Thread by @AkivaMCohen

In the cold light of morning, I'm still completely amazed by the legal belly flop that @ThomasMoreSoc filed in the DC District Court. It's the legal equivalent of watching the butt fumble, live

EVERYTHING you could possibly get wrong in a complaint, they managed

Start with the plaintiffs. The ONLY claims in the lawsuit are that the Constitution gives state legislatures the right to set the manner of elections, which they have allegedly (we'll get to this insanity) failed to do.

There's oodles of caselaw saying "since that's a right of the state legislature, only state legislatures, as a body, can bring such a claim"

Are the plaintiffs state legislatures?

OK, what about the Defendants? They've sued Defendants from, IIRC, five states (GA, PA, WI, MI, AZ) based on claims that the State Legislatures there didn't pass election rules that the plaintiffs insist the Constitution requires (I promise, we'll get there).

OK, so the State Legislatures weren't plaintiffs. They were Defendants, right? 'Cause, you know, the claim is that the legislatures didn't do what they were required to do?

Again

Let's gloss over the fact that they've joined a whole bunch of independent defendants, sued for independent wrongs, in a single case ....

For those who don't know, you ... uh ... can't do that. If I steal your car, and someone in Wisconsin empties your bank account, you can't sue us both in one case just because we both stole from you; unless it's a conspiracy & we're working together, you need separate suits

But sweet glory, they ALSO named the Electoral College as a Defendant, an "entity" that, with apologies to @scottlynch78, is entirely fictional.

That's like filing a lawsuit against "chemotherapy" or "the foreign policy establishment". As I said last night, pity the poor process server who was handed a summons and told "ok, go serve this on the Electoral College"

On the plus side, they DID make up a physical address for "Defendant Electoral College" - it's the US Capitol Building, where (unless I'm wrong and the DC electors use it) exactly NONE of the temporary members of the Electoral College even meet to vote

They also sued a raft of individual defendants from the various states "in their official capacity" - except Brian Kemp, who was sued in his "original" capacity - meaning that they all have 11th Amendment immunity from being sued

Or, well, they would, if the case ever got to the point where immunity is relevant, which it won't because ...

They sued these defendants in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, where basically none of the defendants reside or do business (except for Mike Pence and Congress, who, OF COURSE, were also named as defendants because when you're this crazy, why not?)

This is a slight problem due to the little-discussed topic of personal jurisdiction, which only a hundred thousand or so cases have addressed, which basically says "no, asshole, you can't sue Ginny Welch of Minnetonka in a court in New York. We have no power over her"

There are exceptions to that rule, of course - we're lawyers, after all, and bright-line, easily followed rules without exceptions would put us out of business - but none of them apply here, and the plaintiffs don't even bother arguing that they do.

They just went for it like, "of course we can sue Bryan Cutler, in his capacity as Speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, in Washington D.C. Why wouldn't we be able to? Also, what if we changed his name to Bryan Carter? You know, for the kids?"

They managed to screw up Rule 8. Rule 8!

For my non-lawyers, it's the rule of civil procedure that requires complaints to be "short and plain" statements of the claims. It's not a rule that has much force, generally.

But these guys decided to write a 15-page intro to their complaint and to include SEVENTY-FIVE PAGES of detailed "factual" allegations that had, in the end, nothing to do with their causes of action

(For my non-lawyer friends, "causes of action" are, basically, "the legal rules that the Defendant flagrantly violated by the conduct I just discussed in my complaint, and the reason the court should rule in my favor"

For example, imagine your neighbor came onto your property,

stole your favorite garden gnome you got from your recently deceased grandma, set it on fire, and sent you a video of the whole thing. You'd file a complaint detailing the facts of what happened, and then get to the causes of action:

Trespassing: By coming onto the property without permission, he committed trespassing
Conversion: By taking your property for his own use, without permission, he committed conversion
Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress: That garden gnome was important, dammit!
Etc.)

These folks have 3 causes of action:
1) Violation of Article 2 of the Constitution, based on the theory that the Constitution requires state legislatures to personally count votes and certify election results by legislative vote (yes, really)

2) Violation of the Equal Protection clause, because voters in these 5 swing states didn't have the legislature count and certify, unlike the voters in the other 45 states (and DC), which also didn't have the legislatures count and certify (yes, really)

and 3) violation of due process, by depriving voters of their Constitutional right to have the legislatures count and certify the votes

As you can probably tell from this summary, there are only a few facts/legal issues that matter to these claims:

1) Is there a requirement that state legislatures themselves count and certify votes? (Spoiler: No); and
2) Did the legislatures in these states (or others) do so?

That's it.

So OF COURSE they spent 75 pages, and literally hundreds of paragraphs, writing out, in loving detail, every wild election conspiracy anyone has alleged in any of the defendants' states

Like, it was all lunacy, yes. And courts have already ruled on this stuff. And saying "based on stuff other people have alleged ..." as part of your factual allegations (yes, really, that's what they did) isn't something you get to do

But really, if you're going to get all dressed up in your lead lined underwear, and put on your good tinfoil hat, and put in the effort to hand-letter your sign because really, craftsmanship is important and too many people don't get that these days, good on you, man ...

don't you think you should at least make your crazy internally connect to the things you want?

This was the equivalent of a protest sign that said "Clinton murdered Vince Foster, so please Save the Whales!"

Except that instead of a single piece of oaktag, it was SEVENTY FIVE PAGES of unrelated irrelevant conspiracizing.

This, as I predicted, was the part that broke @questauthority

BUT IT GETS WORSE.

Because buried inside those 75 pages was a paragraph or two specifically alleging that NO COURT could even consider the claims of the complaint, or any election-related claims, which need to be "filed" with the state legislatures

In sum, the wrong plaintiffs sued the wrong (and sometimes nonexistant) defendants in the wrong court based on a totally made up legal theory supported by pages of "facts" that had nothing to do with the imaginary theory, all while telling the court it had no jurisdiction anyway

And then, of course, they asked for legal fees.

/the end