- “Moot? In murder, the victim is already dead, but we try the killer anyway.”*
- “the court has enabled crooks”*
- No conservative 6-3 Court
- More like 3-6 on monumental matters
- Or maybe on a good day 3-3-3 (3 conservative, 3 cowards and 3 activist liberals.)
Terrell picto-meme portrays members of SCOTUS appropriately
Supreme Court Declines to Hear Pennsylvania Election Dispute Cases
The first case was filed by both the Trump Campaign and the Republican Party of Pennsylvania, challenging the decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that made changes to the election laws in Pennsylvania. The most controversial change allowed the counting of mailed-in ballots received up to three days after election day — the election statute has a cut-off of 8:00 pm on election night — so long as the ballot envelope was postmarked on election day. Ballot envelopes with no postmark, or with an illegible postmark, were deemed to have been received after election day.
“Kavanaugh and Barrett”…what was this ‘bullsh-t’ we heard and read everywhere about after Barret’s confirmation there is now a 6-3 “conservative” Court?!
This lineup means that Chief Justice Roberts, along with Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett, were among the six justices voting to deny review. It would have only taken the vote of one of those three to have accepted the case.
Here are two commentaries from Epoch Times we have annotated or excerpted including some choice comments of their readers
Sobering analysis from Michael Walsh: (LOOK FOR OUR ANNOTATIONS LATER TODAY)
With Supreme Court’s Non-Decision, Citizens Must Reform Electoral System
The U.S. Supreme Court’s appalling decision not to hear a Republican challenge to Pennsylvania’s extra-legal changing of election laws shortly before the 2020 vote—which likely delivered the state to Joe Biden in the wee hours of Election Night—is just the latest disgrace of the John Roberts court, and a clear signal of future trouble for the Republic.
Pusillanimity has marked the chief justice and the institution he leads since his volte-face regarding the 2012 Obamacare decision, in which he saved the misbegotten, intrusive, and blatantly unconstitutional law at the last minute by choosing to call the “individual mandate” a tax—that is to say, a hitherto unprecedented ukase by the federal government that once-free citizens had to buy a health-care policy under threat of IRS penalty.
A human weathervane, Roberts has gone on from that low point to plumb ever-new depths of moral cowardice as, increasingly, he sides with court’s dwindling liberal bloc to become, in effect, the new Anthony Kennedy—the regal one-man swing vote on matters of urgent national importance. For as long as he is on the court, which is to say for life, Roberts will be the lasting unfortunate legacy of the George W. Bush administration: even more damaging than Daddy’s Revenge (Iraq, 2001), the Forever War in Afghanistan, now in its 20th year, and 9/11 itself.
Buildings can be rebuilt. Troops can and ought be called home, especially when they are dying for nothing. But the Constitution, once shredded, is not so easily repaired.
Catch-22
Monday’s non-decision to turn away a case involving “absentee” ballots that arrived up to three days after the November election as “moot,” was in fact a decision in itself, indeed the Catch-22 of Robertsian jurisprudence.
The Court had shunted aside the case (in a 4-4 decision with Roberts siding with the liberals and Amy Coney Barrett not yet confirmed) back in October, in effect inviting the plaintiffs to come back after the voting to show injury, if any. Heads, Democrats win, tails, Republicans lose. After all, Trump finally conceded, didn’t he, so what’s the problem? Case closed.
Heading into the election following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, conservatives liked to think that with the appointment of Barrett, the ideological split would be 6-3. And in fact, in this case they were right. All three dissenters were conservative: Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch. The other six, including Roberts, were silent.
“The Pennsylvania Legislature established an unambiguous deadline for receiving mail-in ballots: 8 p.m. on election day,” wrote Thomas in his dissent. “Dissatisfied, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court extended that deadline by three days. The court also ordered officials to count ballots received by the new deadline even if there was no evidence—such as a postmark—that the ballots were mailed by election day… These cases provide us with an ideal opportunity to address just what authority nonlegislative officials have to set election rules, and to do so well before the next election cycle. The refusal to do so is inexplicable.”
Maybe not. What we’ve learned from Roberts is that he’s susceptible to pressure and hates conflict. In one of the most disgraceful episodes in the court’s history, Sen. Chuck Schumer, losing his cool over abortion “rights” on the steps of the Supreme Court, directly threatened Roberts’ colleagues Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh: “I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price,” he said last March. “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”
Roberts’ milquetoast reaction? “Justices know that criticism comes with the territory, but threatening statements of this sort from the highest levels of government are not only inappropriate, they are dangerous. All Members of the Court will continue to do their job, without fear or favor, from whatever quarter.”
Still, Schumer’s message came through loud a clear: vote our way or face the packing of the Court with a fistful of new justices. With the election of Joe Biden last fall, that prospect is now within reach. Elections really do have consequences.
And now here they are: two of the three judges Trump appointed to the Supreme Court have stood idly by while the Constitution’s directives for election law just got shredded. Perhaps not surprising: Kavanaugh’s tearing up during his nasty confirmation was embarrassing, and nothing he’s done since has indicated any desire for quiet payback. And so far Barrett has been a cipher.
Restoration of Traditional Voting
To be clear, accepting this case would not have meant overturning the election. At this point, the vote challenges wouldn’t make any difference to the outcome. But it’s the principle of thing: if six Justices are utterly uninterested in discovering whether our electoral system has now been corrupted beyond repair, we are in more trouble than we thought.
So let’s cut to the chase: there was no Kraken, no Plan, no deus ex machina. Former vice president Mike Pence could not have voided the certified results of the election, however hinkily obtained. Republican senators were perfectly within their rights to question the results, and Pence might have sought to broker a compromise on Jan. 6 in which serious allegations of fraud might have been examined. But Pence had neither the political talent nor the temperament for such a task—even with the precedent-setting example of 1876 right in front of his nose.
And in any case, handing the likes of Schumer and his cronies in the media the propaganda victory of the breach of Capitol Hill by hundreds of protesters—a blunder of epic proportions—put paid to any further maneuvering.
So now the Court sits in a Washington ringed by razor wire and occupied by armed troops while a bumbling old man plays video games with his granddaughter at Camp David and a woman raised in Canada of two foreign-born parents makes international phone calls to heads of state in Europe and elsewhere.
Let’s face facts: what got us here was not theft and media malfeasance; those were just the symptoms of a Democrat-induced malignancy that leveraged the absurd panic over Covid-19 into a free-for-all election in which you could vote without ID, vote months ahead of the election, vote days after the election, “cure” your ballot if you made a “mistake,” allow a complete stranger to “harvest” your vote, and never have to prove provenance. One more election under these rules and the Republic is dead.
Cut to the chase: the only way this can be rectified is by a restoration of our traditional system of voting: one man, one vote, one time, on one day, certified by positive identification at a designated polling place, within an ironclad time period. Ignore the bleating about disparate impact on minorities, bogus civil rights issues, or the racist allegations that blacks and Hispanics are often incapable of using common technology to be fully informed citizens.
If you want to do something about the election of 2020, do something about the elections of 2022 and 2024—right now.
Also at Epoch Times this from Roger Simon (excerpt)
Opinion: Lies the Supreme Court Told Me
In a fashion we must now regard as entirely predictable the Supreme Court of the United States has dismissed (i.e., thrown out) the various state challenges to the 2020 presidential election.
Any decisions on these challenges were determined by the majority to be “moot” because the election had already been decided, and Donald Trump has conceded to Joe Biden. (Associate Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch objected in varying degrees.)
In other words, a stolen presidential election—if it happens, we don’t really know in this case—has an almost immediate statute of limitations, although the results of that election can affect hundreds of millions, if not, as in the case of the United States, nearly the entirety of humanity.
This is true, apparently for a majority of the Supremes, although all sorts of crimes, some not particularly onerous, have statutes of limitations that can go on for years.
Go figure.
The Supremes also cited the issue of “standing,” a term of legal “art” that has always struck me, despite all the precedents on which it is supposedly based, as wide open for biased interpretation of the most self-serving sort. One person’s “standing” can be another’s closed door, almost at will and certainly by vote of a “majority.”
If I sound cynical about the Supreme Court, I have to admit I am. It’s even true of the law in general, which I want to believe in and admire, but increasingly no longer do.
In the real world, legal results tend to mirror A.J. Liebling’s 1960 comment in The New Yorker about the press: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
The law belongs to those who have the deepest control of a society at the time.
We want lady justice to be blind but in actuality she’s a cyborg with all-seeing, rotating night vision similar to the kind you might find on many urban street corners today from Beijing to Chicago, using the latest algorithms to isolate presumed enemies of the state.
. . .
The Supreme Court is the apotheosis of this system—an organization that puts its finger in the air to see which way the wind is blowing (assuming that’s even necessary) and then writes its opinions based on pre-conceived notions designed to offend the lowest number.
Sadly, it is the last place to look for justice in a Presidential election—or anything, really, that tilts against that prevailing wind.
They wouldn’t even, as Clarence Thomas requested, explore the blatantly unconstitutional malfeasances in various states where unelected officials clearly and unlawfully superseded the legislatures in changing election law by fiat, something we would think would only happen in totalitarian countries.
But it happened here, my friends, several times. We could cite the Supreme Court for dereliction of duty … or we could look elsewhere for justice.
* comments by readers of the Epoch Times articles above
That he’s a self-proclaimed “really tough, scrappy guy ‘straight outta Scranton’? The ‘dude’ who sent black gang leader, ‘Corn Pop’ and his gang of toughs cowering in a corner?
“For most of his political life — from his consistent pro-abortion record to his officiating at a gay wedding in 2016 — despite his Catholic affiliation and public pious practices, Joe Biden has magnified and institutionalized countless major violations of the Ten Commandments,” Father Pokorsky writes in an essay Friday.
It is “presumptuous and dangerous to proclaim oneself as a devout Catholic or to encourage (or even allow) the description,” the priest states.
Representative Liz Cheney (R- WY), one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump, said on Tuesday during a Reagan Institute event that the Republican party needs to “make clear that we aren’t the party of white supremacy” in the wake of the deadly Capitol riots.
On Mount Suribachi during the battle of Iwo Jima, Marines “took a knee” to raise the American flag. Three of the Marines in the famous photo also took a Japanese bullet on the same island and died there. Prior to the flag-raising, the Marines stood, they fought, they advanced, then they put their knees and backs into raising the flag for all it represented that day – freedom, sacrifice, courage, a rallying symbol. It was this day in history, 76 years ago . . . and reading the article linked below we are reminded what an ungrateful, ignorant a–hole Colin Kaepernick is . . . and that everyone who “admires” him desperately needs an education about “taking a knee”.
Brooklyn Iowa native Harold Keller was recently identified by the Marine Corps as one of the Marines actually in the famous photo. No one who was previously identified was undeserving of recognition as part of that days events, including raising the flag, but they were not in the famous photo. It is an interesting story and knitted within is a sentiment we find keenly unselfish and patriotic, sentiments that Colin Kaepernick would not understand.
Smilin’ joe is the definition of 
“I LIKE ‘JOE’…HE’S A NICE GUY”… “Joe Biden is impossible not to like.”