Our Ruling Elite and The Regime (Part III)

Lawfare and election rigging by the ruling elite in 2020 and 2024.

This is the final installment in this three-part essay. Read part I and part II for more about the regime’s parts and its origins. 

Hacking the Adversarial System

The ruling elite uses lawfare with impressive efficacy. From radicalizing cultural and sexual norms to rigging elections, the ruling elite’s big law mandarins have mastered the art of manipulating the legal system by exploiting its operating assumptions. By doing so, they have transformed the legal system from an effective mechanism for identifying the truth into an instrument for exercising arbitrary power. This is known as “lawfare.”

There are various types of lawfare. They range from cynical attempts to disbar attorneys who pursue anti-regime legal actions, to bogus defamation lawsuits, to suits to overturn ancient moral norms, to coordinated assaults on state election laws. All are perversions of the legal system and all threaten the integrity of our republic.

In this article, I’ll describe the primary lawfare technique deployed in 2020 to rig our national election by inverting the adversarial process. Specifically, I describe the impressive and successful efforts by regime apparatchik Marc Elias to subvert state election laws and Article 1, Section 4, Clause 1, which grants to the state legislatures the responsibility for “prescribing the time, place, and manner of elections.”

Adversarial Inversion Lawfare

The American legal system operates on the assumption that the truth will emerge through an adversarial process. This process pits interested parties against one another, requires them to present facts and arguments, and mediates it all with the rules of evidence and courtroom procedure. These rules are intended to reduce unreliable evidence or unfairness. In theory, the truth emerges from this rule-mediated struggle.

Critically, the adversarial process presumes that the various advocates will not be impartial–that they will zealously advance their respective interests. This is the opposite of the European inquisitorial systems, which assume that the search for truth is best facilitated by an impartial inquiry. Our system requires partiality in the parties and expects impartiality only from the judges. 

To make a software analogy, the legal system expects as inputs a real dispute and parties actually in opposition. Its subroutines are the rules of evidence and courtroom procedure which operate to adjudicate the dispute. And its output is the resolution of the dispute that results from the applications of the subroutines. It then stamps the output with the majesty and force of law. In short, a court’s orders are enforced through raw power because its procedures (subroutines) are grounded in principle, and it has authentic inputs (true dispute and true parties) as opposed to garbage. To put it differently, our system requires that the parties to a legal dispute oppose one another. 

It hardly would have occurred to our common law ancestors that the opposed parties might actually be on the same side of an issue. The idea would have been preposterous. But with time clever lawyers realized they could manipulate the system to their advantage: where honest people saw a well-functioning legal system, early and mid-century progressives saw an opportunity. They realized that if they could position themselves on both sides of a so-called dispute then they could maneuver a court into advancing their cultural or political interests under the apparent but false guise of resolving a true legal dispute. That is, they could use the truth-seeking and dispute resolution functions of the legal system to advance their power. 

As we’ll see below, the ‘adversarial inversion’ form of lawfare redirects the truth-seeking process of the adversarial system by aligning the interests of the plaintiff and defendant. It is, in effect, a software hack. By submitting inputs the legal system does not expect (parties who are not true disputants), the practitioners of this form of lawfare can transform the legal system’s output from a court order designed to compensate a truly injured plaintiff into one that empowers a corrupt and cunning elite. Continuing the software analogy: garbage in, garbage out. 

When deployed at scale, the result is first the erosion and then the collapse of public respect for the rule of law. A system can tolerate only so much corruption. Today, we are either very near or at that catastrophic inflection point. Once we cross it, respect for the rule of law will collapse. 

Lawfare in Practice

Long before the ruling elite rigged the 2020 election, lawfare was quite simple. Progressives experimented with different forms of inchoate lawfare. They began taking advantage of lowly and pitiful people by harnessing their misfortunes to progressive social causes, as with Jane Roe, described below. Later, they discovered that lawfare worked best when they arranged to put “their” allies in the role of both “plaintiff” and “defendant”–a feat they accomplished by targeting a law that impeded their political or cultural goals (say, election laws or laws against abortion or gay marriage), and then finding a plaintiff with standing to sue. 

50 years ago, early pioneers of lawfare used the beleaguered prostitute Norma McCorvey as their human tool when they launched the case you know as Roe v. Wade. McCorvey had no interest in being used for political purposes by self-absorbed powerbrokers–she didn’t want to be their “plaintiff.” But they, being utopian schemers, cared only for humanity as a general idea and not in specie. They had no interest in her interests or her individual humanity. So, they bribed and cajoled her into sacrificing her privacy and dignity (what little she had left) and made her their fake plaintiff. She became “Jane Roe.” It’s also worth noting that in Roe, the utopian schemers (who are today the regime apparatchiks) found a way both to exploit and dehumanize a very flawed human being and to pour a universal solvent on one of the pillars of the western order: our legal tradition. A “two-for,” if you will, in their methodical dismantling of western civilization.

With these types of victories, the ruling elite realized that lawfare–deployed through its big law mandarins acting directly or pro bono through public interest firms–would help them advance and protect their interests. This process began around the same time that the ruling elite became aware of itself as a political entity–the early 1990s. Thirty years later, however, the ruling elite transformed lawfare from a quaint and clever technique with occasional big successes, into a national machine science. Whereas back then the technique might be used haphazardly, today the ruling elite routinely launch coordinated lawfare assaults en masse, using the technique against dozens of strategically selected courts at the same time. At any given moment, dozens and sometimes hundreds of these fake cases are being “litigated” in courts throughout the country. 

Rigging the 2020 Election

By 2020, the woke left had perfected adversarial inversion lawfare. When Donald Trump faced off against Joe Biden, a big-law mandarin named Marc Elias–together with numerous other big-law mandarins at major firms like Greenberg Traurig–deployed the general techniques described above to rig the Presidential election. Their remarkable success in subverting state election laws is a case study in modern adversarial inversion lawfare. 

When it comes to destroying the rule of law, few people compare to Elias in tactical and strategic acumen. He is a highly capable operator and the ruling elite know it, lauding him as “an indispensable figure” in their mandarin servant class. Rightly so: without him, they would not have “won” the 2020 election. Here’s how he did it. Elias identified battleground jurisdictions that satisfied most (and preferably all) of the following criteria: 

First, the legislatures (typically republican) had enacted laws that imposed certain procedural requirements on voting, generally consisting of common-sense attempts to increase reliability and fairness at zero or no cost to voters. These restrictions consisted of things like requiring people to vote only once, to vote in person absent extraordinary circumstances (like being on active military duty overseas), to sign and date their ballots, to mail absentee ballots so that they were received prior to election day, to present identification to vote, and to vote on election day. 

There is very little doubt about the constitutionality of these types of election laws. It’s only recently that these practical and common-sense requirements have been the subject of serious objection and then only by people who have a nefarious agenda, like Marc Elias. At any rate, the closer a state’s election laws approached this ideal standard, the more the ruling elite and Marc Elias despised them. 

Second, they sought states in which the official responsible for enforcing the election laws (typically the “secretary of state” or similar officeholder) was an ideological fellow traveler–that is, somebody who was a known regime mandarin or prole who served the ruling elite and its goals. This latter requirement was important. In most states, the secretary of state is responsible for enforcing the state’s election laws. As such, he or she would be the named defendant in many of Elias’ lawsuits. Thus, by targeting jurisdictions in which the secretary of state’s office was staffed by regime insiders, Elias ensured there would be no true defendant (an essential part of adversarial inversion lawfare). [Note: Elias and his ilk also filed suits that were defended by bona fide defendants–usually where they had no choice.]

Third, Elias needed to find a plaintiff “with standing” to bring a suit in the friendly jurisdiction. This was easy. He only had to find a person (any person) who was “aggrieved” by the law and lived in the friendly jurisdiction. In Elias’ case, this literally meant any voting age adult since any person could claim to be aggrieved by not being able to mail an absentee ballot. In many of his cases, however, Elias and his cadre found eager political cronies to serve the role. The dupe serving as the “plaintiff” usually had no real interest in the matter, would never have filed suit on her own, didn’t understand the proceedings or its purpose, and was bribed or cajoled (or both) into serving in the role. 

Here we are more than 1,500 words into a 3,000 word essay, and that’s not including parts I and II. These take a lot of work and I’d really appreciate you subscribing. It’s free!

Pennsylvania DNC v. Boockvar

Thus it was that on July 10, 2020, Elias and his operatives at Greenberg Traurig (a “big-law” firm stuffed with regime mandarins) filed Pennsylvania Democratic Party et al v. Kathy Boockvar in Pennsylvania state court. The “plaintiffs” were about fifteen partisan democrats running for office. The “defendant” was Kathy Boockvar, a partisan democrat and “Secretary of Pennsylvania” responsible for enforcing the state’s election laws. From the outset, they were on the same side.  

After the case was filed, Boockvar promptly revealed her alliance with the plaintiffs and asked the state’s supreme court to take the case from the local court, claiming that doing so was “the only means available to resolve these disputes without disrupting the election.” The Pennsylvania state supreme court was majority democrat, having served the regime in earlier legal roles, as noted above. This is why Boockvar asked it to take the case–it was time for the state supreme court judges to pay the piper (their ruling elite masters). The “plaintiffs” filed a response “noting that [they] had no objection.” Of course they didn’t since they and Boockvar were on the same side, that being the point of adversarial inversion lawfare.           

At the state supreme court level, Boockvar (the so-called “defendant”) advanced the plaintiffs’ arguments on every single material issue, while failing to defend the plain meaning of the state’s election laws on any substantive matter. In short, she used her position as a Pennsylvania state official to argue against Pennsylvania’s republican-enacted state election laws. In the state supreme court’s words: “The law, therefore, militates in favor of this Court construing the Election Code in a manner consistent with the view of [Plaintiffs] and the [Defendant].” Ha ha ha ha ha ha! Notice the “and.” They were in agreement, even though one was the plaintiff and the other the defendant. There were no adversaries, at least none that the state supreme court took note of.  

The result was that Pennsylvania’s election laws–lawfully enacted by a republican state legislature under authority reserved to it under Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the Constitution–were overturned by adversarial inversion lawfare. The state supreme court ignored the source of authority for such state election laws (the federal constitution, which is supreme) and simply decided that the state election laws violated Pennsylvania’s state constitution. This is irrelevant. 

The President Pro Tem of Pennsylvania’s senate filed an emergency motion for a hearing with the United States Supreme Court seeking to vindicate the state legislature’s rights as explicitly granted under the United States Constitution. The Supreme Court split 4-4 on whether even to hear the motion for a stay. Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh tried to hear it. Barret foolishly didn’t participate, resulting in the split: tie goes against the runner, I suppose. But in a later ruling relating to this case, Justice Alito observed:

The provisions of the Federal Constitution conferring on state legislatures, not state courts, the authority to make rules governing federal elections would be meaningless if a state court could override the rules adopted by the legislature simply by claiming that a state constitutional provision gave the courts the authority to make whatever rules it thought appropriate for the conduct of a fair election. 

Everybody involved in the case understood Alito’s points: Elias and his cronies, the so-called “plaintiffs,” the so-called “defendant,” and the state supreme court justices. This led to the most astounding example of cynicism in the entire matter. Having received their temporary injunction and flooded Pennsylvania with dubious votes on election day, and despite having earlier asked the United States Supreme Court to hear the matter, they reversed their position entirely and urged the high court “not to [hear the case] because they think it is moot.” The Supreme Court agreed, over the objection of Alito, Gorsuch, and Thomas. 

If they believed in their election law claims, they would never have advanced the mootness argument. But of course, they knew that their arguments would not survive constitutional scrutiny at the Supreme Court level. Justices Alito, Thomas, and Gorsuch told them as much: “There is a strong likelihood that the State Supreme Court decision violates the Federal Constitution.” And if they lost at the Supreme Court level, they wouldn’t be able to do the same thing in 2024.

On the other hand, by moving to dismiss the case without a final order from a non-appealable court, they set themselves up to bring the exact same challenges again this year. In reading Thomas’ and Alito’s dissents, one can tell that both learned justices understood exactly what the adversarial inversion lawfare specialists were doing: gaming the system by dismissing a case so they could bring it again at some other time. Wash, rinse, repeat. Forever. The whole thing was a mere power play. And the lawfare specialists knew that the state supreme court would reliably deliver in 2024, having denied every single claim filed by Trump, the RNC, and the legislature in parallel matters. 

In a legitimate legal dispute where a plaintiff is truly aggrieved, a temporary injunction is never the goal. It was, however, precisely the goal in this adversarial inversion lawsuit that was never designed to seek the truth or to compensate the aggrieved, but rather only to advance the power of the ruling elite. Alito knew as much, but he was outvoted. In early 2021, he wrote presciently: “the cases before us are not moot. There is a reasonable expectation that the parties will face the same question in the future.” I’d bet on it. 

Wrapping Up

The key here is to recognize that in this form of election lawfare, not only are the parties (the plaintiff and the defendant) not opposed to one another, but often the plaintiff would never have brought the case if not induced to do so by the ruling elite and its mandarins. The system’s intended role is totally inverted: the actual party in interest (the ruling elite) funds, organizes, and brings the case but is nowhere named in the pleadings; the defendant wants and intends to lose; and the named plaintiff likely wouldn’t have brought the case and often doesn’t even know what it’s about. In addition, the selected jurisdiction is usually staffed by judges partial to the agenda of the ruling elite, in many cases having received their positions as a sinecure for dutifully serving in the mandarin class as government or big-law attorneys. 

Elias and his sort filed not less than 64 of these bogus adversarial inversion lawsuits during the 2020 election cycle. They did it in battleground states everywhere. They won nearly all of them, so Donald Trump “lost” the election. Given their resounding success subverting the rule of law in 2020, the absence of any serious opposition, and the tactically brilliant move to dismiss the case before the Supreme Court had ruled, they have no reason to stop. As such, Elias and many other regime big-law mandarins are at it again, deploying their tried-and-true lawfare tactics in all the battleground states to propel the ruling elite to just one more victory. 

And, as with 2020, the state propaganda organs will dutifully report that Elias and his ilk are defending democracy from the other side’s attempts to overthrow it. They even go so far as to claim that the other side initiated election lawfare in general. In 2024, only a fool could still believe either of those claims. The typical elected republican NPC is too stupid to organize something so effective and whatever the ruling elite is doing, it’s not “defending democracy.”

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