The idea that legislatures stand unbound by any limit from their own founding documents is a fringe debating point invented for Republican political advantage."
"three justices—Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas—have spent two years campaigning for the ISL doctrine... Brett Kavanaugh, wrote a concurrence... invited the North Carolina Republicans in the Moore case to return to the SCOTUS after losing an emergency motion."
"If you give the legislature a blank check on the manner of appointing presidential electors, then a Republican majority could... simply disregard a Biden victory in the state’s popular vote & appoint Trump electors instead."
"In litigation over the 2020 election, Texas and other Republican-led states showed exactly how that argument would work when they asked SCOTUS to block the certification of Biden electors in four swing states."
"The pernicious threat of ISL, wrote Richard L. Hasen, an election-law expert at UCLA, is that “a state legislature dominated by Republicans in a state won by Democrats could simply ... take matters into its own hands & choose its own slate of electors.”
"another threat to presidential elections...
state lawmakers may discard presidential voting results & appoint electors instead by declaring that voters have “failed to make a choice”—a phrase that is undefined in the law & was exploited in rogue vote-stealing efforts in 2020."
"Moore could set the stage for a major shift in voting law in the run-up to the 2024 election. The Court’s right wing appears to be spoiling for that...
SCOTUS would not even have put this case on its calendar."
"None of these factors restrained the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices. Just as they did in overturning Roe v. Wade... the right-wing justices seized on the first available vehicle for a paradigm-shifting decision."
"Just as they did in overturning #RoeVWade, a ruling they need not have made to uphold the Mississippi abortion law, the right-wing justices seized on the first available vehicle for a paradigm-shifting decision."
"Trump’s #Jan6th effort failed because every contested state had laws on the books requiring all of their Electoral College votes to go to whichever candidate won the popular vote in the state.
Or see @Thom_Hartmann article on Independent State Legislature (ISL) theory.
If SCOTUS legitimizes ISL (which is likely), GOP-run states can ignore actual election results & give that state's electoral college votes to whomever they want.
"In a nearly identical scenario to that of the DHS leaders’ texts, the Secret Service alerted Cuffari’s office seven months ago, in December 2021, that the agency had deleted thousands of agents’ and employees’ text messages."
"In the weeks before the attack on the Capitol, Trump had been pressuring both men to help him claim the 2020 election results were rigged and even to seize voting machines in key swing states to try to “re-run” the election."
"The charging document cited a speech that Kara-Murza... had given weeks earlier...
His remarks accused Russian forces of dropping cluster bombs on residential areas in Ukraine & staging airstrikes on maternity wards, hospitals & schools."
"The atrocities Kara-Murza described have been verified ...
But Vladimir Putin’s Kremlin couldn’t bear the spectacle of a Russian citizen airing these uncomfortable facts — so it locked him up for telling the truth."
Kara-Murza "has continued to campaign for human rights & liberal democracy...
Meanwhile, many politicians in the West have abandoned these values, whether by appeasing dictators such as Putin or by eroding democratic principles in their own societies."
"one lawyer involved in the detailed discussions repeatedly used the word “fake” to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide ... a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome."
“We would just be sending in ‘fake’ electoral votes to Pence so that ‘someone’ in Congress can make an objection when they start counting votes, and start arguing that the ‘fake’ votes should be counted”
"The emails show that participants in the discussions reported details of their activities to Rudolph W. Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, and in at least one case to Mark Meadows, the White House chief of staff."
"The Justice Department is investigating President Donald Trump’s actions as part of its criminal probe of efforts to overturn the 2020 election results"
"Prosecutors who are questioning witnesses... have asked in recent days about conversations w/ Trump, his lawyers, & others in his inner circle who sought to substitute Trump allies for certified electors from some states Joe Biden won"
"The prosecutors have asked hours of detailed questions about meetings Trump led in December 2020 & January 2021; his pressure campaign on Pence to overturn the election; and what instructions Trump gave his lawyers & advisers about fake electors"
"emails that show one lawyer involved in the scheme “repeatedly used the word ‘fake’ to refer to the so-called electors, who were intended to provide VP Mike Pence & Trump’s allies in Congress a rationale for derailing the congressional process of certifying the outcome.”"
"That’s classic “admissions against interest” — the sort of self-incriminating statements that light up prosecutors’ eyes...
The Post’s report also revealed that the Justice Department has the phone logs of senior Trump aides."