Yes, I have seen the thing about Texas suing other states over the election. Yes, the US Supreme Court has original and exclusive jurisdiction over cases between states.

No, this is not a thing that will change the election. At all.

If this is real - and I do emphasize the if - it is posturing by the elected Republican "leadership" of Texas in an attempt to pander to a base that has degraded from merely deplorable to utterly despicable.
Apparently, it is real. For a given definition of real, anyway. As Steve notes, the Texas Solicitor General - that's the lawyer who is supposed to represent the state in cases like this - has noped out and the AG is counsel of record.

https://t.co/AbyzT3aY4n
Although - again - I'm curious as to the source. I'm seeing no press release on the Texas AG's site; I'm wondering if this might not be a document released by whoever the "special counsel" to the AG is - strange situation.
Doesn't matter. The Supreme Court is Supremely Unlikely to take this case - their jurisdiction is exclusive, but it's also discretionary.

Meaning, for nonlawyers:
SCOTUS is the only place where one state can sue another, but SCOTUS can and often does decline to take the case.
If this is real at all, they will refuse.
OK. It's real.

This breaks the prior record for the one dumbest thing that could have been done this election. By far.

Also, more people need to mess with Texas. Messing with Texas should be the new national pastime.
Also -
FFS, Texas. You're not just taking a big old dump on our entire system of government. You're doing it with writing this bad?

Kindly - and I say this with all due respect - GROW UP.

https://t.co/s4G1N6QW0f
For additional clarity:
Yes, lawyers, my use of "discretionary" was not terribly precise. The concept I'm trying to get across is that the court does not have to grant leave and there are lots of reasons they can pick from in declining to grant leave.

More from Mike Dunford

This is an excellent question, and it's something that I've thought about some over the last couple of months.

Honestly, I think the answer is that the rationales for these rulings are not likely to unreasonably harm meritorious progressive OR conservative challenges.


The first thing to keep in mind is that, by design, challenges to the outcomes of elections are supposed to be heard by state courts, through the process set out in state law.

That happened this year, and the majority of those challenges were heard on the merits.

The couple of cases where laches determined the outcome of state election challenges were ones where it was pretty clear that the challenges were brought in bad faith - where ballots cast in good faith in reliance on laws that had been in force for some time were challenged.

The PA challenge to Act 77 is one example. The challengers, some of whom had voted for passage of the bill, didn't make use of the initial, direct-to-PA-SCt challenge built into the law or sue pre-election; they waited until post-election.

The WI case is another. That one had a challenge to ballots cast using a form that had been in use for a literal decade.

Those are cases where laches is clear - particularly the prejudice element.
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 Politics

Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

That's why it's brilliant. NOBODY will be able to claim this team of partisan Democrats didn't go the EXTRA 20 MILES looking for ANY evidence they could find of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election

They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.
I told you they’d bring this up


I was wondering why that tweet had so many stupid replies. And now I see


Seriously, this was “the night before.” If you’re at the march where they’re changing “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil,” you’re not a “very fine person.” Full stop.


There are 3 important moments in that transcript.

1.) When someone asked Trump about a statement *he had already made* about there being blame on “both sides,” he said the “fine people” line.


2. Trump does clarify! “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally “

Okay!

Then adds that there were “many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”

You May Also Like

So the cryptocurrency industry has basically two products, one which is relatively benign and doesn't have product market fit, and one which is malignant and does. The industry has a weird superposition of understanding this fact and (strategically?) not understanding it.


The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.

This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.

The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."

This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.