Thursday, November 05, 2020

I Thought I'd Covered This Already

I was going to start with the legal stuff, but let's start with the political stuff. But we treated the polls like prognostications and missives from Delphi, so woe is us! Wonder what a kangaroo permit is gonna cost me?

Alright, alright, the legal stuff: The childish desperation is almost painful to watch. In a 70-year old man, it's sad. In the POTUS, it's fucking tragic; for the nation. The expertise on display in Trump's lawsuits never ceases to be stunning; or funny. I think "funny" is the word I was looking for. Only in Trump's fevered mind is this true. In reality, the litigation will have to end by December 14 (Bush v. Gore, thank you very much) and most of it will go as well as this:

A hearing on Wednesday in an election case captured in miniature the challenge for the Trump campaign as it gears up for what could become an all-out legal assault on presidential election results in key swing states: It’s easy enough to file a lawsuit claiming improprieties — in this case, that Pennsylvania had violated the law by allowing voters whose mail-in ballots were defective to correct them — but a lot harder to provide evidence of wrongdoing or a convincing legal argument. “I don’t understand how the integrity of the election was affected,” said U.S. District Judge Timothy Savage, something he repeated several times during the hearing. (However the judge rules, the case is unlikely to have a significant effect; only 93 ballots are at issue, a county election official said.) 

“A lawsuit without provable facts showing a statutory or constitutional violation is just a tweet with a filing fee,” said Justin Levitt, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.

Levitt said judges by and large have ignored the noise of the race and the bluster of President Donald Trump’s Twitter feed. “They’ve actually demanded facts and haven’t been ruling on all-caps claims of fraud or suppression,” Levitt said. “They haven’t confused public relations with the predicate for litigation, and I would expect that to continue.”

In other words, the "multi-pronged litigation" is going to be arguing about 100 votes here, 100 votes there (the mail-in ballots in PA that went to the Supremes twice already are being segregated from the final count and don't amount to enough to change anything if they are counted).

There goes a prong already. Yes, they can appeal. But clock is ticking. 39 litigating days left. I guess for once in four years he'll finally be busy. Uh...probably not. Although I can see why he said that: Seems a vendor sent out the wrong ballots to some voters, and those ballots had to be replaced and re-cast, and it's a complete mess that will take time to straigthen out (there's a thread at the tweet if you want the details). But there's also this, now: However, if Nevada goes for Biden, it's game over.  The rest will just be clean-up (Georgia may yet go for Biden, but I'm not getting into the weeds of speculation anymore.  We can either use polling to predict the future, or we can't. And the fact is:  we can't.).
Posted by at

1 comment:

  1. The Thought Criminal1:16 PM

    If the state fish cops could figure out a way to sell permits to hunt them they'd breed kangaroos for the purpose. I was kind of shocked that Maine let you have them with a permit when NH doesn't allow it, then I thought of how out of control the huntin' & fishin' lobby is here.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)