Clarence Thomas Dissent in Election Cases: Our Fellow Citizens Deserve Better
“Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us,” Justice Clarence Thomas declared Monday, when the Supreme Court decided — by one vote –to hear none of the 2020 election cases raising issues of voter fraud and illegal votes.
Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett voted with the liberal justices to deny review of the lower court decisions.
Four justices must vote to hear a case to put it on the Court’s docket, but only three justices — Thomas, fellow conservative Samuel Alito, and libertarian Neil Gorsuch — voted to take at least two of four of the key cases from November 2020.
All three dissenting justices took the unusual step of writing opinions as to why the Court should have taken at minimum two of these cases.
“The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the ‘Manner’ of federal elections,” began Thomas. “Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead. As a result, we received an unusually high number of petitions and emergency applications contesting those changes. The petitions here present a clear example.”...
Quoting the late Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s concurring opinion from the 2000 case Bush v. Gore, Alito continued:
Now, the election is over, and there is no reason for refusing to decide the important question that these cases pose. The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election. But a decision would provide invaluable guidance for future elections....
Our Supreme Court Goes Full Nicaragua in PA Election Case, by C. Edmund Wright, American Thinker, February 21, 2021:
... While I think the United States Supreme Court stumbled badly in its 7-2 rejection of the Texas case on standing last year, the refusal to “grant cert” (i.e., to take the case) yesterday in a Pennsylvania case is horrifying beyond words. I could say that our election laws are now full-on banana republic...
What the Supreme Court codified yesterday, and what it started with the Texas rejection, is that election laws and procedures cannot be challenged beyond a state court, at any time, regardless of how badly those states shred the United States Constitution, and regardless of the major consequences to the other 49 states as a result....
... I think it’s clear that Justice Clarence Thomas is even more mystified than am I, and he was livid. He was also, as he always is, right on the money in his analysis....
For the record, the broad strokes of the Pennsylvania case revolve around the fact that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court changed election laws at the last minute to expand unchecked mail in voting. The Constitution, that once relevant but now apparently irrelevant document, makes it clear that the state legislatures are in charge of state elections. In Pennsylvania, as in many states, the legislature is controlled by Republicans - while Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court is controlled by radical leftists. One lesson the late, great Rush Limbaugh helped teach us is that the left always uses the courts to get stuff done that they could never accomplish through the ballot box. ...