On Friday evening the Supreme Court refused to hear the case brought by Texas’s Attorney General and joined by 18 additional Attorney’s General, all of whom are Republicans. The plaintiffs in the case sought to have the Court throw out the votes of 4 states to be replaced by the state legislature’s choice of electors to the Electoral College. Conveniently enough, all 4 state were won by Joe Biden and all 4 states have Republican majority legislatures.
In the event, when the Court declined to take up the case, it did so without dissent. Two Justices, Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito, took the position that the case should be heard, but pointedly noted that the case would fail on the merits. As Andrew McCarthy notes here, Thomas and Alito adhered to their longstanding position that “…the Court must accept cases when states invoke the Court’s original jurisdiction.” The net result is that the Court voted against Trump 9 – 0, a stinging rebuke no matter how you slice it.
If anyone feels shame anymore then there ought to be a lot of shamefaced people walking around Washington this morning. Start with the man who initiated the lawsuit, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Add the 18 other Republican state Attorneys General who joined the suit. And to that add the 100 or so Republican Congressmen who backed the lawsuit.
They should be ashamed because not only was the lawsuit garbage from the very beginning; it also implied a wholesale rejection of the separation of powers as well as state sovereignty. It would have set the stage for the spectacle of the states suing each other over policies that clearly reside in the purview of the individual states. And not to put too fine a point on it, just the other day those very same Republicans were arguing that Democrats were turning the Court into a super legislature to achieve policy victories they couldn’t achieve through the electoral process.
Well, perhaps the Republicans ought to consider the consequences of having nominated a narcissistic reality TV star for President. It ought to be pretty clear that the voters rejected both Trump the person and hard left collectivism. Maybe, just maybe, the Republicans will stop with the cult-of-personality nonsense and begin to act like adults, but I’m not counting on it.
The Democrats don’t exactly come off well in this fiasco either. Keep in mind that they spent the last 4 years attacking the integrity of the 2016 election, arguing among other things, that Russian interference handed the election, which rightly belonged to Hillary Clinton, to Donald Trump. And Democratic here Stacey Abrams has yet to concede that she lost the Georgia gubernatorial race in 2018. Before the 2020 election even took place, Hillary Clinton announced that Joe Biden should never concede the result. And in Iowa, Democratic candidate for Congress Lisa Hart, who lost the race by 6 votes, has refused to concede and is petitioning Congress to seat her instead of the actual victor.
Some interest should be given to the predictions of Democratic pooh-bahs who launched an all-out attack on the Supreme Court. Consider for a moment the dire predictions of Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) who argued that as a result of the Citizens United decision (affirming the 1st amendment by the way) a wave of “dark money” would crash over the elections ensuring corporate control of “our democracy”. Or predictions that Republican Supreme Court nominees would “hand the election” to Trump.
Well a wave of dark money did cascade over the 2020 elections. But it was largely Democratic money, much of which came from Wall Street. And it didn’t do the Democrats much good in Congressional races where they lost seats. Also consider that Trump has now lost something like 33 of 34 election related lawsuits, and that the Supreme Court turned him down cold without a dissent. It’s pretty hard to take the Sheldon Whitehead’s of the world seriously.
As if the whole situation were not absurd enough to be the subject of a Fellini film, in the wake of the latest defeat, Trump got busy on his Twitter account. See below.
So what does it all add up to?
First, Donald Trump has presented clear and convincing evidence that he never should have received the Republican nomination and never should have been elected President in the first place. Second, the Republican Party, terrified of its increasingly yahoo electoral base, has abandoned its former principles and continues to display a remarkable profile in cowardice. Third, the leadership of the Democratic Party, is increasingly driven by principles–the wrong ones. They are headed down the path of a radical collectivist ideology that bears no dissent and has always led to ruin.
Cheer up, though. Voters in the U.S. have always been quite willing to throw the bums out for a new set of bums. And thus punished, one set of bums gets enough of the message to correct the errors of the last set of bums. And then the cycle repeats.
JFB
