About The Attempted Federal Takeover Of Elections

I can see that readers are aware that the Dem House passed their longed for Federal takeover of elections--authority which the Constitution explicitly reserves to the States. There's a brief article on this at American Greatness:

House of Representatives Passes Bill That Would Enable Federal Control Over State Elections

Here are some relevant excerpts:

The bill passed along party lines in the lower chamber, by a margin of 219-212. No Republicans voted in favor of the bill, which is named after the far-left Georgia congressman who died in office last year. The bill seeks to restore a statute from the original 1965 Voting Rights Act that had been struck down by the Supreme Court in 2013; the statute would permit the federal government to conduct its own review of local and statewide election laws and procedures if the state is considered to have “a history of voter discrimination.”

In the 2013 decision, Shelby v. Holder, the nation’s highest court ruled that demanding the states first seek permission from the federal government before changing voting laws was unconstitutional.

...

The bill now heads to the evenly-divided United States Senate, where Republicans are just as opposed to the bill as House Republicans were. Even several moderate Democrats have questioned the integrity of the bill, thus putting its future in doubt.

Shelby v. Holder was a 6-3 decision and is based in the constitutional principle of federalism:

More On The Roberts' Strategy--If That's What It Is

My presentation in Is The CJ Roberts Plan Working? has received some vigorous pushback in the comments. I've also pushed back vigorously. What I'll do here is elaborate a bit on the issues involved and also paste in the comments below.

Here's the nub of what I wrote yesterday about the "Roberts Strategy"--an admittedly speculative notion:

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 issue 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.

That is not an argument for ignoring election law. What it is is an argument for accepting cases on a very narrow basis--when state law on its face violates some constitutional principle, not based on speculative concepts of disparate impact, such as we're seeing more and more. Those issues were not raised in the TX case that the SCOTUS sidestepped, but they are very much front and center in the AZ case--from a Dem electoral strategy standpoint the AZ case is a potential dagger pointed at the heart of their strategy.

As you'll see when you get to the comments pasted in below, I make the argument that it wasn't the SCOTUS' responsibility to save the GOP. Because let's face it--Trump did what he could to win reelection. The election was sabotaged not just by the Dems but by the GOP. We've seen that in state after state, during the post election squabbling. We're at the point now that the GOPers who sabotaged Trump--governors, legislators, AGs, SecStates--are now scrambling to fix their standing with the voters. Because they now realize that their strategy failed. They thought voters would be duped by the fraud, and accept a false loss by Trump. Instead, voters realize that the fix was in.

The justices at the SCOTUS aren't entirely stupid, nor are they entirely without political views. Some, especially Roberts himself, may have desired a Trump loss. That's as may be. The question is, was it the responsibility of the SCOTUS to rescue officials in GOP run states who failed live up to their own responsibilities? Arguably it was the greater responsibility of the SCOTUS to wait for the right case to try to put US election law back on a sounder constitutional basis. Also arguably--because I can't know this--they may have felt that the AZ case that was heading their way would provide that opportunity in a better way than the TX case would.

Now, here's an excerpt from an article today by John and Andy Schlafly--Election Audits Confound Never-Trumpers. In the first part of the article they make a strong case for the utter fecklessness--not to say perfidy--of the GOPe at the state level. The SCOTUS justices would have had to be fools not to have seen this, immersed as they had been in last minute election cases--they had a better overview than most of us:

Briefly Noted: Roberts' Folly

John Roberts, by foolishly allowing--on a 4-4 decision--the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to unconstitutionally rewrite Pennsylvania's election laws, has managed to maneuver the SCOTUS into a damned if you do, damned if you don't position. Half the states, with Texas at their head, are now calling the SCOTUS to account. No matter what the SCOTUS does at this point one half of the country will be angry and will claim they were cheated. While not everyone would have been happy had the SCOTUS dealt with the illegalities before the election, the Court would at least have had a better chance of convincing the nation that they were acting on constitutional principle. Realistically speaking, any such hope is probably gone. And this state of affairs is largely Roberts' doing.

The SCOTUS will take another hit to its prestige, almost no matter what. And, since the other justices are surely angrily aware of what Roberts has done, any illusions Roberts may have had of being a Chief Justice who could be a leader have probably already gone down the drain. He has marginalized himself while also weakening the Court.

What Does The SCOTUS Pennsylvania Ruling Mean?

This could be very interesting. Shipwreckedcrew offers a very concise account of what this outrageous ruling could mean, followed by a much lengthier analysis:

Supreme Court Declines To Intervene In Case Challenging Changes To Pennsylvania Election Law Rules — For Now

The interesting part is the "for now," which we'll get to.

What this case is about is pretty simple. The Dem governor of PA asked the legislature to change the election laws. The legislature, controlled by the GOP, declined to do so. So the PA Supreme Court--controlled by Dem judges--stepped in and changed the PA election laws by judicial fiat.

Here's the short version by SWC of what this means:

What The Carter Page Case Tells Us About The Flaws In FISA

Since the release this past Saturday of the (highly redacted) FISA application that targeted Carter Page, with the subsequent three renewal applications, there has been no lack of analysis of the unredacted details (Mark Penn's analysis is, for my money, one of the most cogent). In what follows I intend to take more of a "big picture" approach, as well as focusing on issues that haven't received a great deal of attention but may in the future.

One aspect of the application that came as no surprise to all who have followed this FISAGATE affair is that the role of the "dossier"--the collaborative effort produced by the British ex-spook Christopher Steele, Fusion GPS (Glenn Simpson, Nellie Ohr, and possibly others), and the Hillary campaign--is everywhere apparent. While the central role of the dossier comes as no surprise--after all, Andrew McCabe, the FBI's disgraced former Deputy Director and (during the Comey - Wray interregnum) Acting Director testified to the House that the dossier was "crucial" to the FISA--the overall audacity exhibited in the application is breathtaking.

The dossier itself is in the nature of a Big Lie--sensational, lacking in documented sourcing, utterly unverified and unverifiable. To present the contents of such a document (really a collection of memos) to any court as fact is audacious enough in itself. However, the authors of the application took two remarkable steps to support the Big Lie of the dossier.