The Atomic Bomb of Election Subversion, Part 2
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Part two of Moore v. Harper, the case that could wipe out American democracy for good. Will the Supreme Court let it?
Just kidding. Of course it will.
Last week in part one of this essay, we examined Moore v. Harper, the North Carolina case that the Supreme Court will hear next term, which — among other things — could give state legislatures unchecked power to deliver presidential elections to the candidates of their choice, irrespective of the popular vote.
Given that 30 of the 50 state legislatures are controlled by the GOP, the Court’s upcoming ruling could be the coup de grâce in the ongoing Republican campaign to install itself in power permanently. Thanks to extreme gerrymandering that gives the Republican Party an all-but unbreakable hold on those bodies, that 30 state majority is unlikely to change, meaning that this case might serve as a fast-burning, fuel-on-the-fire accelerant toward the establishment of lasting, autocratic, one-party right wing rule in the US going forward.
Harper — sometimes called Moore; the hive mind can’t decide — hinges on the so-called “independent state legislature theory” (ISLT), a dubious legal concept concocted essentially for this purpose. (I refer you to the previous installment of this blog for the hideous particulars.) It is a theory that Vikram Amar, dean of the University of Illinois College of Law, calls “rubbish” and “as wrong-headed as it is treacherous.” In The Daily Beast, Wajahat Ali calls the ISLT “nonsense,” describing Harper explicitly in terms of the Supreme Court’s “Christian nationalist agenda” and part of an attempt to “implement minority rule.” He also notes that it is “exactly the crazy plan outlined by Trump-allied right-wing attorney John Eastman in his six-point memo, which a federal judge concluded was a ‘coup in search of a legal theory.’”
The question before us now is: Will the US Supreme Court allow this to happen? Indeed, will it play the crucial part of executioner delivering this death blow to anything resembling legitimate representative democracy in America?
I’ll save you a bunch of time, if you’re not in the mood to read on:
Of course it will.
