A Dark Day For American Democracy | Is It Time For Justices To Weigh In On Election Results?
January 7, 2021
TRUMP MOB ATTACKS CAPITOL
|The U.S. Capitol was attacked yesterday by a mob of PRESIDENT TRUMP supporters acting in his name. The siege disrupted the final electoral count in Congress. Trump supporters vandalized the building, looting art, damaging offices, and briefly taking control of the Senate chamber. Eventually, Congress got back to business once the mob was finally removed and voted to certify JOE BIDEN’S victory.
FULFILLED PROMISE
|Zoe Tillman with Buzzfeed reports PRESIDENT TRUMP had warned the Supreme Court in December that there would be a “disruption” if justices failed to take his side in a challenge to JOE BIDEN’S victory in Pennsylvania. Trump’s lawyers wrote in a brief to SCOTUS, “Indeed, the intense national and worldwide attention on the 2020 Presidential election only foreshadows the disruption that may well follow if the uncertainty and unfairness shrouding this election are allowed to persist.” Tillman reports, “In the two months since Election Day, Trump and his allies have used the courts to push the baseless conspiracy theories of widespread fraud and a rigged race that fueled Wednesday’s attack on the Capitol. They have recycled false and unsupported claims of illegal activity at the polls that state and federal judges rejected and framed their repeated court losses as more proof that the election was stolen from Trump.”
WE NEED TO HEAR FROM SCOTUS
|Tom Goldstein with SCOTUSblog wrote in an editorial yesterday that justices must speak to the country and “write a unanimous opinion confirming the validity of the election results — for the sake of our country.” Goldstein argues that constitutional order has not yet been restored and without the intervention of the Supreme Court it won’t be. “It is not too much for the court to issue an opinion stating forthrightly that the challenges to the election results are — according to every single court ruling and independent review — based on lies and fabrications. That is a fact. Saying less is much too little.”
A FAMILAR FACE
|Before the madness yesterday, news broke that PRESIDENT-ELECT JOE BIDEN has chosen JUDGE MERRICK GARLAND as his attorney general. We all remember Garland as the Supreme Court nominee who was blocked by Republicans in 2016 from even having a hearing. If confirmed as AG, the centrist federal appeals court judge — said to have strong Republican support — would be inheriting a Justice Department that has become especially politicized under Trump.