UPDATED: Briefly Noted: Is The CJ Roberts Plan Working?

UPDATE: I'm putting this update at the beginning because it tends to support what follows. Briefly, this.

The Soros SecState of AZ was declining to get involved in the AZ election law case discussed below--it's now before the SCOTUS and it deals with stuff like ballot harvesting. This is potentially a huge case with implications for the freedom of ALL states to police elections as they see fit. While CA would doubtless seek to continue its anti-election integrity ways, most states would not. So, since the failure of the SecState to defend AZ law could throw a monkey wrench into the appeal, the AZ Attorney General has formally jumped in to preserve AZ's interests in fair elections. This via TGP--this reads like a press release and appears as a quote, but I couldn't find a link:

On Tuesday, Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed a Motion to Intervene with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of the State of Arizona in the Democratic National Committee lawsuit challenging Arizona’s ban on ballot harvesting and statutes regulating out-of-precinct voting. Attorney General Brnovich is moving to intervene on this matter on behalf of the State because defendant Secretary of State Hobbs has announced that she does not support an appeal.

As noted in today’s filing, Attorney General Brnovich moves to intervene in this matter, assuring the State’s interest in retaining its “broad authority to structure and regulate elections,” is fully preserved and that there is no possible procedural hindrance to Supreme Court review of the matter. The Attorney General is empowered by Arizona law to seek intervention in federal court on behalf of the State.

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Back at the beginning of March I wrote a post that examined an idea that Shipwreckedcrew had put forward. The basic idea was that, in declining to involve the SCOTUS in legal disputes over the 2020 presidential election Roberts was pursuing an actual strategy--not just abdicating the SCOTUS' responsibility to uphold the Constitution.

Let me elaborate on that idea just a bit, to give Roberts the benefit of the doubt. There's no question that the SCOTUS could have stepped in--the Texas case in which numerous additional states joined would have been, IMO, perfect. From that standpoint the reasons given by the SCOTUS for sidestepping the case were unconvincing and harmed the prestige of the court by calling its judicial integrity into question. After all, what constitutional isse could be more fundamental and more important than one that called into question our entire electoral process? I discussed this aspect in the earlier post: Arizona Election Law Case In SCOTUS.

On the other hand, while the SCOTUS--in contrast to the executive and legislative branches--is supposed to be above politics, it simply is no longer possible for the Court to disregard political considerations--if that ever was possible. That is all the more true in that politics in America have become utterly toxic from a constitutional standpoint. The country is sharply divided, with the current regime narrowly controlling both the White House and Congress impugning fundamental concepts of the American order. What is the SCOTUS to do--plunge forward, or ...

Encourage the state legislatures to act by exercising their constitutional authority to regulate elections? That would return elections to regulation by the political branches of state governments, where the US Constitution placed the authority in the first place. The idea is that the putative Roberts strategy would support state legislatures taking charge of their own affairs--rather than the SCOTUS arrogating that authority to itself. In future, then, the SCOTUS would largely butt out of election law cases--the effect being to neuter much of the electoral lawfare we currently see in the federal courts. Voters at the state level would be able to express their views on their own states' election laws and their own courts at the ballot box. That HOPEFULLY is the significance of the SCOTUS--having previously declined to get involved in more sweeping election cases--now taking on a much more pointed case involving the swing state of Arizona.

I'll go into these issues a bit down below, by pasting in part of the earlier post which discusses the Arizona case that is now before the SCOTUS. For now, I want to simply question whether what we see happening in Arizona with regard to the AZ senate's audit of Maricopa County may reflect the effect of Roberts' strategy. 

Here's what interests me. We saw early on in the audit process that Dem election lawyers descended upon AZ and urged the Zhou regime's DoJ to get involved. That hasn't happened, so far. Why not? Is it possible that the Dem lawyers have come to the realization--perhaps as a result of the SCOTUS taking on the AZ case--that any legal challenge by DoJ of a state exercising its authority under the US Constitution would likely get fast tracked to the SCOTUS, and could result in a sweeping ruling that the Dems could bitterly regret? The AZ senate is pressing forward with its audit, despite continuing obstruction--the senate shows absolutely no signs of backing down, which may be encouraging audit and/or reform efforts in other states as well. Again, the question arises: Is Roberts' strategy having an effect? We can only hope so. The road forward would be messy and prolonged, but politics almost always is. We have in our constitutional order a political regime. Such a Roberts strategy--if that's what we're seeing--would recognize that fundamental constitutional fact by returning to the states the authority that the SCOTUS unwisely usurped. We shall see.

Now, here's a portion of the previous post:

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I'm not about to try to summarize Shipwreckedcrew's full article about the AZ election law case that will be argued at the SCOTUS today--Brnovich v. DNC. Very briefly, because election law is very technical and this case depends on constitutional interpretation of state and federal law, at issue are AZ election laws that are race neutral on their face but which the DNC claims have a disproportionate impact on minorities. The case goes all the way back to 2016 and came up through the District Court, a three judge panel of the 9th Circuit, and then an en banc rehearing in the 9th Circuit. SWC engages in some speculation, as you can see from the title:

Is Brnovich v. DNC -- Set for Argument Today -- the Reason the Supreme Court Refused to Take up Election Cases?

SWC doesn't exactly spell this out, but here's my read on what he's at least hinting at. SWC is arguing--and this part is explicit--that CJ Roberts has a long term strategy for getting the federal courts out of the election law business and returning these matters to where they belong: state legislatures. SWC goes back through a bit of the history of the Roberts court on election law. The bottom line appears to be that, as long as the laws in question are not discriminatory on their face it's time for the federal courts to more or less butt out.

In fairness to SWC, his argument is detailed and he explicitly states that he's talking about "voting rights cases." The result SWC sees from the earlier case law--and, I presume, hopes to see continuing--is this:

No longer burdened with the “preclearance” requirement, states could pass voting-related legislation on subjects like voter ID, purging voter rolls, redistricting, ballot harvesting, etc.

Where the Arizona case comes in is that DNC lawyers--does the name Marc Elias mean anything to you?--despite the earlier SCOTUS case law of the Roberts court, are still attempting to conduct a lawfare campaign against state tightening of their election security through other sections of the Voting Rights Act than were interpreted in the earlier cases. That's what happened in the en banc rehearing in the 9th Circuit, in which the Dem judge overruled the District Court and their own three judge appellate panel. Obviously, SWC hopes to see the SCOTUS reverse the 9th Circuit, and believes that Roberts' long term strategy will have its effect.

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