In October, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court took it upon itself to hold that mail-in ballots could arrive after Election Day if they were mailed on November 3 and, almost as if to ensure fraud, that those mail-in ballots without postmarks would be presumed to have been timely.  An eight-justice U.S. Supreme Court refused to consider the matter.  After the election, though, Justice Alito ordered that Pennsylvania segregate mail-in ballots, indicating further review.  Republicans duly filed a request for a review, and, on Tuesday, Pennsylvania filed its unimpressive opposition brief.

Pennsylvania's opening argument is that there's no way the Supreme Court should decide whether a state engaged in unconstitutional conduct in a federal election because doing so is just too big!

Shipwreckedcrew, whose legal analyses at RedState are always must-reads, correctly writes that this is an insulting argument:

While there are certainly different levels of historic significance when considering the role of the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, the Defendants seem to have lost sight of the fact that this is the institution which outlawed racial segregation in Brown v. Board of Education; recognized states' ability to regulate private enterprises in Munn v. Illinois; Congress could regulate the sale of commodities that never left a state as having an effect on "interstate commerce" in Wickard v. Filburn; refused to allow the government to use illegally seized evidence in a criminal prosecution in Mapp v. Ohio; etc.

The idea that the Supreme Court should shrink from making difficult choices in reaching a decision in a case before it due to the claim by Pennsylvania that no court has ever done this before is moronic.  Yes, it's never been done before.

Also yes — no State has ever conducted an election in a manner that violated the State's own Constitution.

The argument also fails because it's a variation of the "you can't disenfranchise Biden voters" fallacy that lies at the core of everything that the pro-Biden faction (which includes a lot of RINOS) asserts.  If you haven't read my post about the Texas lawsuit, let me repeat myself here — and even if you have read it, I'm going to repeat myself anyway because it's such an important point:

That is a singularly dishonest argument. Disenfranchisement occurs when people are deprived of the right to vote. No one was deprived here. What Trump is doing, with his request that every legal vote count, is asking that courts invalidate illegal votes. You cannot disenfranchise an illegal voter, whether that "voter" is dead, a computer algorithm, or a form filled out in a Chinese print shop.

Do you know what happens when you invalidate fraudulent votes and count only legal votes? You identify the winner and loser in an election, as has happened in America since 1792. Those who voted for the losing candidate were not disenfranchised; they just voted for the losing candidate.

Ensuring that an election is constitutionally and honestly conducted invalidates only votes that should not have been counted in the first place.  Conversely, allowing a corrupt election to go forward — which is what the Democrats are insisting happen so as not to "disrupt" their plans to take over the White House — invalidates the vote of every legitimate voter in America.

The risk of erasing legitimately cast votes is precisely the type of problem that a courageous Supreme Court should address.  There's nothing courageous about a court bowing before social pressure to announce imaginary rights to abortion or same-sex "marriage" in the Constitution.  However, in today's world, it does take courage to look at the Constitution's explicit language and conclude that elections most comport with that language to be legitimate.

In this case, the Constitution says that only state legislatures may write the rules by which states conduct both state and federal elections.  In Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court ignored this overriding constitutional requirement.

The Democrats behind the brief filed on Tuesday with the Supreme Court are now trying to argue that, back in 2019, the Pennsylvania Legislature passed a law that was meant to — even if it didn't — allow the kind of open-ended mail-in voting the state Supreme Court authorized.  There, they alleged started the process to amend the Pennsylvania Constitution in a way that would have retrofitted the law to mean what it doesn't say...except that they never amended the Constitution.

Intentions are not laws.  Unamended constitutions have no power.  The argument is gobbledygook.  One hopes the United States Supreme Court remembers that.

It's also imperative that the Court remembers that our country can continue to be the greatest democratic republic in the history of the world only if it abides by the Constitution and the duly enacted laws of Congress and the fifty states.  If the Supreme Court starts making exceptions because doing otherwise would upset actual Biden voters, along with all the dead people, fake people, and computer algorithms that allegedly put him in the White House, our great American experiment is dead.

Image: Supreme Court Z1 by Angela N.  Creative Commons.