On Tuesday, the Supreme Court rejected an utterly deranged lawsuit that threatened the foundational American principle that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Moore v. Harper was the gravest threat to free and fair elections in the United States to arrive at the Court in decades. And, while Tuesday’s 6-3 decision leaves the door slightly ajar should a future Court wish to overturn a close election, it rejects more sweeping theories that could have rendered many American elections meaningless.
It is also the Court’s second decision defending the foundations of US democracy this month — a reassuring and slightly surprising turn after some of its decisions regarding voting rights and elections in the last few years.
Moore involved the awkwardly named “independent state legislature doctrine” (ISLD), a theory that the Supreme Court rejected many times over the course of more than a century. Yet this theory also started to gain steam as former President Donald Trump filled three seats on the Court with staunch conservatives.
The ISLD takes two lines from the Constitution concerning election administration and misleadingly argues that they mean a state’s legislative branch of government has effectively unchecked authority to decide how congressional and presidential elections will be conducted in their state.
Under the strongest version of the ISLD, any state constitutional provisions that protect the right to vote, that limit gerrymandering, or that otherwise constrain lawmakers’ ability to skew elections would cease to function. State governors would lose their ability to veto laws impacting federal elections. And state courts would lose their authority to strike down these laws.
No justice signed on to this extreme version of this quizzical legal theory — even Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissenting opinion conceded, for example, that a state governor may veto an election bill. But two justices — Thomas…
Read the full article here
