The Supreme Court on Friday night essentially told Texas to stay in its lane, and the rule of law has thus been reconfirmed.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton had urged the court to throw out the apparent election results from four states that President Trump lost relatively narrowly to Joe Biden. He laid out a host of explanations for why he thought fraud and error had occurred in those states to an extent greater than Biden’s margin of victory. Some of those allegations had a certain plausibility, while others were absurd.
On the merits alone, many legal analysts, quite convincingly, thought those arguments lacked enough proof to justify the extreme remedy sought by Texas, which was to keep those states’ certified electors from participating in Monday’s Electoral College vote. Quite rightly, though, the high court never even considered the merits, or lack, of those allegations. It also felt no obligation to weigh in on the appropriateness of the main remedies sought, including whether any time limits had already passed.
Instead, the court slapped down Texas on a basic threshold legal question. The justices wrote that Texas lacked legal “standing” to file such a bill of complaint in the first place. The single substantive sentence of explanation was almost brutal in its directness: “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”
Although this seems to be mainly a procedural slapdown, it actually was substantive. Apart from the rest of Texas’s smokescreen, its central legal argument really was about “standing” itself: Does a law officer for one state, on behalf of its citizens, have a legitimate constitutional right to insist that another state failed to follow that other state’s own election laws properly?
The answer is, “of course not.” The judiciary cannot recognize such an interest. To do so would undermine the very constitutional structure itself. Principles of federalism apply: Each state is sovereign over its own election processes. If Michigan sued Texas the way Texas was suing Michigan and the other three states, Texans would respond with hot fury. Rightly so.
Seven of the nine justices, including Trump’s own three appointees, agreed entirely that Texas lacked standing. Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas wrote three sentences separately to make a narrow distinction about whether to grant Texas leave to file the case before smacking it down, but the distinction was indeed technical. They said they would have granted no other relief — which means not even any temporary relief, such as an injunction. In sum, not even Alito and Thomas offered a silver lining for Texas and Trump, but at best offered the thinnest overleaf of pewter.
Every other state attorney general and all 120-plus House members who filed or co-signed amicus briefs supporting Texas should be ashamed. What Texas attempted was radical and, frankly, dangerous. Even if the presidential election had been hopelessly compromised by fraud and error, Texas’s attempt to “correct” it was the horribly wrong case, for the wrong reasons, asking for wildly inappropriate remedies. The Constitution grants no standing for such a radical assault on our government’s federal structure.
