As we all know, 2020 has been a hellscape. So it’s sweet to celebrate rare good news. We got some yesterday, in electorally-pivotal Pennsylvania, courtesy of a federal judge who smacked down Donald Trump even though he owes his job to Donald Trump.
The desperate Trump campaign, mindful that the deadly disease carrier faces potential humiliation 23 days hence, has been trying to make it tougher for Americans fearful of Covid to vote by mail. Their big play, in Pennsylvania, has been to argue in federal court that convenient mail-ballot drop boxes will be a magnet for massive voter fraud.
But yesterday, federal judge J. Nicholas Ranjan – nominated by Trump in 2018 and confirmed as part of Mitch McConnell’s mission to pack the federal courts with conservatives – consigned Trump’s lawsuit to the trash can, essentially saying that it had all the value of a three-dollar bill.
Trump has been whining since the spring about mail ballots, spewing various versions of this ridiculous lie: “Mail ballots – they cheat. OK? People cheat. There’s a lot of dishonesty going along with mail-in voting.” He’s rightly terrified that a tsunami-sized turnout, buoyed by mail ballots, will clinch his ouster and expose him to criminal prosecution. Hence his nationwide efforts to suppress the vote, despite his dearth of evidence that people will “cheat” en masse.
Judge Ranjan, over the summer, had asked Trump’s lawyers to substantiate their fear that convenient drop boxes would trigger massive voter fraud in Pennsylvania. Did Trump have any such evidence – for instance, from the states that already popularize mail voting and use drop boxes? Nope. As the judge pointed out in his ruling yesterday, Trump’s lawyers produced nothing – except a few random anecdotes, virtually none of which “is tied to individuals using drop boxes.”
The bottom line: Trump’s concerns, the judge wrote wryly, “are based solely on a chain of events that may never come to pass…It is almost impossible for (Trump) to present anything other than speculative evidence.”
Besides, the state’s election officials established the mail-ballot rules and approved the drop boxes, and “the job of an unelected federal judge isn’t to suggest election improvements, especially when those improvements contradict the reasoned judgment of democratically elected officials.” (That’s inadvertently funny, because the GOP has long raged about the unchecked power of “unelected judges.” Except for when they want “unelected judges” to do their bidding.)
Naturally, the Trump campaign will try to sustain its war against Pennsylvania’s drop boxes by appealing Ranjan’s ruling – witness this hilarious spin from a Trump lawyer: “President Trump is winning (?!) the fight for a free, fair election in Pennsylvania” – but what we got yesterday was further proof that Trump’s “voter fraud” scare tactic cannot stand up to scrutiny. Judge Ranjan didn’t even need to point out that numerous national studies have found zero evidence of massive voter fraud; nor did he need to note that Trump himself, in 2017, created a White House commission to investigate voter fraud, only to pull the plug in 2018 after it found virtually no evidence.
Perhaps if Trump had an upbeat record to run on – something better than presiding over 212,000 Covid deaths, infecting his own White House, and throwing tens of millions out of work – he wouldn’t need to keep trying to game the election in federal court. But it’s become more obvious, with each passing the day, that the guy who couldn’t even run a profitable casino is playing with an empty hand.
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I wish I had written this tweet, which is making the rounds:
“Trump supporters are threatening to leave the country if Biden wins? OK, find a country with no public healthcare that’s outlawed abortion and has easy access to guns. Afghanistan comes to mind. Pack a sweater.”