“This Is A United States District Court”

what a psycho pic.twitter.com/3bxPw9zCkv

— Ghost of GC🌻 (@gtconway3dg) August 23, 2023

It’s not an all-fours comparison, but also not an inapt comparison, to look at this brief exchange in federal court yesterday over the floating saw blades in the Rio Grande Greg Abbott is so proud of:

Texas also argued the state has the right to defend itself against an “invasion” of drug cartels. But when the state’s lawyers tried to establish the nature of the border security challenges at the border that made the barrier necessary, U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra swatted away that line of defense. 

“This is a United States District Court. It is not Congress. It is not the president,” Ezra said. “I’m not here to engage in nor do I have any inclination to engage in any type of political comment in this decision.”

There is the small matter, as I’ve said before, of the rules of evidence. Trump’s lawyers and others ran afoul of them in 2020 when 60 cases were dismissed shortly after they were filed, because in none of the cases could they present the evidence necessary to predicate a lawsuit. As the judge did yesterday, one can anticipate judges swatting aside arguments about the 2020 election as equally irrelevant.

And now Trump has the evidence they didn’t have then?And OJ has found the real murderer of his wife. He’s just waiting to be criminally charged so he can prove it. If not for the inconvenience of double jeopardy.

What? One expectation is as reasonable as the other.

Even John Eastman’s lawyer doesn’t argue Eastman has evidence to prove the election was stolen. At most he means to argue the first half of the “independent state legislature” theory, that state legislatures have the authority to challenge the electoral college vote when voting has been conducted in ways not explicitly provided by statute. It’s not an argument that’s gotten any traction in the courts, so I don’t think it’ll be much of a legal defense. But, as I say, Eastman’s lawyer isn’t fool enough to think he has evidence of fraud, or that it would do his client any good to say so.