The significance of Monday’s Supreme Court rulings

www.americanthinker.com

On Monday, the Supreme Court refused to dismiss a jury’s 2023 finding in a defamation trial that Donald Trump sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, a longtime advice columnist and former talk show host, in a dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store across from Trump Tower in Manhattan circa 1996, and for defaming her when he denied her claim before the trial, with the $5 million awarded her still in force.

Of less interest is how Trump’s lawyer tried to get the finding dismissed, in part by challenging the judge’s decision to allow at trial evidence of other alleged encounters with women Trump had had. Of more interest is that Carroll waited decades to report — in a sales-generating book, no less — the alleged incident until Trump was president, with the statute of limitations for the suit changed by New York State after the fact specifically to Get Trump. The suit had no real corroborating evidence, with facts changing as Carroll got caught out on discrepancies and her story eerily and uncannily matching the role-playing fantasy of a character in a Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode.

In other words, sane people like you and me would toss the claim, along with Christine Blasey Ford’s story that Brett Kavanaugh was a rapacious sex fiend unfit to serve on the Supreme Court, to the trash heap of history. But that’s not the way it works. Trump still owes Carroll the $5 million and, as of now, another $83 million from a second defamation trial after Trump complained about the first verdict.

In another decision the very same day, the Supreme Court ruled that Mississippi can, as it had been doing, count ballots received up to five days after Election Day so long as they are postmarked by Election Day. In other words, there’s nothing inherently wrong with counting ballots received after Election Day — an invitation for election fraud, the kind of which we may well have witnessed recently. Furthermore, combining the implications of that ruling with the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is getting ever closer to passing, would mean that all such states party to the compact (like California and New York) could keep gathering ballots well after Election Day until they tilt the national popular vote for president in the Democrats’ favor, altering the national outcome, at which time we’ll find the Supreme Court unwilling to get its hands dirty investigating election fraud, which is hard to prove anyway.

Even assuming the Republican nominee clears that hurdle, a possibly bankrupting multimillion-dollar defamation suit, no matter how ludicrous, awaits him in an unfavorable venue.

W.A. Eliot is a pseudonym.

Image via Picryl.