Supreme Court election law ruling heralded as a win for democracy. But it's not all good news.
The traumatic aftermath to the 2020 election has now produced a definitive response from both Congress and the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court’s ruling in an election law case Tuesday prompted many loud commendations from those who celebrated the majority-conservative court’s rejection of something called the independent state legislature theory (ISLT).
The theory argued by the North Carolina Legislature in Moore v. Harper — a dispute between the Legislature and the state Supreme Court over the redrawing of congressional maps — claims that the state courts should not have any role in constraining the Legislature when it comes to election law.
A ‘fringe’ theory
In a statement issued after the ruling, former President Barack Obama called ISLT a “fringe” theory that “threatened to upend our democracy and dismantle our system of checks and balances by giving state legislatures near-total control of federal election laws.”
“This ruling is a resounding rejection of the far-right theory that has been peddled by election deniers and extremists seeking to undermine our democracy,” Obama said.
Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA, said that the ISLT could have “paved the way for state legislatures to engage in election subversion.”
Republicans tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election following Donald Trump’s loss to Joe Biden, despite any evidence of widespread fraud or irregularities, which drove concerns about the ISLT and future elections. Some election experts, however, called these fears overblown.
“Those who worry about state legislative rejection of the presidential popular vote may be looking in the wrong direction,” wrote Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith, two constitutional law experts with extensive experience in government.
But conservative legal scholar J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, called the decision “a resounding and reverberating victory for American democracy.”
The ISLT, Luttig told Slate's Dahlia Lithwick, was "the centerpiece of the efforts to overturn the 2020 election."
Nonetheless, concerns about the ISLT extended beyond election subversion to how much impunity state legislatures would have to draw congressional districts without any oversight or check on their power.
Not all good news
But election experts like Hasen also said that while the 6-3 decision rejecting North Carolina Republicans’ attempt to give state legislatures almost total control of election law was a definitive win, they also cautioned that the decision had some bad news in it as well.
Chief Justice John Roberts, in his majority opinion, rejected the idea that state legislatures can do whatever they want, with no input from state courts.
But he also enshrined in legal precedent that the federal courts have a role in this process too, just as the Supreme Court intervened in the 2000 presidential election, handing the presidency to Republicans with its decision in Bush v. Gore.
“Make no mistake. This gives the U.S. Supreme Court the ultimate say over the meaning of state law in the midst of an election dispute. This is a bad, but not awful, result,” Hasen wrote.
“It could lead to another Supreme Court intervention in a presidential election,” he added.
A win for democracy
The traumatic aftermath to the 2020 election has now produced a definitive response from both Congress and the Supreme Court, insulating the nation from similar attempts to overturn elections in the future.
Congress last year passed significant reforms to the Electoral Count Act that make it much harder for politicians to discount legitimate votes of American citizens, or to try to overturn an election, as Trump and his allies attempted to do in 2020.
And the Supreme Court decision on Tuesday “strips away the foundation of G.O.P. arguments that the election was legally problematic because of state court interventions,” wrote New York Times columnist David French.
In this way, the ruling “dealt a blow” to Trump’s “coup theory,” he wrote.
The nonpartisan National Task Force on Election Crises put it this way: “The Court has reduced one of the more serious threats for instability and election crisis.”
