Thread by @tomTMwolf

Fourth #ISLTamici Theme: The ISLT’s potential harms are significant, and the Petitioners are asking the SCOTUS to ignore them

One of the more alarming features of the Petitioners’ brief is that it never explains why, as a practical matter, anyone—the Framers, Americans today, the Supreme Court—should want what the ISLT is offering them.

Their brief amounts to a lot of “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain” hand-waving.

The anti-ISLT amici explain the practical problems with the ISLT in extreme depth.

Virtually every brief offers at least some insight into these practical problems, and they combine to hit every angle: election administration, election litigation, federal courts’ docket management, public perceptions of elections’ legitimacy, etc., etc.

At the risk of self-promotion, I’ll highlight the Brennan Center’s brief as an example of how detailed these insights get.

brennancenter.org/sites/default/…

Our filing is based on a compilation of election rules that the ISLT would endanger. We identified at least 170 constitutional provisions, at least 650 statutory delegations of power, and thousands of policies the ISLT could compromise.

brennancenter.org/our-work/resea…

We reinforce many of the problems other briefs highlight, and we add one more wrinkle: We help the Court quantify the impact.

This is especially important for dealing with the various “compromise” positions the Petitioners are offering the Court. As we show, these compromises still endanger an intolerably large amount of law.

Petitioners don’t go to this level because they can’t. They’re asking the Court to melt down our long-standing system of checks and balances and plunge the whole country into electoral chaos in the name of a made-up principle and fake history.

That’s a pretty terrible proposition for us all, folks.

We haven’t seen the Petitioners’ reply yet, but my guess is that the catastrophic problems with the ISLT will be dismissed as so much liberal paranoia.

But here’s the catch: Everyone on the anti-ISLT side is saying the same thing, no matter what side of the ideological spectrum they’re on—the ISLT is going to be a complete disaster.

As I noted above, the resistance is bipartisan and there’s strong agreement on what the basic problems are. This isn’t hysteria, it’s the truth.