Azath Vitr (D, on 09 October 2022 - 05:51 PM, said:
'our highest court only rules on approximately 70 cases a year out of the 7,000 petitions for review that are presented. It is a relatively lazy court. In contrast, the supreme court of Brazil rules on approximately 100,000 cases a year. If the US court agreed to accept the Moore case for review, it almost certainly plans to endorse this rogue ISL theory, that could blow up elections and democracy in the United States as we know it.
[...] The Moore case would in practice strip people of the right to fair elections by placing electoral power in the hands of a small group of officials at the state level who set district maps. In a presidential election, these officials could determine what slate of electors gets put forth to the electoral college, regardless of the outcome of the state's popular vote.'
The most terrifying case of all is about to be heard by the US supreme court
IDK about 'almost certainly'... there could be a majority on the court that wants to clearly rule against ISL before the next presidential election to (try to) prevent chaos?...
Here's a plausible alternative (that would explain why the Supreme Court has chosen to hear it, without a majority intending to rule in favor of ISL):
'The Supreme Court Has a Perfectly Good Option in Its Most Divisive Case
In Moore v. Harper, the justices should not side with the views of either party.
[...] "independent state legislature doctrine," they contend that because the legislature is exercising a power that derives from the federal Constitution, legislative discretion cannot be limited by state constitutional law. [...]
In response, the state board of elections and allied private parties contend that the term legislature in the Constitution is just another way of referring to the states, and thus that the federal Constitution does not limit the power of a state court to overrule its legislature. Whether the North Carolina courts were right to replace the legislature's map, they argue, is purely a question of state law and not reviewable by the Supreme Court.
[...] The state respondents would rewrite the Constitution to replace the term legislature with the term state. Given the specific references to legislature, executive, judges, and conventions in various parts of the Constitution, it is not plausible to think that these institutional designations can be disregarded as meaningless. Rather, the Framers of the Constitution appear to have believed that a power so central to democratic governance should be vested in the branch of state government that is most representative of its people.
[...] the state legislature is [...] governed by the [...] state constitution. Even in matters of election law, the state legislature meets when and where its constitution says to meet and is organized the way the state constitution says it's to be organized. There is no reason to think that the Framers of the federal Constitution intended to liberate state legislatures from the ordinary constraints of state constitutional law.
Neither history nor precedent resolves this dispute. On several occasions, justices constituting a plurality, or writing non-authoritative asides (which lawyers call "dicta"), have endorsed some version of the independent-state-legislature doctrine, but never in a holding [...]
[...] a sensible middle ground: A state constitution may limit a legislature's power over federal elections, but it may not give that power to somebody else. We need not an
independent-state-legislature doctrine, but a
constitutional-state-legislature doctrine.
[...] the claim that state courts may hold state legislatures to state constitutional limits does not mean that they can replace the legislature. [...] But it must still be the state
legislatures that act.
What does this principle mean for concrete cases? [...] state constitutional provisions can restrain legislative districting, such as by limiting the use of partisan gerrymandering.
[... But] the North Carolina courts do not have independent constitutional power to adopt their own map.
[...] a state-court interpretation of state law might be so far-fetched that, in reality, the court is legislating and not interpreting. This could transform what ordinarily would be a question of state law into a federal question.'
SCOTUS Must Reject the Independent-State-Legislature Doctrine
Article doesn't specify, but state constitutions iirc effectively forbid the legislatures from throwing out election results and picking the winners themselves....
This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 11 October 2022 - 06:15 PM
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