We need to recognize how remarkable this

Part of me, of course, wants to see this as mundane -- as the Supreme Court doing exactly what it _should_ have done, exactly what every non-quack legal expert said it would do. But it would be wrong to dismiss the fears of those who worried it would do the opposite.

/2
As someone who studies authoritarian politics for a living, I would encourage all of us who have the privilege of living in democracies to retain a healthy appreciation of institutions working the way they _should_.

/3
The argument that SCOTUS _would_ rule this way because it _should_ rule this way was always specious, in my view. Of course it should. But 106 GOP congressmen and 17 state attorneys general _should_ also have refrained from filing amicus briefs.

/4
The GOP and Trump _should_ have recognized defeat, even if they don't like it. Fox News _should_ not be giving a platform to lies about 'illegal' ballots. Shall I continue?

/5
Ok, I will: the US Gov't _should_ not be a feeding trough for the president's children. The Senate _should_ have waited before filling RBG's seat. Congress and the Administration _should_ protect whistleblowers, not persecute them.

/6
In short, the list of impeachable offenses -- by this president and by his allies on Capitol Hill and in state capitals -- is so long that all of them _should_ have been drummed out of office a long time ago. And yet they were not.

/7
This gap between _should_ and _would_ has yawned because institutions do not act in their own right. Institutions have power because they shape the behaviors of the people in them, and they shape those behaviors by shaping expectations.

/8
In other words, institutions allow us to predict outcomes by telling us how people are likely to behave. And we have learned over the last four years to expect people to behave badly.

/9
If 106 Republican Congressmen could sign on to Texas's laughable lawsuit, was it really unreasonable to think that 6 SCOTUS Justices could do the same? That they could act out of self-interest or a warped, Foxed-up interpretation of reality?

Of course it was reasonable.

/10
The fact that SCOTUS in this instance closed the gap between _should_ and _would_ is important and should be neither overstated nor understated. They have not single-handedly saved American democracy. We have a lot of work to do to close the should/would gap elsewhere.

/11
But to take this case -- and even worse, to rule in Texas's favor -- would have closed the should/would gap in the other direction. It would have removed the last of the 'old' expectations and given people a new one: an expectation that the Constitution has no force.

/12
It is remarkable that the six Republicans most able to inoculate themselves against whatever has infected the rest of the party were those occupying precisely the office designed by the framers of the Constitution to be most resistant to the animal spirits of politics.

/13
But it wasn't a 232-year-old piece of paper that made SCOTUS rule that way. It wasn't the building or the air inside. It wasn't even the books and the robes. It was the people. It was _their_ expectation that this was what they _should_ do.

/14
Future historical sociologists will delve into diaries and notes of those Justices and tell us how those expectations were formed, and why they withstood what others cannot. I do not pretend to know. But perhaps we should not wait that long to find out.

/15
Perhaps we should study the thoughts and ideas of those people -- and particularly those 6 Republicans, with whom I agree on practically nothing else -- to map the genesis of their political T-cells. Perhaps we should learn to spread that immunity to the rest of the herd.

/16
I don't want to predict the future. But I do want us to take a look at this moment, if only for a moment, and understand what it means.

/END

More from Law

This issue was repeatedly highlighted bu Judge Totenberg:

Dominion’s system “does not produce a voter-verifiable paper ballot or a paper ballot marked with the voter’s choices in a format readable by the voter because the votes are tabulated solely from the unreadable QR code.”


Judge also found that Dominion's QR codes are NOT encrypted:

“Evidence plainly contradicts any contention that the QR codes or digital signatures are encrypted,”

This was “ultimately conceded by Mr. Cobb and expressly acknowledged later by Dr. Coomer during his testimony.”

Judge Totenberg said there was “demonstrable evidence” that the implementation of Dominion’s systems by Georgia placed voters at an “imminent risk of deprivation of their fundamental right to cast an effective vote,” which she defined as a “vote that is accurately counted.”

Judge Totenberg found that Dominion Systems inherently could not be audited.

She noted that auditors are severely limited and “can only determine whether the BMD printout was tabulated accurately, not whether the election outcome is correct.“

Totenberg stated in her ruling that a BMD printout “is not trustworthy” and the application of an Risk-Limiting audit (RLA) to an election that used BMD printouts “does not yield a true risk-limiting audit.”

Georgia used RLAs to claim no fraud...
We need to talk about the 'expert' witness statement evidence led by Ms Bell in her successful case before the Tavistock. THREAD

You can see who gave evidence in her support from these extracts from the Tavistock's Skeleton Argument.


Helpful for you to bear in mind that her solicitor was a man called Paul Conrathe, who has a long association with the religious right in the US (I have talked about him a number of times but this is as good a starting point as any).


I am not going to address here other criticisms that might be made of the form in which that evidence was given or the timing of its service before the court. I am just going to address, in alphabetical order, the individuals whose evidence Mr Conrathe led on Ms Bell's behalf.

The first witness, alphabetically, was Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Oxford, Michael Biggs.

Mr Biggs was exposed for posting transphobic statements online under a fake twitter handle: @MrHenryWimbush according to this report.
One of the judges this story mentions is William Cassidy, who was promoted from an Atlanta IJ position to a BIA member position in 2019 by the Trump DOJ. Cassidy has an awful history that has been well-documented, but I'm still enraged reading this reporting.


The story notes that the EOIR Director served as an ICE attorney in Atlanta and practiced before Cassidy for years. And it points to FOIA records unearthed by Bryan Johnson showing they remain friendly.

A trove of complaints against Cassidy was published by AILA in 2019 after FOIA litigation. They generally show misconduct, substantiated in the record, followed by "written counseling" etc.

One way Cassidy could avoid discipline is by turning off the recording device during the hearing. If he made a lewd or offensive comment off the record, all the EOIR would do is listen to the recording. If it's not there, the complaint is "unsubstantiated" https://t.co/wUeBPEEbpV


In that case, Cassidy joked about a detained immigrant saying he missed his wife. The complaint was dismissed because the ACIJ found "no levity or joking" in the comment.

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