A panel of commentators and experts at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference criticized the Supreme Court and the judiciary more broadly for its failure to hear evidence of election fraud and other illegalities after the November election.
Dozens of legal cases were brought after the election, and many have yet to be resolved. Most of those that have been resolved were dismissed on procedural grounds without examining the merits of the cases, the panelists said.
The panel, assembled at the CPAC conservative conference, included attorney Jesse Binnall, who litigated some of the election issues, Hans Von Spakovsky, who heads the Election Law Reform Initiative at the conservative Heritage Foundation, Fox News contributor Deroy Murdock, and moderator Denise Cohen from the American Conservative Union Foundation, which runs CPAC.
Murdock said the Supreme Court, which has so far refused to hear evidence in the election cases, failed its duty.
“Imagine you’re watching Game 7 of the World Series, it’s the bottom of the ninth, teams are tied, bases are loaded, and the runner on third base tries to steal home” diving into home at the same time the catcher tries to tag him out.
“Everybody’s wondering, ‘Is he safe? Is he out?’ Everybody looks at the umpire. And the umpire goes, ‘Why are you looking at me? I don’t want to get involved.’ He turns around and walks out the door, all right?
“So what happens? ... The fans in the stands start to fight with each other and chaos ensues.”
The Feb. 26 panel was titled “Protecting Elections Part 2: Other Culprits: How Judges & Media Refused to Look at the Evidence.”
Von Spakovsky noted that in the past, the media would have jumped on the election fraud stories, assigning teams of reporters to get to the bottom of it. This time, however, the media did the opposite, going after the people who presented evidence, he said.
Binnall described how the Supreme Court of Nevada gave his team only two hours to file their appeal brief, a task that would normally take weeks, if not months. When they were able to put together a 40-page brief, the Supreme Court only took two hours to return a decision shooting the case down.
The decision included a false claim that the appeal failed to include specific parts of the court record where the lower court erred, Binnall said. This was proof that the Supreme Court wrote its opinion even before the appeal was filed, on an assumption the lawyers wouldn’t be able to complete the task on such short notice, he argued.
The panel came strongly against H.R.1, a House bill that would substantially relax election integrity measures. It would also largely federalize control of elections, which Murdock argued should be controlled by state legislatures, according to the Constitution.
The bill would ban voter ID laws and at the same time, mandate same-day voter registration. That would allow a person to go on Election Day to multiple polling places, register, and cast multiple votes under different names, Von Spakovsky said.
He called it “the most anti-democratic bill” he’s seen in his 20 years in Washington.
“If this goes through, all the garbage we saw last November is going to be baked into the U.S. Code,” Murdock said. He urged people to contact the media and legislators and “scream bloody hell” about the bill.
The conference dedicated the largest portion of its program to questions of election integrity, the principal concern of the conservative movement following the deluge of allegations of fraud and other illegalities in the 2020 election.
