to review and resolve those controversies.
That's true in pretty much every state, AFAIK.
The idea that state courts will interpret the law as written by the legislature (in terms of constitutionality, both state and federal, as well as whether the state's executive branch is administering those laws appropriately, etc.) is pretty standard in both state and federal courts ever since Marbury v. Madison[0].
In situations where the court has re-interpreted statutes (and those statutes are how every state has codified its election procedures, whether they be local, state or federal elections), the remedy for the legislature is to modify the law so that it comports with the state and/or federal constitution or making the law more specific in its verbiage.
As far as other states are concerned, they can't be harmed by the outcome of other states' elections, as they either are internal to the state, or they are represented in the Federal government by those elected in the congressional districts as apportioned after each census, or by two senators.
My understanding of Texas' argument of harm is that by certifying the electors fro Biden/Harris, if the two Georgia Senate seats flip Democratic, then, if there is a tie vote in the Senate, Harris is the deciding vote, and as such, Texas' representation in that body is diminished.
But that doesn't make sense, because regardless of who is Vice President, Texas will always have the same two Senate seats.
Again, IIUC, in order to have standing, one must be able to identify specific harm from the issue in controversy. Since Texas' claim was based on one hypothetical (Both Georgia seats flipping to 'D') on top of another hypothetical (a potential tie vote in the Senate), they cannot show specific, concrete harm.
As such they have no standing to sue.
But there are further problems in several of the claims Texas makes against the various states. That of 'laches'.
The idea is that when voters are given a specific set of rules before an election, they must rely on those to hold for that election.
Texas has made claims that a number of provisions of state law in WI, PA and MI (not sure about GA) are either unconstitutional or invalid.
The problem with a number of those claims is that the laws in question were in place far (one, in WI I believe, since 2016) in advance of the election.
The idea of 'laches' is that if those rules were already in place months to years before the election, the time to challenge them was before the election -- before the voters had to rely on those laws when casting their votes.
Since Texas did not do so (as well as many of the other lawsuits filed), changing the rules ex post-facto would disenfranchise the voters who relied on those rules when the election was held.
This article[1] explains all this and more much more succinctly than I did.
And this article[2] goes into other details of the issues, again explained better than I ever...
What evidence do you have that "rigging" occurred? No actionable evidence was presented in any of the 50 or so cases already filed (and uniformly rejected by the courts) in AZ, GA, MI, NV, PA and WI.
Are you claiming that not only thousands of election workers, party officials, elected and appointed government officials, but also a couple dozen state and Federal judges, including the US Supreme Court (cf. Kelly v. Pennsylvania), Democrats and Republicans conspired (and succeeded) to steal the election from Donald Trump?
That assertion would be laughable if it weren't so corrosive to our election systems and our federal constitutional form of government.
But don't take my word for it. Or anyone else's for that matter. Read the case records, including complaints, briefs, arguments from both sides and the judicial opinions.
There was no election fraud of any kind and every single one of these lawsuits is really intended to undermine small-d democracy and invalidate the election.
Get the fuck out.