Expecting Trump Supreme Court List This Week | Will Courts Decide Who Is President?
September 8, 2020
THE USUAL SUSPECTS
|After PRESIDENT TRUMP missed his self-imposed deadline of September 1 for sharing his list of potential Supreme Court picks, the White House is expected to share that list sometime this week — possibly as soon as Wednesday. The list is expected to have many of the same names that were provided on his 2016 list including RAYMOND KETHLEDGE and AMY CONEY BARRETT.
ED BOARD OVERTURE
|Will courts pick the next president? That question is the subject of a new piece from the Editorial Board of The Wall Street Journal which notes, “If the presidential election is decided by a whisker, with DONALD TRUMP or JOE BIDEN leading by some thousands of votes in a few states, a court ruling could prove decisive. The pivotal jurisdictions will be flooded with Republican and Democratic lawyers, and the resulting chaos could resemble the 2000 Florida recount, with smudged postmarks as the new hanging chads.”
THREE STRIKES AND DEMOCRACY MIGHT BE OUT
|Larry Diamond and Edward B. Foley write in The Atlantic that a severe shortage of poll workers, mail-in voting and mounting problems at the U.S. Postal Service, and PRESIDENT TRUMP “already dismissing mail-in voting as fraud-ridden” are all the makings for a constitutional crisis. But an added wrinkle, they argue, is that our laws on presidential elections are shockingly inadequate for resolving an Electoral College dispute. They suggest, “Twice in the past century and a half (in 1876 and 2000), the country narrowly averted a catastrophic deadlock over the presidential-election outcome. We may not be so fortunate in 2020.”