What do you call this anyway?

I still can’t get over how gobsmacking the Trump lawsuits in Pennsylvania have been. It’s hard to believe they thought they could actually get away with the arguments they’re making. Here’s a review of the most recent smack down from the State Supreme court’s ruling yesterday.

Justices on the state high court ruled unanimously late Saturday that Republican petitioners waited too long to file their suit challenging Act 77, the 2019 law that established universal mail voting in Pennsylvania. Trump allies had asked the court to invalidate all votes cast by mail in the most recent election or direct the majority-Republican legislature to choose a slate of presidential electors. The ruling with prejudice means that the plaintiffs are barred from bringing another action on the same claim.

The court’s written order called the latter option “extraordinary,” noting that it would disenfranchise 6.9 million voters.

“The want of due diligence demonstrated in this matter is unmistakable,” the justices wrote, noting that the lawsuit was filed “more than one year” after no-excuse mail voting was enacted in Pennsylvania. The order blamed petitioners for a “complete failure to act with due diligence in commencing their facial constitutional challenge, which was ascertainable upon Act 77’s enactment.”

Concurring, Justice David N. Wecht noted that the GOP petitioners “failed to allege that even a single mail-in ballot was fraudulently cast or counted.”

This follows the Friday ruling from the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals where Trump appointed justices looked at the case and in essence asked “what the hell is this thing??”

The Trump lawyers aren’t even alleging fraud. Oh, they might be suggesting that strongly and pounding on the tables about it at their publicity tour “hearings” in the conference room of a moderately priced hotel in Gettysburg. But they won’t make that accusation with evidence in court. And why is that? It’s because there is no evidence of fraud or unequal treatment of poll watchers. They’d have to provide proof and witnesses and signed affidavits. And Giuliani and Ellis have none of that. All they can do is present lies. They know it. The judges know it. It’s all written in the rulings. Don’t come into court crying fraud without evidence and don’t present evidence that isn’t evidence of fraud. Capisce?

So, Giuliani and Ellis are not claiming Fraud that isn’t fraud. No, it’s weirder than that. They are claiming that because a few counties in PA allowed voters to cure their ballots but other counties did not allow that, that voters were treated unequally. Secondly, they just don’t like mail in ballots so ALL of the ballots in PA have to be thrown out.

I can’t wrap my head around this. It’s hard to believe that even the most hardened Trumper believes that all 6.9 million votes cast in PA have to be thrown out because some of them arrived through the mail. You don’t see this kind of crap happening in Seattle. Oh, that’s right, Washington doesn’t have a possibly persuadable Republican legislature. I guess Trump just assumes that Republican legislative bodies are stupid or corruptible or both.

Meanwhile, the massive tons of evidence of fraud that Trump and his lawyers swears went on here, where is it? Just because you call a press briefing and sit on a tiny chair behind a tiny desk and whinge for 35 minutes that somebody spit in your cereal doesn’t make it true. There will always be a certain number of people in your audience that might believe you. But the rest of us will be surprised that you know just how many ways there are to fraudulently hack a voting machine.

Luckily for PA, our voting machines now have paper trails unlike in 2016. And the Republican legislature passed a bill in 2019 to allow mail in ballots, which are the very definition of paper trails.

As the state Supreme Court notes in this ruling, the Trump campaign could have objected to the legislation before the election. It didn’t. It just made delivering the ballots to the board of elections more difficult by slowing down the mail and limiting drop boxes and narrowing the window of time for the ballots to be received and counted and reported. It tried every trick in the book to make mail in balloting hard to do but they didn’t try to lobby the legislature to revoke the mail in ballot process that was approved in 2019. And they probably didn’t try to do that because even if the revocation could get past the legislature, it was likely to be vetoed by the Democratic governor.

So, this is what they’re left with, pounding the table, making up stories about fraud and asking courts to just chuck 6.9 million votes because Trump wants it.

Words fail me.