The Texas Suit Against Pennsylvania Is a Fight for the Constitution
Before the 2020 election, there was a lot of talk of how to conduct an election during a pandemic, and how to best allow for those who wish to vote, the opportunity to engage in their sacred voting rights. Multiple states took the appropriate course of action to pass laws to encourage people to vote by mail. That course of action required legislative action, with the various states’ legislatures passing legislation that was signed into law by the governors of these states. Anyone that has a beef with any state that expanded mail voting rights by the proper course, should not because the appropriate Constitutional process was followed. Where most people call foul, is when the Executives within the states, dismissed that process to order those mail expansions.
The law states that rules for elections must be determined by the legislatures of those states. The idea that any one person or group of persons, which isn’t a legislature, determining rules for an election, is in itself unconstitutional and denies the rights of voters from other states that do comply with the Constitutional process. If Texas and any of the other states joining the case through Amicus Briefings, were all able to comply with the process to allow for the mail vote to be conducted safely and transparently, why were Pennsylvania and many of these other states, not able to?
It isn’t that those states universally expanded those rights but some of those states and counties within those states moved to a universal mail ballot, which sent ballots to those who did not request them and then allowed for anyone, absent identification, to return those ballots. In Pennsylvania, the Constitutional process was ignored not once, but twice, with executives changing election rules, and the courts legislating from the bench. Furthermore, Pennsylvania also ignored an order from SCOTUS to separate mail ballots which came after a certain deadline and then essentially destroyed the evidence relating to the return of those ballots to prevent those ballots from being separated later.
What Pennsylvania and other states did, was deny their own citizens the Constitutional protections and the separation of powers that prevent this sort of abuse from occurring. While those executives within these states would argue that their abuse of power was “in the best interest of those who wanted to vote by mail” the argument should have been made to the legislatures within these states and not to the court of public opinion. Additionally, had Constitutional measures been taken to allow for people to request ballots who wanted them, not many would have complained about it.
Texas’s complaint is simple: There’s a process to our government and our elections. Those processes should have been followed and accounted for throughout the 2020 elections and if they were not, any ballots cast under those unconstitutional actions should be invalidated. If most other states were able to conduct elections based upon our Constitutional government, then there shouldn’t be an exception, for any supposed reason which those states could argue. Our nation’s health through the Constitutional process is more important than the physical health of any person or group of persons.
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