The Texas challenge to the election - what it might, and won't, change

 

Texas has sued four other states - Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - in an attempt to overturn their electoral college nominations.  Texas alleges that many of their changes to electoral rules, regulations and procedures were not put through their state legislatures, and were therefore unconstitutional.  Several other states have announced that they'll join Texas in the suit before the Supreme Court.

I was surprised to see this lawsuit, but also encouraged.  It's on purely constitutional grounds, and doesn't involve (or have to prove) electoral fraud, or any other shenanigans.  As Texas said in its complaint (bold, underlined text is my emphasis):

All these flaws – even the violations of state election law – violate one or more of the federal requirements for elections (i.e., equal protection, due process, and the Electors Clause) and thus arise under federal law ... Plaintiff State respectfully submits that the foregoing types of electoral irregularities exceed the hanging-chad saga of the 2000 election in their degree of departure from both state and federal law. Moreover, these flaws cumulatively preclude knowing who legitimately won the 2020 election and threaten to cloud all future elections.

Taken together, these flaws affect an outcome-determinative numbers of popular votes in a group of States that cast outcome-determinative numbers of electoral votes.

There's much more at the link.

I have no idea whether or not this lawsuit can, or will, succeed on its merits.  For SCOTUS to overturn election results in four states is a very, very big deal.  Some of the Justices will almost certainly be very reluctant to take such a step.  On the other hand, the complaint is very specific.  It alleges multiple violations of plain-language, black-letter constitutional requirements.  If the constitution is indeed normative for this country, its fundamental law, and not just a symbol or a meaningless piece of paper, then the complainants have every right to insist that its provisions must be followed and applied to the letter.  On those grounds, I think - I hope! - that the lawsuit has good prospects of succeeding.

Those grounds may be the only ones that offer any prospect of a legal resolution to the crisis precipitated by the elections.  Electoral fraud aside (for which there's abundant evidence, as we've seen in these pages over the past month or so), it's very clear that the Democratic Party machine was abundantly funded and mobilized to target the cities where Joe Biden's support was greatest, and to generate a massive wave of votes that would swamp the rest of the states concerned.  As PJ Media explains (again, bold, underlined text is my emphasis):

Two things happened in 2020. First, COVID led to a dismantling of state election integrity laws by everyone except the one body with the constitutional prerogative to change the rules of electing the president – the state legislatures.

Second, the Center for Technology and Civic Life happened.

If you are focused on goblins in the voting machines but don’t know anything about the CTCL and what they did to defeat Donald Trump, it’s time to up your game.

The Center for Technology and Civic Life and allied groups are responsible for building an urban get-out-the-vote-machine of the sort that Democrats could only dream up on a bender fueled by jugs of Merlot and all the legalized pot they could smoke.

. . .

Hundreds of millions of private charitable dollars flowed into key urban county election offices in battleground states. The same private philanthropic largess did not reach red counties. Urban counties were able to revolutionize government election offices into Joe Biden turnout machines.

Here’s the best part — All of this is legal. Do not allow your shock and confusion about what happened in 2020 lead you to mislabel all of this as “voter fraud” or “quasi-legal.” The Left excels at making the unprecedented real and the seemingly illegal, legal.

. . .

The hundreds of millions poured into urban election offices by the CTLC and affiliated charities also explains how Trump dramatically increased his share of the black and Hispanic vote and still lost.  Hadn’t we been told that if Trump could increase his share of the black vote by only a few percentage points that he would win? Well, he did, and he lost.

Even if Trump increased his share of the black and Hispanic vote, the opening of the urban turnout floodgates through private donations to government election offices easily swamped Trump statewide in Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan.

It doesn’t matter if Trump has 15 percent of the black vote in Detroit if turnout there soared by 92,891 Detroit votes, which it did. It doesn’t matter if Trump has even 20 percent of the black vote in Atlanta if turnout in DeKalb soared by 54,550 votes, which it did.

This also explains how the GOP was so successful everywhere… except at the top of the ticket.  A flood of blue votes gushing out of deep blue urban areas has a statewide effect only for statewide candidates. It doesn’t affect legislative races outside of the cities.

. . .

By and large, the Democrats succeeded in tossing out state laws related to absentee ballot verification, deadlines and a whole range of laws all in the name of COVID. By and large, GOP efforts in court failed. It was a courtroom bloodbath that created vulnerabilities across the system.

The important point to understand is that elections are messy, and in 2020 hundreds of millions of dollars thrown at lawsuits and at election officials made the 2020 elections the messiest ever. Elections are also complicated, and you don’t always need outright fraud or communist hackers to craft a scheme to defeat Donald Trump. Why take that risk when you can do it all mostly legally by simply fundamentally transforming the entire process?

Again, more at the link.

There was, of course, electoral fraud added to the mix - we've seen abundant evidence of that in recent weeks.  Nevertheless, the basic approach of the Left, to use the cities where their support was strongest to swamp other areas where it was not - worked.  Their opponents failed to realize what was going on, and didn't organize equally hard to get out their own voters, to their cost.

It's the points highlighted above - changes made to election integrity laws by officials and bureaucrats, instead of state legislatures - that have led to Texas' lawsuit before SCOTUS.  On the face of it, the complaint is undeniable.  Whether or not SCOTUS will have the courage to acknowledge that legal reality, and if so, what remedies they will apply, remains to be seen.

The progressive left will, of course, scream blue murder if SCOTUS does provide the relief sought by Texas and other states, and require the legislatures in those four states - all Republican-controlled - to appoint slates of electors for their state.  We can expect massive civil unrest, up to and including bloodshed.  However, the law is the law, and facts are facts.  This is where the forces of law and order must hold the line, and the politicians in charge of local and state governments must do likewise.  If they don't, it's easy to imagine a situation where control is lost, and some cities become hotbeds of anarchy and violence.

Some will doubtless argue that's not acceptable, and must be avoided at any cost.  They may try to persuade SCOTUS that the risks of ruling in Texas' favor are too great, that they must "punt" and not take action.  However, if they do so, then the constitution will have become a dead letter.  It will no longer be the law of the land, and the rule of law will have been fatally undermined.

That's not acceptable to me, and to many millions of Americans who, like me, swore an oath of office to "support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; [and] that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same".  We regard ourselves as still bound by that oath of office.  It has no expiry date.

So, SCOTUS has an opportunity to enforce the constitution - both the nation's and the states' - as the fundamental law of the land.  Will it?  We don't know.  We'll soon find out.  If they do, half the country will rejoice, and the other half will explode in anger.  If they don't, the same situation will apply - just the moods will be reversed.  Either way, I see deep trouble ahead for these formerly United States.  This election has merely highlighted the fact that we are truly not united any more.  Can we find something, some cause, around which to reunify as a nation?  Your guess is as good as mine.

Meanwhile, I'm preparing for hard times.  I think they're now inevitable.

Peter