Rolling the dice on chaos, Supreme Court ducks election-law cases

There’s one thing we’ve forgotten to mention about political intimidation of the Supreme Court. It works…

Yet, on the left, and especially among Alinskyites schooled in the extortionate leveraging of power, the Court-packing threat is remembered as a triumph. It provoked the famous “switch in time that saved nine”: Fearful that FDR would follow through and destroy the Court’s standing as a rule-of-law institution, the Court — led by Justice Owen Roberts — dramatically shifted, upholding the New Deal it had been stalling, and ushering in the foundations of progressive governance.

Credible Court-packing threats by the Left intimidate moderate, politically minded justices, exactly as they are meant to do.

Duly cowed by today’s Court-packing threats, Chief Justice John Roberts has steered the Court into a possible disaster that has been foreseeable (and foreseen) for weeks. Last night, the justices made clear that they will not resolve state voting-law disputes prior to next Tuesday’s election. They will roll the dice on chaos, and all its potentially ruinous ramifications — not just for the country but for the Court.

In a pair of 5–3 decisions, with the newly minted Justice Amy Coney Barrett intriguingly keeping to the sidelines, the justices declined to intervene in the Pennsylvania election case despite the patent lawlessness of the rewrite by that state’s highest court — which could enable fraud by requiring non-postmarked ballots to be counted for three days after the November 3 election is supposed to be over. Nor will the Supreme Court intervene in a North Carolina election-law case that is nearly as egregious: one in which an unaccountable bureaucracy, the State Board of Elections, has presumed to rewrite state law by extending until nine days after the election the deadline for receiving ballots (although those ballots must be postmarked by or before November 3)…

I believe the Court has been intimidated into paralysis by the media-Democrat complex.

The justices hear the Court-packing drumbeat. They hear former vice president Biden’s cockamamie suggestion that justices could be rotated out of the high court, and his announcement that, if elected next week, he would appoint a panel of experts to propose an overhaul of the federal judiciary.

Roberts knows that if the Court were to intervene now in the state election-law cases — i.e., if the Court were to do its job, apply the law, and clarify before the election that ballot-counting rules duly enacted by state legislatures may not be altered by judges and bureaucracies — Democrats and their media allies would turn up the heat. They would falsely claim that Republican-appointed justices are putting their thumb on the scale for President Trump. The Court’s three lefties would chime in about the conservatives’ hard-heartedness in the face of a pandemic — as if the legislatures in the states had not gone to considerable lengths to help people vote while minimizing COVID risks.