One Bullet Dodged

With its decision in Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court rejects one of the gravest legal threats to the republic.

Almost exactly a year ago in these pages, I wrote a two-part piece on Moore v. Harper, the case before the Supreme Court that tested the so-called “independent state legislature theory,” a crackpot concept that the Republican Party was trying to codify as a means of undermining democracy in these United States.

Yesterday the Court handed down a 6–3 ruling rejecting it. (Roberts, Kavanaugh, and even Barrett joined the three progressive justices. Thomas, Alito, and Gorusch dissented. Perhaps Harlan Crow or Peter Singer will fly them off to go fishing and lick their wounds.)

Along with the recent Court ruling rejecting racist gerrymandering in Alabama, and upholding the White House’s prerogative to set immigration policy, this is a most welcome — and somewhat surprising — ruling. Had SCOTUS ruled the other way, Moore might have been the coup de grâce in the ongoing Republican campaign to install itself in power permanently.

I know that the much-esteemed retired federal judge Michael Luttig, a conservative icon who was one of most vocal critics of the ISLT, recently wrote that he was optimistic that the Moore decision would go down this way, and he was proved correct. I was not so sanguine. As Naomi Klein wrote in The Intercept…