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Michael McLeod
I've been heartened, indeed, by the clear thinking and indignation of the judges (many of them republicans)who weighed in on the fake evidence and arguments. It was, like, finally the grownups walke into the room.Love some of their comments.
I have highlighted some of their comments in the story below. Really boosts my morale to see intelligence and judicial acumen clear the air of these poisonous fumes.
By the way: I don't think Trump is lying. I think he truly believes he has been cheated. Why that is - in other words, what is it in his mental and psychological makeup that blinds him - is a subject for another time. But you have to view the pattern of his life going back decades and understand that the best con man utterly believes in his con. He's a method actor ovetaken by his part -- a con man consumed by his con game. I'd pity him if he weren't doing so much damage to the country and the world at large.
As of Friday, more than 50 of their cases had failed or been tossed out of court. Just one minor suit — which shortened the period of time in which Pennsylvania voters could fix errors on certain mail ballots — was successful.
Judges consistently found there was no substantive evidence to support claims of fraud and irregularities — that Biden’s votes were, in fact, legal votes.
Trump’s campaign “did not prove under any standard of proof that illegal votes were cast and counted, or legal votes were not counted at all, due to voter fraud, nor in an amount equal to or greater than” Biden’s margin in Nevada, wrote state District Court Judge James T. Russell, a former lieutenant in the U.S. Army. A fourth-generation Nevadan, Russell’s grandfather was also a judge, assuming the bench after injuring his leg working on the railroad.
In Pennsylvania, Judge Bibas — who sits on a federal circuit court, just below the U.S. Supreme Court — wrote: “Charges of unfairness are serious. But calling an election unfair does not make it so.”
Writing on behalf of two other judges also named to the court by Republican presidents, Bibas, who graduated from Columbia University at 19 before earning his law degree at Yale, added, “Charges require specific allegations and then proof. We have neither here.”
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And in Arizona, evaluating similar complaints from conservative attorney Sidney Powell, federal District Court Judge Diane J. Humetewa wrote: “Allegations that find favor in the public sphere of gossip and innuendo cannot be a substitute for earnest pleadings and procedure in federal court.”
“Plaintiffs have not moved the needle for their fraud theory from conceivable to plausible, which they must do to state a claim under Federal pleading standards,” added Humetewa, a member of the Hopi Tribe who was named Arizona’s U.S. attorney in 2007 by President George W. Bush before being nominated to the federal bench by Obama in 2014.
A handful of judges appeared more open to Trump’s arguments, but such views came in dissents to majority opinions that carried the day.
Unlike politics and the media, courtrooms are run by certain rules, applied over and over in matters small and large.
To file a lawsuit, a person must have standing to sue — to be able to show they have suffered a specific injury that can actually be addressed were they to win their suit. They can ask judges to act only where they have jurisdiction. Federal judges are limited, for instance, in their power to deal with matters overseen by the states, like the rules governing elections.
They must also formally state a claim — that is, show that if they’ve presented all the facts accurately, their suit demonstrates some law has actually been violated. They must rely on precedent, showing that they have asked for the law to be applied in the same way that it has been in the past.
And, finally, if lawyers say a fact is a fact, they must be able to prove it is a fact — with credible, firsthand evidence.
Over and over again, Trump and his allies failed to convince judges that their complaints overcame some of these hurdles. In many cases, they failed to demonstrate that they cleared any of them.
Instead, judges repeatedly found that plaintiffs without standing filed cases that, per past precedent, were lodged too late, sometimes in the wrong courts, asking for disproportionate relief based on unsubstantiated claims.
Witness statements submitted by the campaign, for instance, were “self-serving statements of little or no evidentiary value,” wrote Russell in Nevada. So-called expert testimony “was of little to no value,” and a claim of ballot-stuffing in broad daylight asserted by an anonymous witness with no corroboration he termed “not credible.”
One of the most strongly worded opinions came from Wisconsin state Justice Brian Hagedorn, a onetime president of Northwestern University Law School’s chapter of the conservative Federalist Society, who previously served for more than four years as chief legal counsel to former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R).
“Something far more fundamental than the winner of Wisconsin’s electoral votes is implicated in this case,” Hagedorn wrote, in declining to hear a case brought by a conservative group that asked the court to overturn the election results. “At stake, in some measure, is faith in our system of free and fair elections, a feature central to the enduring strength of our constitutional republic.”
“Once the door is opened to judicial invalidation of presidential election results, it will be awfully hard to close that door again. This is a dangerous path we are being asked to tread,” Hagedorn added.
He was joined by three other justices, including that court’s currently longest-serving member, Justice Ann Walsh Bradley, who taught high school in La Crosse, Wis., before taking up the law, as well as Justice Jill Karofsky, who was elected to the court in April.
The Post review found striking diversity in the political orientation and experience among the judges who ruled against Trump or his allies. Fifty-four were men, 32 were women. They ranged in age from 42 to 82.
Trump called the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear a case challenging the results in four states “a great and disgraceful miscarriage of justice.” (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
In Pennsylvania, U.S. District Court Judge Matthew W. Brann, who served as the chairman of the Bradford County Republican Committee for more than a decade before taking the bench, compared the Trump campaign’s stitched-together legal theories to “Frankenstein’s monster.”
“This Court has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations, unpled in the operative complaint and unsupported by evidence,” wrote Brann, days after he heard Trump’s attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani personally argue the case.
“In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth most populated state. Our people, laws, and institutions demand more,” he concluded.
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