Texas - WTF is this even - a very short reassurance thread:

1: The Texas "lawusit" against four other "battleground" states in the United States Supreme Court is legally stupid.* It is so legally stupid that I was reluctant to believe that even Ken Paxton would file it.

*My patience level is not ginormous today. Please don't try to explain to me why you think it isn't stupid for whatever other reasons because I'll be making liberal use of the airlock. Thx.
2: Yes, one state can sue another at the US Supreme Court. However, the Supreme Court gets to decide whether to take the case. One factor that they will **undoubtedly** look at is the factor of "injury."
Texas is claiming two things. First, that the states have a special interest in who becomes Vice President because of the tiebreaker. Second, that their electors are injured if their votes are "diluted" by electors from states that, in Texas's view, didn't obey their own law.
There is very little argument presented for "injury." Even less - barely a paragraph - was presented for how the defendant states caused that injury.

For lawyers, this is a signal that this is a performance of politics by "litigation" and not a serious effort.
Nonlawyers - who are the audience for this drek - may be impressed by the arguments about how other states violated their own laws.

Lawyers - at least competent ones - will zero in on the alleged injury and the evidence that the injury was caused by the defendant states.
Why? Simple.

Courts care about how the person bringing the complaint was allegedly harmed by the person being sued. If there's not a harm you can sue over and/or you can't show how the person you are suing caused that harm, You Have No Case.
This applies to states, too.

The motion for leave to file doesn't seem to allege an actual injury that courts address, and doesn't really allege how the state in question caused that injury.
Simply put, @JohnFetterman has a better ability to bring a court case against @DanPatrick to recover 2 million dollars in Sheetz gift cards for showing proof of election fraud than the state of Texas has to bring a case against Pennsylvania over the election.
This lawsuit is Texas taking a dump on the rest of the Republic and I'm angry as all hell that those- those people have chosen to do this.

I am not worried in the least about the case.
PS - Akiva looks to be at least as pissed off as I am, and he's being pissed off in more detail.

https://t.co/QRIBlW6qf6
And it's being picked apart here in even more exquisite detail.

I'll let them take it. I looked at the injury section and then deleted the download.

https://t.co/ipbla8ose4
Seriously:
The Republican Party, as a whole, is a clear and present danger to the viability of the Republic.

More from Mike Dunford

THREAD:
Good afternoon, followers of frivolous election litigation. There's a last-minute entry in the competition for dumbest pre-inauguration lawsuit - a totally loony effort to apparently leave the entire USA without a government.

We'll start with the complaint in a minute.

But first, I want to give you a quick explanation for why I'm going to keep talking about these cases even after the inauguration.

They're part of an ongoing effort - one that's not well-coordinated but is widespread - to discredit our fundamental system of government.

It's a direct descendent, in more ways than one, of birtherism. And here's the thing about birtherism. It might have been a joke to a lot of people, but it was extremely pernicious. It obviously validated the racist "not good enough to be President" crowd. But that wasn't all.

Don't get me wrong, that was bad enough. Validating racism helped put the kind of shitbird who would tweet this from an official government account into power. But it didn't stop


(Also, if you agree with Pompeo about multiculturalism - the legendary melting pot - not being what this country is all about, you need to stop following me now. And maybe go somewhere and think about your life choices and what made you such a tool.)
I've been trying to think that through - not just legally, but judicially.

The more thinking I do the less serious - and more ludicrous - the entire thing looks. And the more obvious it becomes that this is the proposal of deeply unwell individuals who are not thinking clearly.


On the legal side, I read through the list of emergency powers - the whole list - that was assembled by the Brennan Center. Nothing on that list fits. Nothing comes even

It seems extraordinarily unlikely that any executive order along the lines of what has been discussed would be legal. In this case, it can be taken as a given that one or more targeted jurisdictions would dash right off to the courthouse.

Standing would not, it should go without saying, be likely to be an issue. I doubt redressability would either. I think it's very likely that restraining orders and injunctions would be swiftly issued.

That's the legal side, to the extent it's possible to speculate on that at all at this point. Basically, there's no readily apparent legal basis for such a thing, so it probably wouldn't be legal.

That's the easy part. Now for the nuttier side - the logistics.

More from Court

Some initial observations about this case, and in particular what the Court of Appeal made of the Attorney General’s application to refer these sentences as “unduly lenient”.

Spoiler: it makes uncomfortable reading for the Attorney General.


First, by way of background. I was one of several commentators astonished that the Attorney General, who has no known experience of practising criminal law, decided to personally present this serious case at the Court of Appeal.

It appeared an overtly political decision.


Comments leaked to the press confirmed this was a political decision, to capitalise on a tragic case in the headlines.

A “friend” of the Attorney General told the Express that she was pursuing the case *against* legal advice. She also took a preemptive pop at the judges.


On the day of the hearing, it appeared from selected reports that the AG was out of her depth. She appeared to be making political submissions to the Court of Appeal that have no place in a case of this type.


The Court of Appeal judgment helps understand what happened.

The AG played a limited role. She “rehearsed some of the facts and said that the sentences had caused widespread public concern”

Her contribution was seemingly not considered by the Court to be legal submissions. Oof.
There won't be a rerun of Jan 6. The riot at the Capitol was unique in many ways: Trump called for it; it was the last chance to "overturn" the election; it was huge in scale.


The coming Trumpist events on Jan 17 and Jan 20 will probably be much smaller in scale, especially in DC. The MAGA crew can't buy another flight and take more days off work so soon after Jan 6.

Some of the Trumpist forums are actively suspicious of these events, claiming they're FBI or Antifa traps. A lot of people at TDW felt that the *design* of this flyer was too lefty to be real!


Unfortunately, that doesn't mean everything will be OK. The statehouse events on Jan 17 have the potential to turn violent, where a few hundred people could be enough to overwhelm local authorities.

MAGA anger at a lot of the GOP is high, as well as against Dems. Even red states could see problems, so I hope authorities are prepared.

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