To be fair, I'm talking about 57 other elections, where the Supreme Court was not involved. Because the Constitution is fairly clear about how election law is to be handled - so it takes a VERY narrow range of circumstances to actually get the Court involved. Which is why it happens so rarely.gameoverman wrote: Fri Sep 25, 2020 3:07 amI look at it a bit differently. You are talking about a specific set of circumstances in one election.
Lawyers charge by the hour, and there's billions of dollars to be hoovered up here, so no doubt someone somewhere is researching it. But on the list of things we need to worry about, this is pretty near the bottom. Mostly, it's not a very good way to go about "stealing" the election, for a couple of reasons.I'm sure they have their lawyers figuring out what ifs based on getting the election results in the Supreme Court's hands.
- It would be very, VERY hard to do. Even assuming that the Republicans are going to do it all....voting fraud, state house shenanigans, assassinating electors....assuming absolutely NOTHING is off the table.....you're still trying to set up an incredibly specific path of a events when you could just outright rig the election, or launch a coup, or something.
- It's horribly unreliable. I know we've been so warped as a population that it's near impossible to see a person's partisan affiliation as anything other than an intrinsic, unalterable part of a person's character, but SC Justices do not see themselves that way. That doesn't mean ideologies NEVER align along partisan tracts...it does happen, but again, we're talking about a situation where the Republicans are willing to do ANYTHING to hold power. Why gamble on a bunch of people who frankly haven't proven very reliable over the last 4 years?
Sure, but that's Senator McConnell at work. We KNOW what he's all about. We have decades of legislative history to look at to prove it. We also have years to decades of jurisprudence to look at for ALL of the Justices...including Amy Coney Barrett...and virtually none of it suggests that even the worst of them (lookin' at you, Thomas) are cut from anything remotely resembling the same cloth.Until Republicans made up a rule preventing Obama from appointing a justice there was no such rule. And now that a Republican is President there isn't such a rule again. Don't underestimate their willingness to hack out a path if it's the path they want.
Hell, they've had a 5-4 majority for a couple of years now, and they haven't exactly used it to remake America.
