(Source)

Well Fuck Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch

US Democracy: Close to Death

Pardon my language.

But we are f*cked. Yesterday (June 30, 2022), SCOTUS agreed to hear “Moore v. Harper” on its fall 2022 docket. This case deals with the authority of states to run elections (see more detail later on)*. The conservative-majority court will likely rule in favor of Moore, which would let Republican-held state legislatures appoint their own electors in the electoral college, ignoring the popular vote. In essence, Republicans wouldn’t have to repeat Jan. 6 in the future. They could simply use Republican-held statehouses to reject election results they don’t like, ending free and fair elections in the US.

Presently, there are not enough votes for Congress or the President to do anything to stop this. Congress could potentially impeach Justice Thomas for his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection but the Constitution requires a two-thirds majority Senate vote to convict a sitting Supreme Court justice. Sufficient support for this does not exist in the Senate, and is not likely to exist at any time soon. 

There is only one real, legal recourse to this threat: obtaining a true Democratic majority in the US Senate, which we do not have. Senators Manchin and Sinema are unreliable at best and potentially plants at worst. They support neither the reform of or conditional exemption to the filibuster, nor “packing the court.” We need two additional Democratic senators to make their spoiler-effect opposition irrelevant. A 52-member Democratic Senate would allow the filibuster to be bypassed and open the way for the Judiciary Act to pass, which would allow President Biden to add four additional Supreme Court justice seats to reign in this current slow-motion right-wing coup. Don’t think abolishing the filibuster is right? See additional text later.**

How do we get two additional Democratic votes in the Senate? There are currently two highly-competitive Senate races for seats held by Republicans in the midterms this November: Pennsylvania (Dr. Oz (R) vs. John Fetterman (D)) and Wisconsin (party nominees undecided, primary scheduled Aug. 9, 2022). The Dems also need to hold onto every seat they currently occupy. This includes other highly-competitive seats in: Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. I’ve never campaigned for anyone in my life before but today I signed up to volunteer with John Fetterman’s campaign because I feel like this is important. 

I can’t tell anybody what to do this information, I can only provide it. But I hope that people who value laws, regulations, and policies that support the social, economic, environmental, and democratic wellbeing of a society can recognize when those things are at stake (and they are). The Republicans and their right-wing evangelical supporters know that the 2022 midterm and 2024 general elections are the last chance they have to impose their religious agenda on the country. They know the majority of Americans do not support an elimination of abortion, the banning of LGBT people from public life, or the continuous denial of the climate crisis. That is why they are using the Supreme Court to take action right before these critical elections. They should not get away with this. 

“I’m too anxious or burnt to do anything.” That’s true. It’s been an exhausting past two years. But, for myself, I hate to think of the regret I might have in 2024 when a Republican-held Court, White House, and Congress enact a nationwide federal ban on abortion or LGBT people. Do I want to ask myself at that time, “was there anything else I could have done?” “Electoralism doesn’t work.” I sympathize.*** Often times it feels we elect people who don’t ultimately do anything. But I guarantee that voting will become even more of a token gesture in the future under the likely Moore v. Harper ruling if it’s allowed to proceed unchecked. “The Nation is already f*cked, there’s no point in saving it. We should just let the inevitable balkanization of America happen.” While I think current inflation and supply chains are bad, I can’t imagine how much worse they will be when the nationwide networks of food, medicine, water, household goods, consumer electronics, et al. are subject to tariffs and various petty interregional conflicts that the federal government currently mediates. Yes, the US will cease to exist one day, but let that be a day when we decide that we no longer need the federal government to aid us in living healthful, rich lives, not because of a right-wing coup. 

Thank you for your time if you've read this far.

*Moore v. Harper is a Supreme Court writ of certiorari between Thomas Moore, the Republican Speaker of the North Carolina House of Representatives, and Rebecca Harper, a North Carolina citizen who is collectively filing with other North Carolinians against the Speaker. The case has to do with a Feb. 2022 North Carolina Supreme Court decision that threw out the State Legislature’s election map as gerrymandered. The NC Supreme Court ruled that the maps adopted by the NC Legislature violated the NC Constitution. The NC Supreme Court adopted remedial election maps in their place. Speaker Moore, in turn, filed a writ of certiorari with SCOTUS that it accepted June 30. The NC Republicans believe the US Constitution does not allow state supreme courts jurisprudence over elections and that state legislatures should be able to run and organize elections exclusively. SCOTUS has continuously ruled, however, since 1916 (Davis v. Hildebrant) and as recently as 2015 (Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission) that the Constitution does not give unilateral election-running authority to a state legislature but rather to the public or a state’s constitution. The likely SCOTUS ruling in the fall on Moore v. Harper would overturn over a century’s worth of precedent and allow sitting state legislatures to blatantly gerrymander election maps and even the ability to ignore the popular vote.

**Don’t think abolishing the filibuster is right? The US Constitution does not support the use of the filibuster and does not require a two-thirds vote for laws. It only specifies that a two-thirds majority be used for: censure, expulsion, conviction, and treaty approval. The Senate has reformed the filibuster throughout US history. Senators used to be able to simply filibuster a motion out of the Senate without any accountability. In 1917, the Senate changed its rules to allow a two-thirds majority vote to end debate, the first such check on the filibuster. In 1975, the Senate changes its rules again and dropped this threshold from 67 to 60 senators. Clearly, the Senate has a history of changing its own rules as allowed by Article I, Section 5 of the US Constitution. It is perfectly reasonable and constitutional to either reform or end the use of the filibuster.

***Yes, electoralism is not the end-be-all of civic engagement. It is the bare minimum. If you want more than casting a vote then (good news): there’s a wealth of civil society and community-based organizations out there waiting for your talent, energy, and expertise. Getting involved can connect you to additional resources. And, yes, support mutual aid requests as you are able but mutual aid is not a replacement for actual, scalable human services, like medicine, professional care, electronic infrastructure and services, formal education, et al. that our federal state provides. This is not an “one or the other” decision. All of the tools are here. Use all of them as you are able. Campaign, vote, organize, donate, spread awareness. All of it. And anybody calling for a violent revolution is clueless. The right-wing white supremacists have been preparing for this moment four four decades, with ready-to-mobilize militias. There are no comparable and scalable left-wing militia organizations to counter this. Sure, join your local Socialist Rifle Association but SRA, as it stands now, is simply not comparable to the organization that right-wing extremists currently have. And once you have outed yourself as an active leftist gun user (in the same way that white militias use theirs), you can forget about your constitutional rights. The longer-term solution is to create locally-based power that can resist overreaches by state and federal governments.

By Adam Liptak

The New York Times

Sept. 26, 2022

WASHINGTON — “It’s the biggest federalism issue in a long time,” Chief Justice Nathan L. Hecht of the Texas Supreme Court said on the phone the other day. “Maybe ever.”

He was explaining why the Conference of Chief Justices, a group representing the top state judicial officers in the nation, had decided to file a brief in the U.S. Supreme Court in a politically charged election-law case. The brief urged the court to reject a legal theory pressed by Republicans that would give state legislatures extraordinary power.

Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard, said the brief underscored how momentous the decision in the case could be.

“It’s highly unusual for the Conference of Chief Justices to file an amicus brief in the Supreme Court,” he said. “It’s even rarer for the conference to do so in a controversial, ideologically charged case.”

If the Supreme Court adopts the theory, it will radically reshape how federal elections are conducted by giving state lawmakers independent authority, not subject to review by state courts, to set election rules in conflict with state constitutions.

The conference’s brief, which was nominally filed in support of neither party, urged the Supreme Court to reject that approach, sometimes called the independent state legislature theory. The Constitution, the brief said, “does not oust state courts from their traditional role in reviewing election laws under state constitutions.”

The case, Moore v. Harper, No. 21-1271, will be argued in the coming months. It concerns a congressional voting map drawn by the North Carolina Legislature favoring Republicans that was rejected as a partisan gerrymander by the state’s Supreme Court. Republican lawmakers seeking to restore the legislative map argued that the state court had been powerless to act.

Four conservative members of the U.S. Supreme Court have issued opinions indicating that they may be ready to endorse the independent state legislature theory. Professor Stephanopoulos said the conference’s decision to raise its voice was telling.

“That the conference is willing to take a stand here highlights how extreme and dangerous the argument of the North Carolina legislators is,” he said. “That argument would undermine the authority of state courts to interpret state law — a bedrock principle of our system of federalism, and one that conservative justices historically championed, not questioned.”

Empowering state legislatures at the expense of state courts would, these days at least, generally seem to help Republicans, who control more legislatures.

But Chief Justice Hecht, who was elected as a Republican and has called for ending partisan elections for judges in his state, said the constitutional principles should remain constant.

“Politics can shift,” he said. “You can say, ‘We want these people to make the call because they’re in the right party.’ But tomorrow they might not be in the right party — but they still get to make the call.”

Evan Caminker, a law professor at the University of Michigan who represents the conference along with two prominent Supreme Court specialists, Carter G. Phillips and Virginia A. Seitz, said the filing was part of a useful dialogue.

“This brief provides a rare and important opportunity for federal Supreme Court justices to receive direct input from their peers who sit on state supreme courts,” Professor Caminker said. “State justices have a central stake in this case because, in our federalist system, they typically have the final say over the meaning of state law, and here they can directly explain to their federal counterparts why their traditional state role is worthy of protection.”

The independent state legislature theory is based on a literal reading of two similar provisions of the U.S. Constitution. The one at issue in the North Carolina case, the Elections Clause, says: “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”

That means, North Carolina Republicans argued, that state legislatures have sole responsibility among state institutions for drawing congressional districts and that state courts have no role to play in applying their states’ constitutions.

The North Carolina Supreme Court rejected that argument, saying that was “repugnant to the sovereignty of states, the authority of state constitutions and the independence of state courts, and would produce absurd and dangerous consequences.”

Texas and a dozen other states led by Republicans filed a brief supporting the North Carolina lawmakers. “The Elections Clause forbids state courts from usurping state legislatures’ districting authority,” it said.

The Conference of Chief Justices’ brief said that reading was too cramped. “While the text of the Elections Clause requires that state legislatures prescribe the laws governing federal elections,” it said, “it does not otherwise displace the states’ established authority to determine the final content of their election laws, including through normal judicial review for constitutionality.”

Chief Justice Hecht said the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the case was unlikely to be limited to redistricting and could open the floodgates for all sorts of election challenges in federal courts.

“The Constitution’s language is very broad about time, place and manner of elections,” he said. “So that’s mail-in ballots, what it takes to register, what ID you have to show, how late the polls are open, how the ballots are counted, who gets to sit and watch when they do. The state courts get scores of these cases in virtually every election.”

The case, he added, “will profoundly affect both the state and the federal courts.”

Thank fuck, our democracy is good for another 18 months

LET US GO OVER MOORE V HARPER

When we say if the supreme court goes through with Moore v Harper then you will loose your right to democracy in the US, that is NOT an exaggeration.

States will be able to throw out votes for any reason they see fit. Indigenous Americans are especially going to have a hard time, due to the way their address works. If a state sees you have an address they deem "odd" they will throw out your vote.

Hell these people could start dismissing your vote just because you voted for someone they disagree with. THAT MEANS EVEN IF A MAJORITY OF A STATE VOTES BLUE THEY WILL BE ABLE TO SAY "NO, our state is voting red."

I know a lot of people think their vote doesn't matter, but I am gonna make something very clear, if this plays out the way the court wants THEN YOUR VOTE ACTUALLY WON'T MATTER!

So, you need to stay aware, and you need to stay fucking pissed.

No one is coming to save us, we have to save ourselves, so spread awareness and start helping the cause in any way you can. Stay safe out there.

A huge example of why every vote counts!

Radical SCOTUS should not be hearing this case but it’s the same theory John Eastman tried to use to turn over the election.

Please don’t let 2022 be our last free and fair election! Vote and amplify!

Today in alarming news... 

It’s an optimistic take, as is “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Asks Simplest, Most Damning Question As Supreme Court Entertains Canceling Democratic Elections” over at abovethelaw.com

But even the idea that the Supreme Court is coming down 4-vs-4 on a fringe legal theory that says basically that state legislatures can rule on elections however the hell they want, no matter what the state constitutions say, is alarming.  And Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s last and least-qualified appointee, being the deciding vote doesn’t exactly inspire confidence you know? 

Like I hate to be paranoid but after the Supreme Court threw out precedent when they overturned Roe v. Wade and endorsed some wacky "originalist" theory there too it’s like... anything is possible.  This case would be even more egregious though, this would be overturning 233 years of precedent for a naked power grab by one political party.   

Anyway there’s nothing any of us can do about this, just like all the Supreme Court decisions.   The only thing I’m glad about is how much the midterm elections showed that “Republicans are trying to end US democracy” is an issue that a lot of voters really care about, even more than climate change or the culture wars or the shitty economy.  

More at Brenan Center for Justice, here’s a graphic from them:

When I say eat the rich I mean some real Dutch citizens from the year 1672 type shit

They’re trying to take our rights to vote away.

I mean, you can still vote. It just means that your vote won’t matter because they can throw it away if they don’t like it, basically.

i saw a post discussing what will happen if moore v harper is overturned and the comments were bashing the person for scaring them and it’s frustrating because wow congrats!! you understood what the post was trying to say

Election Lie Supporters Ask Supreme Court To Bless Radical Election Changes

Honestly these few weeks have been a lot as an American with a uterus. It’s like America is turning into a fascist theocracy before our very eyes. Now this isn’t the biggest issue in comparison to Roe, Harper, Rights being taken away from indigenous people, shootings, black people getting killed by cops and just so much more. However across the country, books are being banned and librarians are coming under attack.

Now, America is going mask off with it’s Christian nationalism now and queer books, books on the holocaust slavery etc are getting banned. This isn’t anything new—especially for fascism. The whole book censorship thing has been going on for literally forever. However there are two things. 1. I am being this up now because it feel more relevant than ever and 2. here is what I really want everyone to do.

If you find out that a book has been banned in your area, the news, a library or school, read it.

Find time in your schedule, pirate it online, drive to the next library to read it, if you are neurodiverse like me, research alternatives ways to consume the content of the books without literally reading (example: audiobooks)—hell if you have kids, read them some books that have been banned as well. whatever you do, READ THAT BOOK.

They are trying to censor this information for a reason. These banned books, whatever they are trying to tell the reader are a threat to them. and they will do whatever they can, whether it be burning books, suing publishing companies or now, attacking librarians. They don’t want their message, no matter how obvious it is like “gay people deserve rights” or challenging the status quo and authority.

The best thing we can all do besides protest to keep those books in libraries is to actually read them ourselves. If they don’t want the message to get across, we can and should be the people that message gets across too.

I know it isn’t much, but knowledge is a very valuable resource in rising up against authority and I just wanted to get my message out, if there are any blind people or other people with disabilities curious on finding banned books accessible to them please just message me and I will personally help you get your hands on accessible censored books.

This site is on my 2023 survival list, especially for exposing SCOTUS shenanigans trying to restrict our voting rights. Please check out Democracy Docket and Marc Elias on social media to stay up to date.

The Moore v Harper oral arguments were heard by SCOTUS on Dec 6. We need to engage in what happens next. Congress has the power to reign them in, which could happen if more Rs come to their senses and fight for voting rights. I’ve expressed this hope before, which is really more of an expectation now.

I know we are collectively better than this! I see trends bringing people together to solve problems that government never will, to form communities that don’t rely on the power structures we currently have in place. I’m ready to open my mind, ask questions, explore misconceptions, dispel mistruths, and become a living example of a better way.