A whole lot of wrong

While I would not count my money will sitting at this particular table, there’s reason for optimism that the Supreme Court will not go Full Fash in Moore v. Harper. As Sotomayor noted near the outset, the “independent state legislature” theory goes beyond “law office history” well into “making stuff up out of whole cloth”:

More importantly, ACB — the swing vote in this case — followed this exchange up by “piggybacking” on Sotomayor’s point rather than trying to rescue the Lawless Thompson Gunner.

I cannot deny that Friend of the Blog Neal Katyal — making a rare appearanc as a liberal in practice as well as in theory — really had it today:

The fact that the justices asserting that almost everybody has been wrong over a period of more than 200 years to not give an absolutely nonsensically literal reading of a constitutional phrase call themselves “originalists” is one of the dark ironies of our time.

And I really mean “nonsensical.” They can’t stick with their own literalism themselves because the logic collapses instantly. It exists solely for the purpose of stopping state courts from ending Republican gerrymanders:

I also enjoyed this bit from Bloody Sam:

Using “what if state courts were as powerful and unaccountable as federal courts” as a bottom of a slippery slope is a hell of a thing from a justice urging that huge amounts of state law be thrust aside based completely incoherent nonsense. In another exchange, Gorsuch laments state courts who exercise judicial review based on “open-ended” constitutional provisions. This level of self-parody would be funny if these people weren’t so powerful. Hopefully at least this time it’s just too much.