Don’t Mess With Texas, 3389

I’m still reporting on Texas.
The Texas lawsuit which has now been accepted by the Supreme Court is long, detailed and complicated. It’s likely to get more complex as more and more states join in the suit. Tonight, it was announced that 17 states have now joined, and by tomorrow, that could exceed 20 states.
At issue is Article II of the US Constitution, an article that had not gotten a lot of attention since Bush v. Gore in 2000. Article II states:
“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors…”
“In such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”
The lawsuit states this is a plenary power of the legislature and plenary means absolute which means no other branch of government not the executive and not the judicial has the authority to change anything the legislature decides about how to choose the electors.
In the first presidential elections, the state legislatures simply met and picked electors. Amazingly, there was no vote of the people and there is to this day nothing in the Constitution that gives individuals the right to vote for president.
The state legislatures have the complete and total authority to decide how those electors will be chosen and each state has slightly different rules about how to choose the electors for their state.
The Texas lawsuit states that Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, the four states that it is suing, violated this clause of the Constitution by holding elections that violated the statutes passed by the legislature on how the presidential election would be held.
The lawsuit notes that all of these decisions made by courts and election officials to change the election rules in these four states are in violation of the laws passed by the state legislatures, and all were made to favor presidential candidate Joe Biden.
According to the lawsuit, the elections held in those four states disenfranchised the voters in Texas, which held an election following the rules set by the legislature in a constitutional manner.
The lawsuit contains pages of information about how the elections were held in those four states that violated the Constitution because the rules established by the state legislatures were not followed. There is a lot of information about vote counts, lost ballots, questionable ballots, throwing the Republican poll observers out of the counting rooms, etc.
The legal issue of the constitutionality of the election in those states remains, regardless of the outcome of the election, and should be pursued to their conclusion regardless of their effects or non-effects on the 2020 election because this is at the root of American democracy – free and fair elections upon which the citizenry can rely.
Article II doesn’t allow any wiggle room. It doesn’t have a pandemic exception, it states “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct…”
The members of state legislatures were all aware of the pandemic. They were all aware that the election was going to be held during the pandemic and had the opportunity to make any adjustments the majority in each legislature agreed to make.
In some ways the Texas lawsuit boils down to a simple question, Does Article II mean what it clearly and explicitly states or can the Supreme Court find some hidden meaning that allows a judge or elections official to overrule the clear and unambiguous meaning of the Constitution.
If the Supreme Court throws out the results in those states because it finds the elections were unconstitutional, then the power to choose electors returns to the hands of the legislatures, where it has in fact always been and such a remedy is exactly as the Founders intended if such a situation as this ever came to pass in this nation. In other words, the ultimate authority rests in the hands of the elected officials who are closest to the general public – their state’s legislators.
This is the ultimate deconsolidation of power which the Founders tried to build into every aspect of our Constitution and my prediction is the Supremes will uphold it.
I’m still reporting from just outside the citadel of American freedom. Good day.