The Nightmare Scenario SCOTUS is Plotting For the 2024 Election Takeover
This scenario isn’t just plausible: it’s probable. GOP-controlled states are already changing their state laws to allow for it, regardless of how their people vote. Six Republicans on the Supreme Court just announced that one of the first cases they’ll decide next year could include whether that very scenario is constitutional or not. And at least 5 of the Republicans on this Court will almost certainly say that it is.
While the main issue being debated in Moore v Harper, scheduled for a hearing this October, is a gerrymander that conflicts with North Carolina’s constitution, the issue at the core of the debate is what’s called the “Independent State Legislature Doctrine.”
It literally gives state legislatures the power to pre-rig or simply hand elections to the candidate of their choice.
That doctrine — the basis of John Eastman and Donald Trump’s effort to get states to submit multiple slates of electors — asserts that a plain reading of Article II and the 12th Amendment of the Constitution says that each state’s legislature has final say in which candidate gets their states’ Electoral College vote, governors and the will of the voters be damned.
The Republicans point out that the Constitution says that it’s up to the states — “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct” — to decide which presidential candidate gets their Electoral College votes.
But the Electoral Count Act requires a governor’s sign-off, and half those states have Democratic governors. Which has precedence, the Constitution or the Act?
If the Supreme Court says it’s the US Constitution rather than the Electoral Count Act, states’ constitutions, state laws, or the votes of their citizens, the scenario outlined above becomes not just possible but very likely. Republicans, answering to their rightwing billionaire donors rather than voters, play hardball and consistently push to the extremes regardless of pubic opinion.
After all, the Constitution only mentions the states’ legislatures — which are all Republican controlled — so the unwillingness of the Democratic governors of Michigan, North Carolina, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania to sign off on the Electoral College votes becomes moot. Read the entire article by Thom Hartmann.
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U.S. Capital Insurrection January 6, 2021
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