Slate - alarming. "Clarence Thomas Promotes Trump's Voter Fraud Lies In Alarming Dissent"
Even the “appearance of corruption” is enough to justify voter suppression laws, according to the Supreme Court justice.
BY MARK JOSEPH STERN
FEB 22, 20213:02 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/02/clarence-thomas-voter-fraud-trump-pennsylvania.html
(entire article is worth a read. and this is some serious shit)
Justice Clarence Thomas is not backing down from the fight to legitimize Donald Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was rife with fraud. On Monday morning, Thomas issued a startling opinion ranting against the alleged dangers of mail voting and declaring that SCOTUS must override state courts that expand vote-by-mail pursuant to their state constitutions. Trump may be out of office, but his staunchest ally on the U.S. Supreme Court is carrying on his assault on the legitimacy of the election.
snip
SCOTUS’ conservative justices were so furious about the Pennsylvania decision that they attempted to shatter states’ authority to run their own elections. In October, Thomas—joined by Justices Sam Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh—accused the Pennsylvania Supreme Court of infringing on the legislature’s authority to set election law. They asserted that, under the U.S. Constitution, federal courts can override state courts’ interpretation of election codes based on their own sense of what the state legislature prefers. Yet these four justices never found a fifth vote: Amy Coney Barrett joined the court too late to weigh in, and Chief Justice John Roberts refused to go along with this hijacking of state election law. In the end, late-arriving ballots were counted, though they did not change the outcome of any federal race in Pennsylvania, including the presidential contest.
snip
In his dissent, Thomas cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2020 election by questioning the security of mail voting. “Voting by mail was traditionally limited to voters who had defined, well-documented reasons to be absent,” he wrote. The current trend toward more “permissive” mail voting, the justice warned, “vastly” increases “the risk of fraud.” Thomas drew heavily from a 2012 New York Times article focusing on Florida’s mail voting regime, which focused on a handful of fraudulent schemes involving mail ballots. The justice also pointed to a Republican operative’s criminal attempt to steal an election in North Carolina using mail ballots.
big snip - lots of good stuff in it.
last paragraph
Democrats currently appear to lack the votes to expand the court. By declining to take action, the party is assenting to decades of rule by crass partisans like Thomas. Democrats may complain about the tsunami of voter suppression laws that Republicans are instituting in the wake of 2020, but they currently have an opportunity to end this wave of disenfranchisement by creating a majority of justices who believe in the right to vote. So far, they have passed it up. This inertia leaves the nation with a Supreme Court with at least four justices who are sympathetic to elements of Trump’s big lie. As long as they hold so much power on the bench, every federal election will remain at risk of subversion by judicial decree.
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