President Trump's campaign says this case is a matter of grave national consequence, a stolen election and an illegal scheme to oust the president. But -- oops! -- it accidentally dropped all of that from its lawsuit the other day because it got confused. 
Trump's lawyers say they hope to go through all the mail-in ballot envelopes, determine which of them were "illegally counted," then extrapolate how many votes to disqualify and then try to subtract a bunch from Biden's total.
The Trump campaign is explicit about its strategy: It wants to find a way to invalidate a large number of mail-in ballots over things like signatures. If it can, "the Court should set aside these votes and declare Trump the winner."
Or hey, maybe it won't be able to prove this vast and consequential conspiracy and will therefore withdraw its case. You never know.
The problem with a lot of the Trump campaign's argument against dismissal is -- as Judge Brann pointed out yesterday -- it dropped a lot of these allegations when it amended the complaint. They're no longer part of the case.
The campaign is trying to litigate dismissal on the basis of the initial complaint that it amended, or the amendment it hopes to get permission to file later, but not really on the basis of the case that's currently before the court.
Trump's lawyers say that when Republican-leaning counties decided not to permit voters to cure defective ballots, that deprived the president of "lawful votes." But when Democratic-leaning counties did let people cure, those were "unlawful votes."
Again the Trump campaign says defendants discriminated against Republican voters. But how? The counties treated all mail-in voters in their jurisdictions equally. It's *other* counties, not named as defendants, that didn't permit ballots to be cured.
The campaign says its voter-plaintiffs have standing because they were disadvantaged by other counties allowing other voters to cure ballots when they couldn't. But how were they disadvantaged by other people being allowed to vote?
If federal courts bite on the Trump campaign's arguments about standing and Equal Protection in this case, it'd likely open the doors to a *lot* of other election litigation of the type that conservatives have been fighting against for a very long time.
Trump's lawyers say the federal court shouldn't abstain because there are no issues of state law in the case. But it repeatedly alleges "Democrat" counties violated state law. Without that, they're alleging the counties acted unconstitutionally by following state law.
Here's the campaign's whole argument: courtlistener.com/recap/gov.usco…
One other thing: Trump's lawyers are making a lot of a 1994 case in which the 3d Cir. basically set aside the results of a Philadelphia election because of "massive absentee allot fraud." What they leave out: Even there, the court refused to say the other candidate wins.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
