The vote at 6-3 wasn’t close…..
An Republican effort to essentially have 50 different rules for House, Senate and Presidential Election has gone down in flames…..
The ruling follows two other ruling’s by the court that have thrown out seperate cases where Red state lawnakers tried to draw House districts that would have cut minority voting power…
NY Times….
The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a legal theory that would have radically reshaped how federal elections are conducted by giving state legislatures largely unchecked power to set all sorts of rules for federal elections and to draw congressional maps warped by partisan gerrymandering.
The vote was 6 to 3, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. writing the majority opinion. The Constitution, he said, “does not exempt state legislatures from the ordinary constraints imposed by state law.”
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch dissented.
The case concerned the “independent state legislature” theory. The doctrine is based on a reading of the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which says, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”
Proponents of the strongest form of the theory say this means that no other organs of state government — not courts, not governors, not election administrators, not independent commissions — can alter a legislature’s actions on federal elections….
Washington Post…
Under the theory advanced by North Carolina’s Republican legislative leaders, but rejected by the court, state lawmakers throughout the country would have had exclusive authority to structure federal elections, subject only to intervention by Congress….
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If the ruling had gone the other way, the case could have had a major influence on results in the 2024 election. It has drawn attention in part because of the nation’s polarized politics, in which former president Donald Trump and his allies are still advocating to overturn the 2020 election, and the midterms showed that control of Congress can depend on the drawing of congressional district lines.
“In its most extreme form, the Independent State Legislature Theory could have weakened the foundation of our democracy, removing a crucial check on state legislatures and making it easier for rogue legislators to enact policies that suppress voters and subvert elections without adequate oversight from state courts,” Abha Khanna, a lawyer who represented plaintiffs, said in a statement. “We are incredibly relieved that the Supreme Court decisively rejected this dangerous theory.”…
Update*….
It appears the Supreme Court ruling in the above case closes the door on Trump’s effort to get state lawmaklers to CHANGE the elector’s they have for the electoral college form the vote representation….
The Supreme Court’s rejection of a controversial election theory may also have another huge political consequence for future presidential contests: It obliterated the dubious fake elector scheme that Donald Trump deployed in his failed attempt to seize a second term.
That scheme relied on friendly state legislatures appointing “alternate” slates of pro-Trump presidential electors — even if state laws certified victory for Joe Biden. Backed by fringe theories crafted by attorneys like John Eastman, Trump contended that state legislatures could unilaterally reverse the outcome and override their own laws and constitutions to do so….
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….by rejecting the so-called independent state legislature theory in Moore v. Harper on Tuesday, Chief Justice Roberts effectively extinguished it as a plausible path in 2024 and beyond.
“It keeps the toothpaste in the tube, in the sense that the theories that would give state legislatures unvarnished power has been rejected,” said Ben Ginsberg, a prominent Republican elections attorney who loudly pushed back against Trump’s attempts in 2020 to overturn his loss. “State legislatures thinking that they can just, if they feel like it after an election, replace the popular will with a slate of electors is as gone as ‘there can’t be any review of redistricting plans.’”….