July 1, 2023

New York University (NYU) Law professor Rick Pildes, among a partisan academic group including NYU Law’s Bob Bauer, who worked for the Obama administration, wrote a guest essay in the New York Times recently where he opines on the SCOTUS decision over state voting procedures.  In doing so, he adds to the long list of law school professors who are deliberately misleading the public.

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There are some formal issues to consider in this case, including the Court’s dissent by Justices Clarence Thomas and others, and the concept of “mootness,” but I’d like to leave those technical and law factors to others, and focus on what Pildes does in his NYT essay: deliberately twist the law in order to serve the DNC, and by so doing, abandon law’s professional standards.

Pildes tries to convince the public that the Supreme Court has laid the groundwork for “turmoil” in the 2024 election cycle. That is a rich hypocrisy, given the 2020 election corruption by the DNC that he and his colleagues on the Left either aided, sanctioned, or ignored.

Recall what actually happened in 2020: COVID was used as a pretext to go into states with legal teams hired by the DNC (largely directed by political strategy law firm Perkins Coie) to intimidate judges by asserting an “emergency” which necessitated a sudden, and undisclosed, change in voting procedures. A chorus of law professors, such as Berkeley Law dean Erwin Chemerinsky, provided a nearly nonstop running media narrative, asserting that exceptions to nearly all voting rules needed to be suddenly accepted, due to the “dangers” of showing up at a voting station in person, or being burdened with restrictions on voting time and place, or even to provide proof of voter eligibility.  COVID was used to completely bypass the Constitution.

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A strange thing about the NYU law professor’s argument is that he suddenly criticizes legal ambiguity, and fears that vague language will make voting rules set by legislature harder to challenge, while exposing the court to endless accusations of overstepping its authority.

This is quite a leap in constitutional doctrine: But the law professor wants to have his cake and eat it too: vague legal language serves him just fine when the issue may be legal “workaround” ploys in voting policy, but for the federally centralized voting authority that the Left craves, it puts them in a position of disadvantage: the Left is really bad at explaining its political rationale, or justifying its authoritarian impulses. It prefers using courts to simply make rules, and public consent be damned.

The centerpiece however, of Pildes’ legal disingenuousness is when he brings up Wisconsin:

“For illustrative purposes, let’s say in 2024 the Wisconsin state legislature passes a law establishing deadlines for requesting or returning absentee ballots, but a state court rules those deadlines unconstitutional because they contradict the state constitution’s guarantee of the right to vote. The losing party will now turn to the federal courts and argue that the state court has gone “too far” in its interpretation of the state constitution.”

Readers may remember that Wisconsin was one of the most corrupted states in 2020 (where a number of NY DNC-affiliated lawyers parachuted into towns in order to “oversee” voting and counting).  DNC operations created just enough time and uncertainty in ballot collection and counting, to deny Trump its electoral votes. 

Indeed, the Wisconsin chief justice at the time, Patience D. Roggensack, wrote one of the most insightful, damning dissents in Wisconsin legal history when she put her finger on what was allowed to happen in her state, in Trump v. Biden, et al: “Four justices on this court cannot be bothered with addressing what the statutes require to assure that absentee ballots are lawfully cast.”