Two Wisconsin Democratic presidential electors are suing 10 Republicans who acted as fake electors for then-President Trump following the 2020 election.
Pre-emptive? No, reactionary.
Such a shame it’s come to this.
The great push back begins. Pin their ears back. Make them squirm in public.
I read it. They don’t have any damages. This is almost certain to get dismissed.
What are they asking for in their prayer for relief? It doesn’t sound like they are asking for much.
Dumb declaratory judgments that won’t actually resolve anything. Same on injunctive relief. Compensatory damages for the injuries they didn’t plead, plus punitive damages for the same non-existent injuries. The only thing that looks particularly viable to me is a statutory fine of up to $2,000 per fake elector, and that gets paid to the state.
Given all that’s gone down, it would seem that the Democratic Party should have an army of lawyers and legal scholars out there, pushing for criminal consequences and finding and supporting civil plaintiffs. It seems really quiet given what’s at stake.
That’s what prosecutors do. This is not Rudy/Sidney/Eastman freelance material.
The people who had actual, compensable injuries lawyered up long and sued Trump around about this time last year.
As @txlawyer mentions, without damages named, this looks like a washout of a suit. Summer Concepcion’s illustration of the nebulous goal of this lawsuit does no favors for the plaintiffs.
The Democrats argued the fake electors should face some accountability for their election steal scheme, hoping the lawsuit might help warn against disruption of the democratic process in future elections.
What might accountability look like? Perhaps wiser counsel could consider going after them with a clearly-defined claim of harm with real penalties.
My unrealistic fantasy is that a string of lawsuits like those the SPLC won against racist outfits will bankrupt these people into oblivion.
But look what Rudy/Sidney/Eastman were able to do. The took the country to the edge of a coup and helped convince millions of people that the election was stolen. I don’t understand why we don’t have a team like that on our side, except made up a real lawyers and scholars. What are we waiting for?
I got an “urgent” voicemail from Emanuel Cleaver announcing a live phone town hall to take place the following day. “You’ll get a call from this number tomorrow night. You’ll want to be on this call.” When I got the call, they announced the topic, “What Dems are doing to help with the cost of prescription drugs!”
It’s like the whole Democratic party is attempting to govern an alternate version of the US, one where the other party isn’t run by fascists and SCOTUS wasn’t overturning Roe.
But the SPLC had plaintiffs with actually cognizable damages – physical injuries, wrongful deaths, economic harms, etc. The closest these two plaintiffs claim is that their public reputations were harmed, which (a) probably isn’t true, and (b) isn’t going to get them anything other than actual economic damages, which they probably can’t prove. And as I have had to explain one more than one occasion, it is generally a very bad idea to make your reputation an issue in a lawsuit because the discovery from the other side testing that reputation is going to be used to uncover every questionable thing you’ve ever done from third grade to the present.
Bullshit performative lawsuits are bullshit, regardless of who files them - Nunes suing a fake cow, these Dems suing without any remedy at law.
They were able to imperil their licenses to practice. Other than that, they ain’t accomplished shit other than getting their client impeached twice.
Ummm, have you ever watched cable news? They’re well known and omnipresent. Hell, even Larry Tribe appears to have woken up and smelled the conspiracies to obstruct an official proceeding.
I was wondering - glad you read it and I didn’t have to.
In my opinion, while the relief being requested (The lawsuit seeks to disqualify the 10 Republicans from serving as electors again) more than damages will be an issue, I predict the case will be heard on the merits.
And yet, their client was acquitted both times by a deeply corrupt party that is poised to take both the House and the Senate in the midterms, put there by the millions of people who were convinced by them that the election was stolen. SCOTUS is signaling that it will allow states to reject any slate of electors with which they don’t agree, while it is chipping away at the laws put in place to safeguard free and fair elections.
It feels kind of obvious that our democracy is on the brink. I’m certainly not the only one saying it. As the only party that still believes in democracy, it seems we should be fighting with every tool - and creating new tools - to beat back this tsunami.
But I guess there’s nothing we can do preemptively, from a legal standpoint? We just have to watch it happen and hope the system that almost came crashing down a year ago will be able to withstand the better coordinated attack in 2024? Oh well.
“We should be just as shitty as the Republicans” is not a philosophy I have any interest in embracing. Bye.
What is wrong with you? At what point did I suggest that we should be as shitty as Republicans? Fyi, using your law degree to be an arrogant asshole to people who are trying to have a conversation with you is actually exactly what a Republican would do. So yeah. Bye.
While there is some merit to this position, it is also true that you should not play by the Marques of Queensburry rules when you are getting kicked in the groin.
Look at it this way, the game is politics and not law. Law may be a tool to win the game of politics, but winning or losing a particular case is not what this is all about.
And yet what’s under discussion is having a bunch of lawyers do law shit. Which is already what they’re doing. Shebus.