A tale of two Supreme Courts
One has decided to subvert our elections, and the other one will hear a case that may turn the tide against corruption
Two separate legal cases that may affect the midterm elections are in the news this month.
A decision that was made by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overturned the decision of a lower court and declared that Act 77, an election law that had been declared to violate the state constitution, was in fact legal.
Another case is going before the US Supreme Court in the fall, to decide if state courts that overrule laws written by state legislatures exceed their authority and violate the federal constitution.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court, by a 5-2 vote along party lines, overturned a 3-2 ruling by the Commonwealth Court that Act 77, the state law that liberalized mail-in voting, violated the state constitution. The lower court ruled that the changes were so drastic that an amendment to the state constitution, by a ballot measure that needed to be passed by a popular vote, was required. The Supreme Court decided that the legislature could change the voting rules without an amendment:
Based upon our analysis of Article VII, Section 1 of our Constitution, we conclude that the phrase “offer to vote” does not establish in-person voting as an elector qualification or otherwise mandate in-person voting. We reiterate that our General Assembly is endowed with great legislative power, subject only to express restrictions in the Constitution. We find no restriction in our Constitution on the General Assembly’s ability to create universal mail-in voting.
The order of the Commonwealth Court is affirmed as to the reviewability of the challenged statutory provisions. Otherwise, the decision is reversed.
https://www.pacourts.us/assets/opinions/Supreme/out/J-18A-E-2022mo.pdf?cb=1
This was exactly as I predicted here, in an article subtitled "Appeal to PA Supreme Court to overturn ruling is likely to succeed, as Democrat Justices outnumber Republicans by 5-2".
The media coverage of this law has almost universally ignored the fact that it was bent completely out of shape by previous decisions of the Pennsylvania and US Supreme Courts.
In 2020, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled by 4-3 that the provisions in Act 77 that required all ballots to be received by 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Election Day, and required all mail-in ballots to have legible postmarks, actually meant that the deadline was 5:00 p.m. on the next Friday and that ballots with no postmarks would be counted. They cited the COVID-19 emergency as the reason for this rewriting of the law.
To make this crystal clear, if a stack of "mail-in" ballots with no postmarks arrived on the counting tables on the Friday after Election Day, they were still counted, as the court declared them to be both legal and 'timely'.
The second court in this tale of two courts is the US Supreme Court, which will decide a case this fall that is related to the ability of state courts to overrule state legislatures. The court has punted several times on this issue in the recent past, including a tied 4-4 ruling, with one vacancy, on the Act 77 case in 2020. Three Justices wrote or co-signed an opinion that this ruling probably 'violated the federal Constitution', as that document clearly gives state legislatures the power to set the 'Times, Places, and Manner' of elections, not the state judiciary.
The Supreme Court will take up a case from North Carolina next term that could upend federal elections by eliminating virtually all oversight of those elections by state courts. On Thursday, the justices granted review in Moore v. Harper, a dispute arising from the state’s efforts to draw new congressional maps in response to the 2020 census.
The doctrine at the heart of the case is known as the “independent state legislature” theory – the idea that, under the Constitution, only the legislature has the power to regulate federal elections, without interference from state courts. Proponents of the theory point to the Constitution’s elections clause, which gives state legislatures the power to set the “Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives”…
The issue returned to the Supreme Court in 2020, when the justices turned down a request by Pennsylvania Republicans to fast-track their challenge to a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that required state election officials to count mail-in ballots received within three days of Election Day. In an opinion that accompanied the court’s order, Justice Samuel Alito (joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch) suggested that the state supreme court’s decision to extend the deadline for counting ballots likely violated the Constitution.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/08/know-supreme-court-will-finally-hear-case-fall-election-law-punted-back-december-2020-not-yet-folks/?ff_source=Email&ff_medium=the-gateway-pundit&ff_campaign=dailyam&ff_content=2022-08-05
Most of Justice Alito's opinion is available here, in an edited form that omits the legal citations for the sake of clarity and brevity:
In George Orwell's novel '1984' he described Newspeak, a corrupted version of English where words had their meanings reversed by a totalitarian state. "War is Peace", "Freedom is Slavery", and "Ignorance is Strength" are the three top examples of Newspeak, and they were engraved on the building that housed the Ministry of Truth. Now we can add "Tuesday is Friday" and "Mail-in ballots don't need to be mailed" to the 2022 edition of the Newspeak dictionary.
According to Wikipedia, in the world of '1984', "The Party's long-term goal with regard to the new language is for every member of the Party and society, except the Proles — the working-class of Oceania — to exclusively communicate in Newspeak, by A.D. 2050." We are on schedule here in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Perhaps we should engrave 'Tuesday is Friday' just above the entrance to the PA Supreme Court, to put ourselves ahead of schedule.
If any word in any law becomes completely genderfluid the moment that a Supreme Court Justice reads it, then the rule of law is dead in America. If words themselves have no concrete meaning, then laws that are written using words have no substance. We claim to be a nation of laws, not men. If any law can be redefined to mean the precise opposite of its original definition, by a group of men, at their whim, with no limits on this power, then we are in reality a nation ruled by politicians wearing robes.
If the US Supreme Court does not return us to a state of sanity and fix things this year, then this country may reach the point of no return, where lawfare is used to overturn the clearly expressed intent of the lawmakers, and elections are so corrupt that it will not matter how many votes are actually cast for candidates that oppose the ruling oligarchy. If the oligarchy is given enough time, it will sabotage our democracy so thoroughly that it may be irrecoverable.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pennsylvania-supreme-court-upholds-no-excuse-mail-voting-law
https://www.theepochtimes.com/pennsylvania-supreme-court-upholds-no-excuse-mail-in-voting-law_4638513.html?utm_source=partner&utm_campaign=ZeroHedge