Once again, SCOTUS has thrown the voters under the bus, quietly denying without any explanation yet another election fraud lawsuit. The Supreme Court of the United States seems to be sending a clear message that election integrity isn’t something they should get involved with.
SCOTUS plays by their own rules
Conservative Americans are frustrated with the apparent lack of interest in what should be a huge hot button issue but generally speaking, they don’t have law degrees either.
The rules that the Supreme Court play by are so insanely complicated that very few people fully grasp the intricate way SCOTUS really works. The simple answer is that this wasn’t the right case to test the issue. The whole problem is that the people who filed suit in the first place never had a legal leg to stand on.
Forcing an issue in court takes leverage. The first thing you have to do when filing a lawsuit is stake out a piece of ground over the contested issue and prove that you are an interested party, damaged in some way that the particular court where you filed suit can somehow legally grant relief.
That right to ask for damages in the first place is called “standing.” Most cases presented to SCOTUS are refused because of lack of standing, simply because the rules are so arcane.
In this particular case, SCOTUS says that former Republican congressional candidate Jim Bognet has no right to demand answers from the 3rd US Circuit Court of Appeals on the matter, and neither do any of the four “individual voters” in the battleground state of Pennsylvania who argued the state high court “exceeded its authority.”
Because of that, it’s not their problem and the majority of the justices are just as silent as the minority on the issue. They’re smart enough to know which battles to fight and which ones to let go by for fighting another day, on another field of glory.
Out with a whimper
Left-leaning political analyst Steve Vladeck, who covers SCOTUS for CNN, can’t help gloating of the way another election integrity suit went down in flames. “Once again, the court’s involvement in the 2020 election is going out with a whimper, not a bang.”
The central issue of this case, if it had been filed by the proper parties, is the question of whether or not the Pennsylvania Supreme Court “exceeded its authority when it ordered the expansion of ballot deadlines.” The reason why they did it was Covid but that doesn’t matter one bit. All that matters is that it isn’t their job in the first place.
SCOTUS isn’t going to consider the hotly debated question to decide once and for all if it is the courts or the lawmakers with final say on the issue. The answer boils down to whether “commissions” are “given legislative powers by the state constitution.”
Conservatives and liberals alike will have to wait for another day to learn if “the Pennsylvania Supreme Court usurped the Pennsylvania General Assembly’s authority when it changed voting rules prescribed by the legislature.”
Vladeck seemed impressed by the way that SCOTUS neatly sidestepped getting sucked into a political whirlpool.
“By vacating the decision below and ordering the lower court to dismiss the suit as being moot, the Justices avoided either tacitly endorsing or rejecting the lower court’s analysis, leaving no federal precedent to govern the question of whether the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was allowed to extend the deadline for receipt of mail-in ballots last fall.”
