MSM in all its glory...
Dissent by Justice Thomas in election case draws fire for revisiting baseless Trump fraud claims
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivers a keynote speech during a dedication of Georgia new Nathan Deal Judicial Center Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020, in Atlanta.
John Fritze
Mon, February 22, 2021, 4:37 PM
WASHINGTON – A blistering dissent in a
high-profile election case written by Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas prompted blowback Monday from Democrats who accused one of the court's most conservative members of embracing baseless claims of voter fraud promoted by President
Donald Trump after the November election.
In an
11-page dissent from the court's decision not to take up a challenge to the expanded use of mail ballots in Pennsylvania, Thomas acknowledged that the outcome of the election was not changed by the way votes were cast in the battleground state. But he raised questions about the reliability of mail-in voting that echoed many of the same arguments Trump raised in the weeks before and after the election.
Fact check: What's true about the 2020 election, vote counting, Electoral College
The dissent followed the court's decision Monday to turn away a challenge to accommodations the Pennsylvania state Supreme Court made for mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic. The state, one of a handful of tossups that ultimately led to the election of President Joe Biden, allowed absentee ballots to be received up to three days after Election Day, even in cases where those ballots
did not have a clear Nov. 3 postmark.
Scroll back up to restore default view.
In the end, despite the partisan rancor over the issue and a bevy of lawsuits, there were too few ballots at issue to make a difference in the outcome in the Keystone State. But Thomas and two other conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, said the legal questions should have been taken up by the high court to guide future elections.
"That decision to rewrite the rules seems to have affected too few ballots to change the outcome," Thomas wrote. "But that may well not be the case in the future."
More: Supreme Court won't hear 2020 election case questioning Pennsylvania ballots
But much of the pushback against Thomas was focused on another argument of his dissent in which he appeared to cast doubt on the reliability of mail-in ballots more broadly. Thomas pointed specifically to a case of fraud from the 1990s in a state Senate election in Philadelphia. In a footnote, he asserted that "an election free from strong evidence of systemic fraud is not alone sufficient for election confidence."
"Also important is the assurance that fraud will not go undetected," he wrote.
Critics said Thomas' argument played into an idea espoused by Trump and others that fraud
could have existed, even though the former president did not ever prove it. Groups such as the Brennan Center for Justice have found voter fraud is exceedingly rare.
"None of us should be shocked that Justice Thomas would write an out of touch, radical & unhinged opinion," the chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Jaime Harrison, tweeted. "He and his wife showed us who they were a very long time ago."
Harrison's response was in part a reference to a report this month that
Virginia Thomas, a conservative activist and the justice's wife, apologized to her husband’s former law clerks for posting a series of messages supporting Trump's claims of fraud. Thomas has declined to comment on his wife's apology or her earlier pro-Trump statements.
More: Ginni Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, apologizes for pro-Trump remarks
Trump's weekslong assault on the election results, which came without evidence of problems on a scale that could have changed the result, culminated in a riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 in which a mob of the president's supporters disrupted the counting of Electoral College votes. The riot resulted in five deaths and a second Trump impeachment.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delivers a keynote speech during a dedication of Georgia new Nathan Deal Judicial Center Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2020, in Atlanta.
"You don’t have to be a prosecutor to understand how ludicrous Justice Thomas’ dissent is," tweeted Rep. Ted Lieu, D-Calif., noting a conspiracy theory raised by some of Trump's attorneys that Venezuelan socialists hand a hand in helping Biden win.
"Fraud requires a perpetrator; that’s why Trump folks came up with Hugo Chavez," Lieu said. "Otherwise you’re saying over 7 million uncoordinated voters figured out how to commit voter fraud undetected."
Thomas, nominated by President George H.W. Bush in 1991, argued in his dissent that the questions raised in Pennsylvania should have been heard by the Supreme Court because they could come up again in future elections. Republicans say the extension for receiving mail-in ballots was never approved by the state legislature and was allowed by courts that relied on a vague provision of state law requiring elections to be "free and equal."
An evenly
divided Supreme Court allowed the deadline extension to stand in October. At the time, the court still had a vacancy following the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The tie meant the state court decision stood. Republicans returned to the court again days later – this time after Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a Trump nominee had been confirmed. But Barrett did not take part in the review, and the court denied a motion to expedite the case, noting that the election was at that point only days away.