To the heartbreak of millions of Americans who were hoping that the U.S. Supreme Court would give justice a fighting chance in the current fog of electoral war, seven of the nine members of the High Court simply slunk away last Friday without even lending an ear.
Approximately one week ago, shortly before midnight, the state of Texas filed a lawsuit directly with the high court.
In that suit, Texas challenged the election procedures that had taken place in the states of Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
The seven members of the high court, who took the position that Texas and the other co-plaintiff states would not be allowed to have their case heard, committed a fundamental error.
The justices may have been influenced by a slew of legal prognosticators, some of whom had taken to the Democratic-dominated media to ridicule the Texas attorney general for having initiated the action in the first place.
Others spread a message that conveyed an overly simplistic analysis, claiming that the process of selecting electors to send to the Electoral College is a matter that is handled by individual states, and therefore if a federal court, in this case the Supreme Court, were to hear it, the court would be intruding on state sovereignty.
The fact of the matter is the U.S. Constitution uniquely prescribes the manner in which presidential elections are to be implemented, and exactly where the authority for such implementation resides.
The authority is granted exclusively to the state legislatures of each respective state.
The high court has referred to this power to select electors as a "plenary" one, i.e., all encompassing.
The statehouses are given an exclusive grant of authority to determine the manner in which the states’ presidential electors are chosen.
This is a distinct and explicit constitutional mandate, a federal matter, appropriately decided in the federal court system and, if necessary, the court of last resort, the Supreme Court.
The textual constitutional language in this regard is specific and unambiguous, setting forth a singular authority that precludes state officials, state executives, and even state courts from altering or contradicting statehouses, when it comes to the selection of electors for the purposes of choosing the president of the United States.
The Constitution also specifies that the Supreme Court will have original jurisdiction over "disputes among the states," meaning that when Texas needs to adjudicate a matter involving a disagreement with another state (or states), the Supreme Court is the only place to go in order to seek resolution or remedies in law or equity.
Texas and its fellow co-plaintiff states were not questioning the election laws of the defendant states, but rather they were claiming that "non-legislative actors," i.e., governors, secretaries of state, election officials, and state courts, unconstitutionally altered and overrode the election laws that had been duly passed by state legislatures.
The threshold issue that was before the Supreme Court was whether the constitutional prescription for the selection of electors had been violated by non-legislative actors.
This was, and will always remain, central to the functioning of our republic, and it is a premise that is vitally important for all of the justices to recognize.
Seven simply did not.
These wayward seven failed to allow the case to move forward.
How were their decisions justified?
They avoided hearing the case on the merits, claiming that the prospective plaintiffs in the case lacked "standing."
Standing is the principle that limits the hearing of cases to those individuals or entities that demonstrate specific harm has been suffered or that a particular legal interest has been detrimentally affected.
The harm in this case is quite obvious — unconstitutional behavior that results in illegal voting in one state damages legitimate voting in other states.
In this case, electors in Texas were canceled out by electors in states where illegitimate votes were produced by unconstitutional processes.
A huge segment of the American population believes that the 2020 presidential election was illegitimate, due to alleged widespread and multifaceted fraud.
This huge population segment yearns for, and is entitled to, a judicial review of the mounting evidence.
Thus far, no determination with regard to the merits of the case has been made.
Similar, if not identical claims from other plaintiffs, ones that possess a stronger argument on the issue of standing, will arrive at the Supreme Court soon.
The seven members of the high court get another shot at justice.
James Hirsen, J.D., M.A., in media psychology, is a New York Times best-selling author, media analyst, and law professor. Visit Newsmax TV Hollywood. Read James Hirsen's Reports — More Here.
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