I think the SCOTUS/2020 election scenario that's far more likely than them handing Trump the election on sketchy grounds, is one where Trump tries to get them to do that but they slap it down, thus buying themselves a ton of legitimacy, allowing them to stave off packing...

...and also clearing the ground for them to do what the GOP long game has long hoped the federal judiciary will do....to strike down as unconstitutional any progressive legislation, no matter how big of a majority it passes by and is supported by.

I should say that at this point it seems like the more likely scenario is that Biden wins by a significant, unchallengeable majority. It seems unlikely (tho not impossible) that Trump will get in plausible spitting distance to justify a viable court challenge.

I don't think Roberts is the sort of judge who wants to be engaged in patently shady shenanigans. His whole career has been geared toward the moment when the SCOTUS can be a GOP-friendly check on an emergent, Demo majority flowing from the inexorable logic of demographic change.

Trump and his most rabid fans seem to be fantasizing about America becoming a failed state, but the conservatives on the SCOTUS are smart enough to recognize that this would not serve the interests of the constituency they're most concerned for.

I think Roberts is far more interested in protecting the legitimacy of the SCOTUS so it can play it's allotted, anti-democratic role in a future American politics where the GOP, until it can win more votes from non-whites, is a permanent minority party.

Anyway, this is just future tripping speculation. I do think, however, that the conservatives on the court are playing the long game & see Trump's efforts at institutional sabotage as ultimately self-defeating. And 2 be clear, I don't think this is a happy scenario for democracy.

I also worry that all of the attention people are putting on the idea that ACB is going to be the judge who hands Trump an illegitimate victory is underestimating the savvy of the Federalist Society and its judges.

They don't want to make the US a failed state. Their entire judicial philosophy revolves around the Scalia-like idea that it is the judiciary's role to make the federal government as small as possible, to be a negative check on majoritarian efforts to use the state to do good.

From the get go, this has been the historical mission of the SCOTUS (with the exception of the small window of the Warren/Thurgood Marshall court)...to be an anti-democratic check on ambitious majorities.

Trump and his minions have no conception of that historical context, but you can sure bet Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch, Alito, Thomas, and Barrett do. A right wing SCOTUS with legitimacy is the best the GOP can hope for looking ahead a decade or two. The smart ones know that.

The GOP has almost no positive legislative agenda anyway. Their entire ideology is almost pure negation. Once they lose the power to do that in the legislative and executive branch, they'll need a judiciary with popular legitimacy to continue that work of negation.

They know gun control bills, bills protecting access to reproductive choice, bills addressing climate change, and bills expanding health care are coming down the pike. But they needn't be too worried about them if they've got a 6-3 SCOTUS that can strike them down.

Don't forget that the primary conservative argument against many of Warren's plans (including the Never Trump conservatives) was that Warren can say whatever she wants, but what she wants is unconstitutional and the SCOTUS will say as much.

And while I dislike Mitch McConnell as much as 87% of my fellow Americans, he's no dummy. There's a reason why he's been minting new right wing judges in lieu of doing anything else. He's doin it like it's going out of style, cause he knows GOP legislators are going out of style.

And holy cow, can you imagine the headlines: CONSERVATIVE SCOTUS REJECTS TRUMP'S EFFORTS TO STEAL THE ELECTION. They could plausibly believe that this would buy them enough political capital to bat down anything remotely ambitious that a Biden administration might try to do.

Trump has now bought the GOP establishment everything they could have ever wanted in the form of a stacked federal judiciary. Why on earth should we think they'd risk undermining the legitimacy of the state just to give someone they know is a buffoon another 4 years?

From the perspective of GOP elites, the past 4 years have been gravy. They thought for sure they'd lose in 2016. And now they know they're going to lose, but it doesn't matter because Trump & McConnell bought them something far more valuable, a judicial Trump card, if you will.

This could all be completely misguided...but this nightmare scenario came to me as I was drifting off to sleep so I figured I'd toss it out there to see what folks thought.

Ok, returning in the morning to find that this has taken off more than I had expected. To clarify, this speculation is based on a) my background as a historian of the politics of the founding era and b) my more recently acquired background as a historian of modern conservatism.

I've read all of the same primary sources from the founding that your rank-and-file Federalist Society member has. I was also taught that stuff by Gordon Wood, a fave of Scalia and such people. So I think I understand their world view fairly well, tho I don't share it.

Here's a thread I did way back in 2017 on the GOP's judicial long game. It's their best political strategy for pursuing their deeply unpopular policy agenda. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/929749127407136768?s=20

Here's a thread on the sort of "originalist" thinking with wch conservative judges are quite familiar. The people who wrote the Constitution feared majoritarian democracy (which they associated with state legislatures). They designed SCOTUS as a check. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1012087560871407618?s=20

SCOTUS was an ingenious solution to a relatively new problem the US faced...how to create a check on the power of a government that is legitimized solely by popular sovereignty. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1013897982821871616?s=20

And here's a thread on a key underlying assumption behind much modern right wing jurisprudence--the idea that much of the post-New Deal federal government is basically unconstitutional on originalist grounds and should be deemed as such. https://twitter.com/SethCotlar/status/1017083607158906880?s=20

BTW, this is exactly the sort of scenario that Never Trumpers would LOVE. They get to live in a country kept artificially "center-right" by an unaccountable SCOTUS, but also a polity that enuf citizens will perceive as institutionally legit so as to forestall Trumpian chaos.

I also think people like Cruz, Rubio, and McConnell (and many other GOP Senators and reps who are only opportunistically Trumpian right now) would regard this as an optimal solution. They get to be the party of obstruction, AND they can outsource responsibility to the judiciary!