Thank the Supreme Court, for Now. by Linda Greenhouse
The justices did the right thing by declining to hear the case brought by red states to overturn the election results. But let’s see what happens down the road.
'The Supreme Court was never going to hear, let alone grant, the request by red-state attorneys general and the White House to overturn the election results in four battleground states that went for Joe Biden. We knew that, we privileged few who could have offered an inventory of the lawsuit’s flaws while standing on one foot. We had not the slightest doubt that the case was a non-starter.
Or did we?
I spent much of last week, nearly up to the moment on Friday night when the court tossed the Texas case into history’s garbage bin, assuring friends and strangers alike that Texas v. Pennsylvania had no merit whatsoever. Texas had no business invoking the court’s original jurisdiction — seeking to come directly to the Supreme Court and bypassing the lower courts — in order to complain directly to the justices about other states’ election processes. The justices, I added, would never permit themselves to be drawn into such a sorry charade.
Many people who emailed me with their questions knew little about the Supreme Court and its jurisdictional quirks, but some were lawyers or avid court-followers who know a lot. Their anxiety was a measure of how much of what we once took for granted has been upended during these past four years. I confess that by the end of the week, the tiniest shadow of doubt had invaded my own mind. And no wonder: The usual inference that even young children are able to draw from experience — “This has never happened before so it’s very unlikely to be happening now” — has proved of dubious utility. We can know all the facts and all the rules, but still, we can’t be sure.
In the aftermath, with the electoral votes counted and the justices off on their four-week winter recess, what more is there to say about the justices’ refusal to grant the Trump team and its statehouse enablers their day in court? It’s easy to understand why the response offered by Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, became the go-to quote in many accounts of the week’s denouement. The court, she said, delivered “an important reminder that we are a nation of laws, and though some may bend to the desire of a single individual, the courts may not.”
It’s a comforting thought, one that we needed to hear and yearn to believe. But I think it gives the court too much credit. Texas v. Pennsylvania had the form of a Supreme Court case. But it was a Potemkin village of a case, '>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/17/opinion/supreme-court-trump-election.html
