2020 Elections - Trump FIRED

[CU77]

Wait, what? The Attorney General of Texas "has been under indictment since 2015 for felony securities fraud charges"?

Those Republicans really love Law and Order, don't they?

Anyway, that's a state crime that he's under indictment for, Trump can't pardon him for that.

Paxton unsuccessfully sought to quash the indictments. This challenge was rejected by the trial judge, the Fifth Court of Appeals, and the Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas' criminal court of last resort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Paxton

Yee-Haw!

[a fan]

Wait, what? The Attorney General of Texas "has been under indictment since 2015 for felony securities fraud charges"?

Those Republicans really love Law and Order, don't they?

Anyway, that's a state crime that he's under indictment for, Trump can't pardon him for that.

Paxton unsuccessfully sought to quash the indictments. This challenge was rejected by the trial judge, the Fifth Court of Appeals, and the Court of Criminal Appeals, Texas' criminal court of last resort.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Paxton

Yee-Haw!

Oh, he was tricked into doing that.

[njbill]

Once Rudy heard that Lyin’ Ted Cruz wanted to argue the case before the Supreme Court, he got up out of his Covid sickbed and left the hospital.

There will now be a catfight between Rudes and Teddy Boy for who gets to argue the case.

Spoiler alert: there will be no argument. The case has a 0.00% chance of success. And there is a 0.00% chance there will even be oral argument.

[Typical Lax Dad]

I wonder what global threat keeps The President of The United States of America up at night?:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/sta ... 31553?s=21

[seacoaster]

This is a brief filed in the SCOTUS yesterday by moving for leave to file an opposition to the Texas petition to file an original complaint:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/ ... 0FINAL.pdf

Summary of the argument:

"The Electors Clause and 3 U.S.C. § 5 contradict the Plaintiff’s unprecedented argument that a presidential election dispute is a controversy between two or more states. One way these provisions contradict Plaintiff’s argument is by authorizing each state to delegate by statute the adjudication of all controversies or contests concerning federal presidential election results in that state to that state’s courts. Such statutory delegation to state courts is part of each state legislature’s chosen statutory “manner” for presidential elections as much as are the statutes on, for example, mail-in voting. A state’s chosen “manner” applies “exclusively,” McPherson v. Blacker, 146 U.S. 1, 27 (1892), “absent some other constitutional constraint.” Chiafalo v. Washington, 140 S. Ct. 2316, 2324 (2020) (emphasis added). There is no constitutional constraint against state courts being the trial courts for presidential election disputes.

Moreover, 3 U.S.C. § 5 expressly and properly enables a state to designate “its” state tribunals as the “conclusive” arbiter of “any controversy or contest concerning” presidential election results in that state. (Emphasis added). In the rare instance that a state supreme court’s ruling violates a federal constitutional provision or statute, this Court has appellate jurisdiction. See, e.g., Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98, 100-01 (2000) (per curiam).

Plaintiff’s Motions make a mockery of federalism and separation of powers. It would violate the most fundamental constitutional principles for this Court to serve as the trial court for presidential election disputes."

[Typical Lax Dad]

Good morning great American citizens! The President of the United States of America is hard at work for you this morning:

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/sta ... 88292?s=21

There are evil people in the shadows that pose a global threat to our great democracy. The President of The United States of America is here to serve you!!

[DMac]

Well, guess that just goes to show you that the "anyone can become President" ideal we live by comes with unintended consequences. See Donald J. Trump (our Prez is a nut case).

[njbill]

This just in. In an unexpected development, the Supreme Court has taken the Texas lawsuit, but surprisingly has decertified the Texas election results and awarded all of Texas’ electoral votes to Biden!

T**** tweeted, “Ouch! Didn’t see that coming.”

[seacoaster]

Nice review of the expert opinion attached to the Texas Motion to have a chance to disenfranchise about 20,000,000 voters:

"....Texas AG Ken Paxton's suit asking the Supreme Court to overturn the certified election results in GA, PA, WI, and MI (thereby throwing the election to Trump) purports to show that:

The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump's early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000^4). See Decl. of Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. ("Cicchetti Decl.") at ¶¶ 14-21, 30-31. See App. 4a-7a, 9a. 11.

Although I had not yet read the Cicchetti Declaration when I posted my comments, I assured you that it did not, and could not, demonstrate what Mr. Paxton claimed it demonstrated, and that it was nonsense of the highest (or lowest) order, and I promised a more complete explanation once I had read Ciccheti's full analysis.

Well, now I have read it (see the Appendix posted here), and it's as bad as I knew it would be. [h/t Jonathan Adler]

Here is how that idiotic "one in a quadrillion" estimate was derived.

First, Cicchetti shows that if the voters in 2020 had the same Dem vs Rep preferences as they had in 2016, the chance that the results would show Biden out-performing Hillary Clinton to the extent reported in the certified results is virtually zero. That is correct. Here's his analysis:

"10. In 2016, Trump won Georgia with 51.0% of the vote compared to Clinton's 45.9%, with more than 211,000 votes separating them. Clinton received 1,877,963 votes and Trump received 2,089,104. In 2020, Biden's tabulated votes (2,474,507) were much greater than Clinton's in 2016.

11. I tested the hypothesis that the performance of the two Democrat candidates were statistically similar by comparing Clinton to Biden. I compare the total votes of each candidate, in two elections and test the hypothesis that other things being the same they [i.e., Clinton and Biden] would have an equal number of votes. . . . I can reject the hypothesis many times more than one in a quadrillion times that the two outcomes were similar.

Statistics textbooks and statistics professors love to state problems with reference to balls in urns, so we can restate what Cicchetti has actually shown this way: Suppose you have many millions of balls in an urn; 51% of the balls are red and 45% of them are blue (the 2016 distribution). You now draw 5 million balls out of the urn (the 2020 election). The chances that 2.5 million of them (50%) would be blue is, indeed, virtually zero (one in a quadrillion).

So we can reject the hypothesis that Cicchetti testing: that "the performance of the two Democrat candidates [i.e., Clinton and Biden] were statistically similar [and] that other things being the same they [i.e., Clinton and Biden] would have received an equal number of votes." As he shows, the two performances are not "statistically similar." If the voting population in 2020 had exactly the same distribution of preferences it had in 2016, Biden could not possibly have out-performed Clinton as substantially as he is reported to have done.

Second, he demonstrates that if the population of voters using mail-in ballots had the same preferences as those voting in person, the chance the mail-in ballots could have turned the tide for Biden in the manner reported is also virtually zero. That is also correct.

"14. At 3:10 AM EST on November 4 the Georgia reported tabulations were 51.09% for Trump and 48.91% for Biden…. On November 18 at 2 PM EST, the reported percentages were Trump 49.86% and Biden at 50.14%.

15. [T]he votes tabulated in the two time periods could not be random samples from the same population of votes cast…. There is a one in many more that quadrillions of chances that these two tabulation periods are randomly drawn from the same population. Therefore, the reported tabulations in the early and subsequent periods could not remotely plausibly (sic) be random samples from the same population of all Georgia ballots tabulated."

That, believe it or not, is it. (A) If the 2020 voting population had precisely the same party preferences as the 2016 voting population, Biden could not possibly have won; and (B) if the mail-in and in-person voters had precisely the same party preferences, Biden could not possibly have won.

Wow! Man bites dog!! Who would have believed it!! If the 2020 voting population had the same Repub/Dem split as it had in 2016, Trump must have won!! If mail-in voters had the same preferences as in-person voters, Trump must have won!! And if my aunt had four wheels, she'd be a motorcar!!

Dr. Cicchetti, in other words, has falsified two hypotheses that nobody in his/her right mind could possibly have believed might actually be true. Garbage in, garbage out.

I would remind Dr. Cicchetti—and, more importantly, Texas AG Paxton—that we periodically conduct "elections" precisely because voter preferences may change over time, and some people who voted for the Democratic candidate in one election might choose the Republican in the next, or vice versa. Were this not the case, I suppose we'd still have a Federalist as Chief Executive. ["Your Honor, the chance that Thomas Jefferson carried Maryland in 1800, as has been reported, is less than one in 8 million billion quadrillion!! (assuming that voter preferences haven't changed since the 1796 election …)"]

And I would urge Dr. Cicchetti to re-do his analysis, but instead of comparing Biden's performance to Clinton's he should compare Mitt Romney's performance in 2012 to Donald Trump's in 2016. This, of course, would prove conclusively that Donald Trump could not possibly have carried Pennsylvania or Michigan or Wisconsin (given voters' 2012 preferences) … one in a quadrillion!

And as far as the mail-in vs in-person distributions is concerned, only about 2.48 million pundits and prognosticators predicted, before the election, that mail-in ballots would likely skew Democratic. So there, too, Cicchetti's findings are hardly a surprise.

Dr. Cicchetti's analysis—for which, I assume, he was paid handsomely—is merely silly, irrelevant, and a total waste of time.

Attorney General Paxton, though, is another story; his use of Ciccetti's analysis is mendacious and misleading and, I believe, unethical. Recall what the Motion he filed at the Court asserts:

The probability of former Vice President Biden winning the popular vote in the four Defendant States—Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—independently given President Trump's early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion, or 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000. For former Vice President Biden to win these four States collectively, the odds of that event happening decrease to less than one in a quadrillion to the fourth power (i.e., 1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000^4). See Decl. of Charles J. Cicchetti, Ph.D. at ¶¶ 14-21, 30-31. See App. 4a-7a, 9a. 11.

No, no, no, Mr. Paxton—that is most definitely not what Cicchetti demonstrates. You have omitted the critical qualifier: that probability is less than one in a quadrillion assuming the distribution of voting preferences is exactly the same in the two populations (mail-in vs. in-person voters). If those distributions are not the same—and there is absolutely no reason to think they are—the Cicchetti Declaration says absolutely nothing at all.

In the long history of misuse of pseudo-statistics and probabalistic mumbo-jumbo, about which many books have been written (my personal favorite being "The Drunkard's Walk" by Leonard Mlodinow—highly recommended), this surely has pride of place. It is a disgraceful performance, and I would hope that the voters in Texas would take note.

And if, as several of the commenters on my earlier posting suggested, Paxton (who is currently under indictment for securities law violations) is doing all this just in order to get a pardon from Trump, that is—to put it mildly—a gross abuse of the power entrusted in him by the good people of Texas."

https://reason.com/volokh/2020/12/09/mo ... at-scotus/

[wgdsr]

honestly, we must be the stupidest population on the planet. and actually, trump's greatest achievement may be getting the last 3% or so people that couldn't get jobs, jobs.

or maybe that was easy because someone had to be there to decide to hire them.

[Kismet]

Somebody gets it -

“I’m no lawyer, but I suspect the Supreme Court swats this away. From the brief, it looks like a fella begging for a pardon filed a PR stunt rather than a lawsuit — as all of its assertions have already been rejected by federal courts and Texas’ own solicitor general isn’t signing on.”- Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb)

Texas AG is currently under Federal indictment - He couldn't possibly be looking for a pardon, could he?

[CU88]

I love all these “states rights” buffoons pretending that states have the right to sue other states over their election laws.

Um, maybe they are confused about what “states rights” mean?

MAGA

[seacoaster]

I love all these “states rights” buffoons pretending that states have the right to sue other states over their election laws.

Um, maybe they are confused about what “states rights” mean?

MAGA

They know what it means, and pretended for decades that it was important. But when it got in the way of holding onto the offices of power and spigots of public dough-re-mi, it was tossed aside like an empty beer can.

[Typical Lax Dad]

honestly, we must be the stupidest population on the planet. and actually, trump's greatest achievement may be getting the last 3% or so people that couldn't get jobs, jobs.

or maybe that was easy because someone had to be there to decide to hire them.

There is nothing dumber than a dumb American.

[cradleandshoot]

honestly, we must be the stupidest population on the planet. and actually, trump's greatest achievement may be getting the last 3% or so people that couldn't get jobs, jobs.

or maybe that was easy because someone had to be there to decide to hire them.

There is nothing dumber than a dumb American.

Point of order young man... there are also dumb liberal Americans. That is a whole other breed of dumb.

[seacoaster]

honestly, we must be the stupidest population on the planet. and actually, trump's greatest achievement may be getting the last 3% or so people that couldn't get jobs, jobs.

or maybe that was easy because someone had to be there to decide to hire them.

There is nothing dumber than a dumb American.

Point of order young man... there are also dumb liberal Americans. That is a whole other breed of dumb.

"You are my density." M. McFly.

[seacoaster]

Good opinion piece in the Times:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/opin ... e=Homepage

"Americans are taught that the main function of the U.S. Constitution is the control of executive power: curtailing presidents who might seek to become tyrants. Other republics have lapsed into dictatorships (the Roman Republic, the Weimar Republic, the Republic of China and so on), but our elaborate constitutional system of checks and balances, engineered largely by James Madison, protects us from despotism.

Or so we think. The presidency of Donald Trump, aggressive in its autocratic impulses but mostly thwarted from realizing them, should prompt a re-examination of that idea. For our system of checks and balances, in which the three branches of government are empowered to control or influence the actions of the others, played a disappointingly small role in stopping Mr. Trump from assuming the unlimited powers he seemed to want.

What really saved the Republic from Mr. Trump was a different set of limits on the executive: an informal and unofficial set of institutional norms upheld by federal prosecutors, military officers and state elections officials. You might call these values our “unwritten constitution.” Whatever you call them, they were the decisive factor.

It’s true that the courts at times provided a check on Mr. Trump’s tyrannical tendencies, as with their dismissal of his frivolous attacks on the election and their striking down of his effort to overturn the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program without appropriate process. But in other cases, such as his anti-Muslim travel ban, the courts have been too unwilling to look beyond form to ferret out unconstitutional motive. More generally, Mr. Trump has tended to move fast, while the courts are slow, and to operate by threat, which the courts cannot adjudicate.

The bigger and more important failure was Congress. Madison intended Congress to be the primary check on the president. Unfortunately, that design has a key flaw (as Madison himself realized). The flaw is vulnerability to party politics. It turns out that if a majority of members of at least one body of Congress exhibits a higher loyalty to its party than to Congress, Congress will not function as a reliable check on a president of that same party. This was what happened with Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Senate.

The problem is chronic, but over the last four years it became virulent. Confronted with a president who was heedless of rules, Senate Republicans, in ways large and small, let him do what he wanted. They allowed acting appointees to run the federal government. They allowed him to claim a right to attack Iran without congressional approval. The impeachment process was reduced to nothing but a party-line vote. The Senate became a rubber stamp for executive overreach.

Instead, the president’s worst impulses were neutralized by three pillars of the unwritten constitution. The first is the customary separation between the president and federal criminal prosecution (even though the Department of Justice is part of the executive branch). The second is the traditional political neutrality of the military (even though the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces). The third is the personal integrity of state elections officials.

If any of these informal “firewalls” had failed, President Trump might be on his way to a second and more autocratic term. But they held firm, for which the Republic should be grateful.

Consider the first firewall: prosecutorial independence. The prosecution function of the executive branch is not mentioned in the Constitution, and based on the text alone — “the executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States” — some might think (and some have even insisted) that the president has the power to order federal prosecutors to do his bidding. Mr. Trump claimed that power in 2017, saying “I have absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department.”

But an unwritten norm has long held that the president should not dictate law enforcement decisions in general, and criminal prosecutions in particular. That is why, throughout this fall, even as Mr. Trump urged his appointees in the Justice Department to openly announce a criminal investigation into the Biden family, they did not comply. None of Mr. Trump’s appointees was willing to openly investigate Joe Biden or his family members, let alone issue an indictment or civil complaint.

Imagine if the Justice Department had followed Mr. Trump’s lead. Imagine if in response to the provocations of Mr. Trump’s lawyer Rudolph Giuliani, a U.S. attorney had charged Mr. Biden with criminal fraud. Even if Mr. Biden ultimately prevailed in court, publicly fighting such charges during an election would be a political and logistical nightmare. The unwritten constitution blocked this line of attack on the electoral process.

Prosecutorial independence was not limited to refusing to indict Mr. Trump’s political adversaries; it also extended to indicting his allies. Over the past four years, six of Mr. Trump’s close associates have been convicted and seven were indicted, including his adviser Stephen Bannon, his campaign chairman Paul Manafort and his lawyer Michael Cohen. Such prosecutions would be unimaginable in a dictatorship.

None of this is to suggest that William Barr, Mr. Trump’s attorney general, has served as a model of nonpartisan behavior, or that the Justice Department has been scrupulously fair. What it does show is how powerful unwritten norms can be, even in a department run by a loyalist.

The second firewall of the unwritten constitution was the U.S. military’s longstanding custom against getting involved in domestic politics. It was invaluable in checking Mr. Trump’s militaristic instincts.

On June 1, as protests and counter-protests occasioned by the killing of George Floyd became violent and destructive of property, Mr. Trump appeared in the Rose Garden of the White House and denounced what he called “acts of domestic terror.” He said he would “deploy the United States military” if necessary to “defend the life and property” of U.S. citizens. In a subsequent photo op, he was flanked by Mr. Barr, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who was clad in military fatigues. Soon, active duty forces from the 82nd Airborne Division were positioned outside of Washington.

Mr. Trump’s plan had the written law on its side. Neither the Constitution nor any congressional statute would have prevented the president from directly ordering active duty military to suppress the protests. The Constitution makes the president the commander in chief of the armed forces and the Insurrection Act of 1807 allows the president to use the military or National Guard to suppress civil disorder, providing a broad exception to the general rule barring domestic use of the military.

It was an extraordinarily dangerous moment for the country. As the history of lapsed republics suggests, when the military becomes involved in domestic politics, it tends to stay involved. But two days after Mr. Trump’s speech, Mr. Esper publicly broke with the president, stressing that active duty forces should be used domestically only “as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations.” He concluded that “I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.”

General Milley later issued a public apology for participating in Mr. Trump’s photo op. “My presence in that moment,” he said, “created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” He added, “I should not have been there.”

Mr. Trump’s plans ran afoul not of the law, but of an unwritten rule. In a few days, the active duty troops gathered around Washington were sent home. Though briefly tested, the norm had held.

The final firewall of the unwritten constitution has been the integrity of state elections officials. Corruption of the people and institutions that set election rules and count votes is an obvious threat to the democratic process. In Russia, for example, the neutrality of its Central Election Commission during President Vladimir Putin’s rule has been repeatedly questioned, especially given the tendency of that body to disqualify leading opposition figures and parties.

The story of Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state in Georgia and its top elections official, testifies to the potential threats to an election’s integrity during a heated campaign. Mr. Raffensperger, a Republican, was loosely in charge of the vote in a state that went narrowly for Mr. Biden. In that capacity, Mr. Raffensperger was attacked and disparaged by higher-ranking members of his own party. This included such prominent political figures as Georgia’s two senators, David Perdue and Kelly Loeffler. Both demanded Mr. Raffensperger resign for no apparent reason other than his failure to prevent Mr. Biden from winning the state.

Despite the pressure, Mr. Raffensperger and the state’s governor, Brian Kemp, held steady, along with an overwhelming majority of state elections officials around the country. They have refused to “discover” voting fraud without good evidence of it. Party loyalty — at this point — seems not to have fatally corrupted the vote-counting process.

Might this welcome result be credited to constitutional design? Not really. The states are an important part of the Constitutional design, and the document does give them a central role to play in federal elections. But what seems to have mattered most, in terms of ensuring the integrity of the voting process, was less the constitutional structure and more the personal integrity of the state elections officials. Their professional commitment to a fair vote may have spared the Republic an existential crisis.

Madison famously wrote, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Cynical minds have read this line to mean that we should never trust people and should rely only on structural controls on government power.

The last four years suggest something different: Structural checks can be overrated. The survival of our Republic depends as much, if not more, on the virtue of those in government, particularly the upholding of norms by civil servants, prosecutors and military officials. We have grown too jaded about things like professionalism and institutions, and the idea of men and women who take their duties seriously. But as every major moral tradition teaches, no external constraint can fully substitute for the personal compulsion to do what is right.

It may sound naïve in our untrusting age to hope that people will care about ethics and professional duties. But Madison, too, saw the need for this trust. “There is a degree of depravity in mankind,” he wrote, but also “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” A working republican government, he argued, “presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form.”

It is called civic virtue, and at the end of the day, there is no real alternative."

Tim Wu (@superwuster) is a law professor at Columbia, a contributing opinion writer and the author, most recently, of “The Curse of Bigness: Antitrust in the New Gilded Age.”

[Typical Lax Dad]

honestly, we must be the stupidest population on the planet. and actually, trump's greatest achievement may be getting the last 3% or so people that couldn't get jobs, jobs.

or maybe that was easy because someone had to be there to decide to hire them.

There is nothing dumber than a dumb American.

Point of order young man... there are also dumb liberal Americans. That is a whole other breed of dumb.

Hubris is part of it....

[cradleandshoot]

honestly, we must be the stupidest population on the planet. and actually, trump's greatest achievement may be getting the last 3% or so people that couldn't get jobs, jobs.

or maybe that was easy because someone had to be there to decide to hire them.

There is nothing dumber than a dumb American.

Point of order young man... there are also dumb liberal Americans. That is a whole other breed of dumb.

"You are my density." M. McFly.

There are a lot of dumb conservatives too. They are also a whole other breed of dumb.

[seacoaster]

Here is Georgia's response to the Texas petition:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/ ... sition.pdf

Here is Wisconsin's response:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/ ... _Brief.pdf

Michigan:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/ ... 012-10.pdf

Pennsylvania:

https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/ ... .FINAL.pdf