BLUE WAVE OR SKARI LAKE?
November 5, 2022 -Durt Fibo

The wreck of American democracy is 3 days from reaching shore. Women registering as Democrats have been surging since the Supreme Ayatollahs ruled on Dobbs (Roe v. Wade), but they must catch up with the number of those who grew into Maga-mushrooms since 2000. Will it work? Blue Waves are better that Skari Lakes, but who will honor votes? Roughly 300 Republican candidates who’ve publicly doubted Biden’s win are running for every position, from the lowest to the highest, in the Nov. 8 midterm elections. Why do they bother campaigning? Because these K-mart-quality candidates have been groomed promoted and packed with PAC money to engineer the futility of voting. They may have the credibility of cracked manikins, but they are nonetheless the pawns of the “one dollar, one vote” clubs arranging to checkmate any genuine electoral processes.

Many totalitarian states initially gained power in elections, just so that they could then eliminate them in future civic life. In America just now some of the hollowheads glued to their podiums have taken to exposing this secret aloud, with some, like Wisconsin’s Tim Michels (“Republicans will never lose another election in Wisconsin after I’m elected governor” to Arizona’s Kari Lake (“I’m going to win the election and I’m going to accept that result”) articulating the tactic, while they and others speak of rejecting and selection electors at their whim (those positioning themselves for Governors, Secretaries of State, Attorneys General and now “constitutional Sheriffs”). On the county level, those clutching any vague title have and will refuse to certify valid results; election officials and volunteers have and will be harassed into fleeing their jobs, and Jim Crow vigilantes have spilled over from the photos of history to the streets of today. In their daily endeavors, these political types both in and out of office stagger and stomp, cheering on violence like slobbering drunks at some jackass roadhouse.

As the 2020 Biden presidential win plunged Trump into a cesspit of a what we might politely call ‘Small Time Lawyers With Big Ass Problems’ one of the floaters –John Eastman– took up the desperate notion of the “Independent State Legislature Theory,” which he continued to fling across the nation for 17 months. Of note is that Eastman never received the advance presidential pardon he requested, and that the ISL is always shackled to the qualifier: “theory.”

But this excrescence also bobbed up to the Supreme Court. In the published words of New Yorker staff writer Jane Mayer: “John Eastman and both Clarence and Ginni Thomas are old friends.” The ancient ideals of “friendship” have driven the world forwards in many salubrious aspects, but this doesn’t smell like one of those instances. The legal fraternity has generally laughed off the ISL theory, but with Eastman’s encouragement, it has uncannily been accepted into the Supreme Court docket and will uncoil there in oral form this December 7.

The US Constitution’s Elections Clause delegates to states the power to regulate federal elections while giving Congress the overriding authority to make or alter such laws. The ISL argument (to be heard as Moore v. Harper), claims that same clause gives state legislators near-exclusive authority to regulate federal elections while prohibiting any other state entity (state courts, governors, et al) from engaging in any checks or balances on that power. As summarized by the Brennan Center for Justice: “In Moore v. Harper, the Supreme Court will decide whether the North Carolina Supreme Court has the power to strike down the legislature’s illegally gerrymandered congressional map for violating the North Carolina Constitution.” (the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled the mapping “unconstitutional beyond a reasonable doubt”). The gerrymanderers are panting that the “theory” licenses them to violate their own state constitutions, leaving no one with any power to stop them.

“Debunked” is the designation given to ISL theory by the Brennan Center and most legal writers. Yet the altruism of the Supreme Court is even lower than that, and it is feared that the Ayatollahs will find some hallucinatory pretext to let it pass. This will, of course, open new highways so that the nation’s voters will be left with no state or federal court redress to undo calculated gerrymandering, ignoring regulations, invalidating referendums, knotting voting procedures, violating civic and personal privacy, or almost any part of life in America. As ISL is in fact a component of the previously avoided fake electors scheme (Eastman again), the upcoming ruling could easily be used to mold the 2024 presidential election.