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The New Republic - I Don't Trust the Supreme Court With the 2024 Election
The New Republic - (archived: https://archive.ph/XN4o6 ) I Don’t Trust the Supreme Court With the 2024 Election
During his presidency, the high court’s conservatives proved to be resistant to the idea that
Donald Trump was their legal client. This year, that all changed.
Matt Ford
October 23, 2024
It’s impossible to say whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win the presidential election next month. Far more easy to predict is that there will be litigation after Election Day over the results. By one count, there have already been more than 130 legal challenges to election laws across two-thirds of the states. Trump and his allies are aggressively sowing doubt about the election results so that they can create fraudulent slates of electors to deadlock the Electoral College if he loses.
In some ways, the American electoral system is more resilient now to Trump’s malfeasance than it was four years ago. Democrats hold key gubernatorial and election offices in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, providing a backstop against GOP skullduggery. Congress passed a law after the chaos of the 2020 election to clarify the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Storming the Capitol to stop the count on January 6, 2025, will also be far more difficult with a Democratic president in the White House.
But there is one powerful actor in the presidential election that still keeps me up at night: the Supreme Court. I was fairly confident ahead of the 2020 election that the justices would not grossly intervene for Trump’s benefit. Indeed, they ultimately rejected MAGA litigation intended to throw out the results, wholesale. But the court’s rulings in Trump’s favor last term—first on disqualification under the Fourteenth Amendment and then on presidential immunity—mean I can’t make the same assumption this time.
For most of the Trump years, the Supreme Court did not show the former president any clear favoritism—by which I mean that its members did not rule in his favor in ways that did not reflect their general approach to the law. When the justices tossed a series of congressional subpoenas for Trump’s financial records in 2020, for example, it fit within the court’s general trend of insulating the executive branch from congressional scrutiny. That same day, they also allowed New York prosecutors to obtain those records with a grand jury subpoena, rejecting his sweeping arguments for immunity.
/snip
During his presidency, the high court’s conservatives proved to be resistant to the idea that
Donald Trump was their legal client. This year, that all changed.
Matt Ford
October 23, 2024
It’s impossible to say whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris will win the presidential election next month. Far more easy to predict is that there will be litigation after Election Day over the results. By one count, there have already been more than 130 legal challenges to election laws across two-thirds of the states. Trump and his allies are aggressively sowing doubt about the election results so that they can create fraudulent slates of electors to deadlock the Electoral College if he loses.
In some ways, the American electoral system is more resilient now to Trump’s malfeasance than it was four years ago. Democrats hold key gubernatorial and election offices in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, providing a backstop against GOP skullduggery. Congress passed a law after the chaos of the 2020 election to clarify the Electoral Count Act of 1887. Storming the Capitol to stop the count on January 6, 2025, will also be far more difficult with a Democratic president in the White House.
But there is one powerful actor in the presidential election that still keeps me up at night: the Supreme Court. I was fairly confident ahead of the 2020 election that the justices would not grossly intervene for Trump’s benefit. Indeed, they ultimately rejected MAGA litigation intended to throw out the results, wholesale. But the court’s rulings in Trump’s favor last term—first on disqualification under the Fourteenth Amendment and then on presidential immunity—mean I can’t make the same assumption this time.
For most of the Trump years, the Supreme Court did not show the former president any clear favoritism—by which I mean that its members did not rule in his favor in ways that did not reflect their general approach to the law. When the justices tossed a series of congressional subpoenas for Trump’s financial records in 2020, for example, it fit within the court’s general trend of insulating the executive branch from congressional scrutiny. That same day, they also allowed New York prosecutors to obtain those records with a grand jury subpoena, rejecting his sweeping arguments for immunity.
/snip
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