Remedy
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes, no longer from Como Park emails:
In Murthy v. Missouri, the Biden administration was accused of unconstitutional infringement of free speech by pressuring social media to suppress stories unfavorable to the administration. A lower court found it was the most blatant act of censorship in American history.
The Supreme Court sidestepped the issue in cowardly fashion and reversed. The court did not say the government’s action was constitutional, it said citizens have no standing to challenge the unconstitutional action.
There’s no such thing as “standing” in the Constitution, it is strictly a made-up rule that courts use to get rid of nuisance cases they don’t want to hear. It’s a convenient way to avoid making hard decisions. Minnesota courts have used it to rule that ordinary citizens have no standing to challenge the governor’s Covid lock down order, even though it cost them their livelihood or landed them in jail. There is simply no legal remedy for those acts.
Imagine that Biden stays in the race so Democrats have to steal the election to keep the Bad Orange Man out of power. Imagine that the courts act for this instance as they did in 2020 denying that individual citizens have standing to challenge the result and refusing to hear the merits of the election fraud case. What’s the remedy?
If the court is correct citizens have no peaceful remedy within the constitutional system for unconstitutional government action, then the only remedy available is the one the founders exercised: insurrection leading to revolution.
Plenty of rope in the hinterlands and plenty of lamp poles in Washington. No wonder the elites are terrified.
Joe Doakes
One hopes they are.
July 11th, 2024 at 8:12 am
I 2020, Justice Alito urged SCOTUS to hear cases pertaining to judicial rewrites of election laws before the Election in November so they could do so without knowing if or how a specific Decision would affect the outcome, and so that affected voters could recast ballots if their absentee ballots were thrown out. The Court ignored Alito and then ignored the Cases, typically for mootness.
This week, the nakedly partisan Wisconsin Supreme Court just overruled itself from 2 years ago and reinstituted unsecured, COVID era drop boxes as equivalent to handing a ballot to the county clerk.
SCOTUS should decide the Cases brought to it “without fear or favor” and not always look for the expedient way to punt the Case off to the future. If anything, what they are doing is adding to their own workload by not deciding things clearly the first time. FFS, how many times does Jack Phillips have to keep bringing what is effectively the same Case to SCOTUS because Chief Justice Roberts narrowly tailors the Decision to technicalities instead of smacking that Colorado commission and saying “the First Amendment means what it says you jackasses.” How many times does Alito and Thomas (and Scalia while he was alive) have to write a Concurrence, much less a Dissent, admonishing the majority for being weak kneed and predicting that their narrow Decision will just spawned even more Cases because they refused to actually Decide on the issue?
July 11th, 2024 at 9:55 am
This has bothered me since the Supreme Court parlayed the Obama administration’s “no show” in Obergefell v. Hodges into a nationwide support of same sex mirage, and all of the amici curae documents filed by those who opposed that basically went into the circular file. Also at play is the “sue and settle” tactics by the Obama and Biden adminstrations where regulators basically invite environmental and other activist groups to sue, and then settle for the terms the environmental groups endorse.
In both cases, standing for the poor taxpayers/citizens who get to endure the fallout from those cases–relentless harassment of cake bakers for Obergefell and the like, regulatory overreach for all of us when the Sierra Club basically writes code without the review process–would be very welcome. It would not guarantee good results, but it would be a great start.
July 13th, 2024 at 10:21 am
It would be nice when any Administration, Federal or State, rolls over and refuses to defend a law that it doesn’t like if the Courts would allow an outside group to defend said law. Personally, I’d be okay with setting up some pre-approved rate of compensation for the outside group to do the government’s job for them, but it would probably be possible for the major political parties to set up a dedicated fund for that purpose. Personally, I’d be more likely to donate to the RNC’s fund to do the Biden Administration’s job than I am to donate to their crappy campaign fund.