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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
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Proving that the thicket of congressional and law enforcement investigations circling around outgoing President Donald Trump’s family will not end with his White House term, Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Joaquin Castro opened up a new probe on Wednesday focusing on Jared Kushner’s potentially compromising dealings with Qatar and other Middle Eastern governments.
The latest investigation looks into whether Kushner pushed his father-in-law Trump to support a Qatari blockade while Kushner Companies sought a more than billion-dollar bailout from officials from that and other Middle Eastern governments.
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In Texas, Republicans have worked hard to impose burdens on voters — at least, within the state’s own borders. But now they have grander plans. On Tuesday, Texas filed a lawsuit announcing its desire to interfere with voting processes in other states across the country. The lawsuit has no merit. It will fail. The effort though represents a galling expansion of Texas officials’ disregard for voters and the electoral process.
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The litigation is legally incoherent, factually untethered and based on theories of remedy that fundamentally misunderstand the electoral process. At the core, it is an uninspired retread of the many state-level claims that https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-thought-courts-were-key-to-winning-judges-disagreed/2020/12/08/20f153f2-3913-11eb-aad9-8959227280c4_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_7 (already have imploded) since Nov. 3. Texas has simply delivered these defective claims in an even worse package.
Among the more novel flaws afflicting this lawsuit is that Texas should not have filed it. Texas does not have standing in federal court to vindicate the voting rights of other states’ voters — much less standing to undercut the rights of those voters. Independently, Texas officials should not have filed these claims directly in the Supreme Court. Filing directly is improper because other courts have been available to hear claims of this nature — and, indeed, other courts have heard and repeatedly rejected them.
Yet another, separate problem with this lawsuit relates to timing. Even if the claims were otherwise valid, Texas should not have brought them so late in the process. A fundamental principle of election law involves what’s called laches, which is a principle that prevents litigants from filing challenges after an election when they could have been brought beforehand. This principle helps to ensure that voters, when casting their ballots, can rely on the rules set in place. Texas has filed its lawsuit over a month after the 2020 elections — and on the date of the https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/safe-harbor-law-locks-congress-into-accepting-bidens-win/2020/12/08/3afcb948-3914-11eb-aad9-8959227280c4_story.html?itid=lk_inline_manual_11 (safe harbor deadline), no less, which provides further assurance that Congress will accept the electoral votes of any state that has completed its post-election processes. This lawsuit runs headfirst into a veritable wall of laches.
To pile on further, the lawsuit demands a particularly inappropriate remedy: that the Supreme Court tell other state legislatures what to do. It appears impossible to square this extraordinary demand with basic constitutional principles, much less the Supreme Court’s recently strengthened conception of states’ rights.
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Ultimately, who knows what Paxton’s motivations might be. It is hard to understand why a person in a position of public service, who has taken an oath to defend the Constitution, would challenge an election through an incendiary lawsuit that even he, surely, knows is frivolous — a lawsuit that will do nothing more than inflame, frustrate and confuse. What is clearer is that the litigation will die an ignoble death, just like all the others. The end likely will come by way of a short, dismissive order from the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, that order won’t stop Texas officials from continuing to try to chip away at the democratic process, both at home and beyond.
President Trump has moved all of his electoral eggs into a new basket.
Now, his efforts to undermine the will of the electorate and seize a second consecutive term in office hinges upon a lawsuit filed by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a lawsuit that essentially argues that Texas is harmed by the election results in four states that flipped from red to blue last month.
It is a lawsuit that people with much more legal expertise than myself have dismissed out-of-hand as ridiculous given the legal case being made. But it is also a lawsuit that makes statistical claims that are so bizarre, it falls well within my area of expertise to point out that on that rhetoric alone, it’s a disaster.
The lawsuit’s statistical case comes down to this question: How many zeros will it take for you to be sufficiently impressed that you’ll ignore basic logic? The author of the lawsuit appears to have settled on the number 15.
“The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000,” it reads at one point. “For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power.”
After citing the individual credited for this interesting math, it continues.
“The same less than one in a quadrillion statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States — Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently exists when Mr. Biden’s performance in each of those Defendant States is compared to former Secretary of State Hilary [sic] Clinton’s performance in the 2016 general election and President Trump’s performance in the 2016 and 2020 general elections,” it reads. “Again, the statistical improbability of Mr. Biden winning the popular vote in these four States collectively is 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000.”
Just complete nonsense.
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