Any legal basis on which Trump might claim fraud or personal injury from Nevada's relatively smooth conduct of this year's election would be pure partisan fantasy. Solidly supported by its top officials, any Supreme Court attack on the conduct of Nevada's election would have to derive from a full-frontal attack on vote by mail itself, one that could resonate throughout the swing states that are likely to decide the election.
That Trump himself votes by mail would be deemed as being of no consequence. The six right-wingers who now dominate the Court might choose to use this procedural challenge as a pretext by which the idea of mailing ballots to registered voters and counting them quickly and efficiently could be found to be somehow unworkable.
In other words, the Court would undermine virtually the entire basis of this year's voting. There would be just one clear beneficiary: Donald Trump.
It would be the clearest, most egregious partisan judicial attack on democracy since the founding of the republic.
But given the personnel now on the Court, it's an entirely possible outcome.
Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett have all been appointed by Trump. Along with Kavanaugh and Barrett, John Roberts was an active partisan in the infamous Bush v. Gore decision trashing the popular will in the 2000 election that enthroned George W. Bush despite his having lost the public vote. Clarence Thomas voted in favor of that decision from the bench. Hard-rightist Samuel Alito can be expected to join any decision meant to further the dictatorial powers of Donald Trump.
The SCOTUS trashing of deadline extensions in the various states did get a comeuppance in the case of Vermont, when Brett Kavanaugh was forced to correct an erroneous characterization of the state's rules and procedures. But its assault on equitable distribution of drop boxes, ID and witness requirements, the demand that ex-felons pay fines before being allowed to vote and other selective limitation of the franchise has been unrelenting.
Like Trump himself, the six SCOTUS rightists appear to have no moral or ethical qualms about undermining the will of the American public in an election based on democratic principles and practices.
How the public would react to the official sabotage of this year's election with no real legal basis remains to be seen.
But if the Court conjures some pretext to destroy Nevada's and other swing states' vote-by-mail systems by stopping the ballot counting and disqualifying ballots that arrive late, it will be 2000 all over again. It will replay Bush v. Gore, with which the SCOTUS majority and a disenfranchised American public is so familiar.
Doing that could render the 2020 election a smoldering ruin.
The question would then become: How would the public react to the dictatorial destruction of the last vestiges of U.S. democracy?
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