Justice Thomas thought the SCOTUS should hear the election cases they had declined to intervene in back when it mattered. So did Justices Alito and Gorsuch.
See here, beginning at page 25.
CNN takes its swipe a Justice Thomas here. USA Today has a screed here.
Same theme. Same word, even: “baseless”
Has any word ever been so overused in modern times? But then it appears they have to overuse it, because the allegations of election fraud are so obviously not baseless. Which is not to say that they are necessarily everything the claimants claim them to be. But they could be. And that question has been systematically evaded by the courts and shouted down by – well, what shall we call it at this point? – the internet-media establishment.
The reality is that any country claiming to be a “democracy” and depending upon elections for governmental legitimacy is vulnerable to fraudsters of various stripes seeking to “game the system to win, every single time”, which gaming will frequently, if not inevitably, devolve into fraud. Most of the time the fraud won’t be “material”, in the sense that it won’t affect the outcome. And Justice Thomas appears to acknowledge in the very dissent he is now criticized for that it appears this was the situation in the very case under review from which he was dissenting.
We’ll say this again: claims of election fraud – both state and federal – are fairly common. They are frequently litigated. On rare occasions the litigation can overturn the initial result. Indeed, the election rules themselves amount to an acknowledgment that election fraud will occur without the safeguards of those rules. There is nothing inherently implausible about alleging election fraud, it is not undermining democracy to make such allegations, and even 500 trillion repetitions of the word “baseless” will not change that.
We truly have arrived at a strange moment. Not because the 2020 election was exceedingly strange and likely involved widespread fraud, because that can be dealt with in the ordinary course. Rather, it is the ruthless suppression of dissent by our establishment, the cynical confidence that they can shout down and mantra-over reality and that the populace will acquiesce.
Ugh.