Thursday, December 10, 2020

Can I submit an amicus brief to the Supreme Court?

 I would like to say Amen to Pennsylvania's brief to the latest Trump attempt at overturning the election results:

For their whole filing

From the introduction:

PRELIMINARY STATEMENT 

Since Election Day, State and Federal courts throughout the country have been flooded with frivolous lawsuits aimed at disenfranchising large swaths of voters and undermining the legitimacy of the election. The State of Texas has now added its voice to the cacophony of bogus claims. Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees. Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas’s preferred candidate for President is legally indefensible and is an afront to principles of constitutional democracy. 

What Texas is doing in this proceeding is to ask this Court to reconsider a mass of baseless claims about problems with the election that have already been considered, and rejected, by this Court and other courts. It attempts to exploit this Court’s sparingly used original jurisdiction to relitigate those matters. But Texas obviously lacks standing to bring such claims, which, in any event, are barred by laches, and are moot, meritless, and dangerous. Texas has not suffered harm simply because it dislikes the result of the election, and nothing in the text, history, or structure of the Constitution supports Texas’s view that it can dictate the manner in which four other states run their elections. Nor is that view grounded in any precedent from this Court. Texas does not seek to have the Court interpret the Constitution, so much as disregard it.

Why is the Republican party and leaders standing by this attempt to deny the reality that Donald Trump lost this election?

Here is the statement from other states opposing this case:

  1.  California, 
  2. Colorado, 
  3. Connecticut, 
  4. Delaware, 
  5. Guam, 
  6. Hawaii, 
  7. Illinois, 
  8. Maine, 
  9. Maryland, 
  10. Massachusetts, 
  11. Minnesota, 
  12. Nevada, 
  13. New Jersey, 
  14. New Mexico, 
  15. New York, 
  16. North Carolina, 
  17. Oregon, 
  18. Rhode Island, 
  19. Vermont, 
  20. Virginia, 
  21. U.S. Virgin Islands, and 
  22. Washington

Here are the states supporting this case and their arguments:

  1. Missouri, 
  2. Alabama, 
  3. Arkansas, 
  4. Florida, 
  5. Indiana, 
  6. Kansas, 
  7. Louisiana, 
  8. Mississippi, 
  9. Montana, 
  10. Nebraska, 
  11. North Dakota, 
  12. Oklahoma, 
  13. South Carolina, 
  14. South Dakota, 
  15. Tennessee, 
  16. Utah, and 
  17. West Virginia. 

106 Republican legislators also have submitted a statement supporting this case.  I won't list them all, but so disappointed to see this.  I was talking to my friend Young Wha about this case and it really does seem like we are living in different realities.  One where we live in a democracy, and another where loyalty to the president supersedes facts and where even the facts exist in an alternate reality.  

The other groups submitting documents in support of this case are evangelical christian groups - like https://thejusticefoundation.org/ that fights against "forced" abortions? A Christian family org?  Nothing this president has done deserves this support.  

Nothing in this election shows fraud, just that people were allowed to vote using mail in ballots. Which is crazy because so many states allowed mail in ballots and Trump won those states. List here. They aren't in this case.  

1 comment:

Christine Merrill said...

Hey, you've been writing lots of stuff on your blog! I should have kept reading after the Christmas card! :) I totally agree with you about the weirdness of the election challenges. Somehow, Trump won a lot of support from many religious people by his tightened restrictions on abortion. I'm totally not for abortion, and I'd love to see it disappear. But I'm not willing to tank the whole country over it. But I guess a lot of my friends really feel like that's the single most important issue in our country today, and will vote for anyone who supports that. And who knows, maybe I'm wrong - saving lives is important. (Yeah, cough, cough, covid response...) ANYWAY, I'm glad the supreme court threw it out.