Hack Trump judges trying to throw the election to the SCOTUS
This CNN story wildly understates the potential significance of what’s going on here:
A panel of three Donald Trump-appointed judges said Friday that Mississippi was violating federal law by counting mail ballots that arrive after Election Day, but stopped short of blocking the policy before the election, in a ruling that could nevertheless impact voting-related lawsuits this fall.
The ruling from the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals is a victory for the Republican National Committee and others who brought the case in Mississippi, a non-battleground state with very little mail-in voting, seeking a ruling by a far-right circuit court friendly to their arguments.
“Voters deserve nothing less than a fair and transparent election which ends on November 5th. We will continue to defend the law, fight for protection of every legal vote, and stop election interference in our country’s most important election,” RNC Chairman Michael Whatley said in a statement celebrating the ruling.
The three-judge panel included Kyle Duncan, who you may remember from his kabuki martyrdom at Stanford Law School, and James Ho, who got into the news recently by saying he wouldn’t hire clerks from Yale because Yale Law School is a viper’s nest of Woke Leftists (like JD Vance apparently).
What’s really happening here is that this is a test case, which will give the SCOTUS the opportunity, should it choose to avail itself of it, to throw into doubt the post-election results in the 20 states that count mail-in ballots mailed by Election Day but received afterwards. (Nevada is in this group, as are states whose elections will be critical to the ultimate control of Congress, including New York, Ohio, and California).
Cutting through the legalese, this is the typical reactionary bullshit by which long-standing and until ten seconds ago completely non-controversial electoral practices are undermined by fascist-adjacent lawyers and judges, who are using the most ludicrous formalistic arguments to try to sow post-election chaos, in the service of putting Donald Trump back into power, so that among other things we won’t have to worry so much in the future about things like free and fair elections.
James Ho, Kyle Duncan, et al. are objectively pro-fascist, and it’s important not to lose sight of that amid all the pretentious bloviation about “text, history, and precedent.”
Trump judges, including but far from limited to the Sinister Six who gave us the abomination that is Trump v. United States, are going to do everything they can to throw this election to their master. I’m already looking forward to the shocked pearl clutching among Legal Elites ™, when something as predictable as a sunrise on the eastern horizon materializes in the days between November 5th and January 20th. In fact as this case illustrates, it’s already happening.