The U.S. Supreme Court’s “shadow docket” of rulings on emergency petitions yielded a significant decision with mixed political implications, and I tried to unravel it at New York.

When North Carolina and Pennsylvania Republicans petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn state-court decisions against their attempted congressional gerrymanders, there were two issues at hand. The most immediate matter involved the gerrymanders themselves: Was there any federal constitutional bar to state courts interpreting state laws to smack down state legislative regulation of federal elections? There was also a longer-term issue casting a big shadow on the 2024 presidential elections: Do state legislatures have constitutional superpowers that may let them override state and even federal laws governing the designation of presidential electors, as Donald Trump’s campaign claimed in 2020 as part of its efforts to overturn that year’s results?

As Mark Joseph Stern noted at Slate when rulings came down on both petitions, the Pennsylvania GOP effort to reverse a state-court redistricting decision was a stretch: “The plaintiffs demanded at-large congressional districts for the first time since the 18th century because there was no backup map in place and no time for the legislature to draw one.” So the Supreme Court rejected the Pennsylvania petition without dissent or comment.

But in the North Carolina case, the Supreme Court said “no” to the GOP gambit to overturn new court-imposed maps and “maybe” to the broader claim of legislative superpowers. Six justices — John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — rejected the North Carolina legislature’s petitions to overturn its state court’s redistricting ruling that could shift as many as four U.S. House seats toward Democrats as compared to the original legislative map. Three justices (Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch) dissented, with an opinion from Alito citing the famous “independent state legislature” doctrine, under which neither federal nor state courts can overrule legislative determinations of rulings affecting federal elections.

It’s not clear, however, that the Court’s majority rejected that doctrine. Kavanaugh’s concurring opinion explicitly reserved judgment on it, instead basing his rejection of the North Carolina petition on the close proximity of the 2022 elections. Chief Justice Roberts (who has expressed support for strong legislative election prerogatives in the past) and Barrett were silent.

So a short-term victory for the prerogatives of state courts interpreting state election laws (which in these two cases benefited Democrats) could later give way to a bigger defeat that puts legislatures in the driver’s seat in future election controversies — you know, like controversies over who actually won a presidential election. Trump’s frustrated 2020 effort to get Republican legislatures to overrule state-certified electoral-vote rewards might fare better in 2024 with more time to prepare the groundwork for a coup. And even if that doesn’t happen, legislatures — not courts, governors, or secretaries of State — could have the final word on election and voting procedures. As election-law expert Rick Hasen warned after the North Carolina order, we could see a “big, bad election law precedent potentially coming down the line.”

I’ve been following the antics of Florida Senator Rick Scott lately. This is my latest report at New York:

What does Florida senator Rick Scott want? Does he want to impress Donald Trump by displacing Mitch McConnell as Senate Republican leader? (He says he’s not interested in challenging McConnell, though he acknowledges that Trump personally asked him to do just that.) Maybe he’s positioning himself to run for president if Trump sits out the 2024 campaign? I surely don’t know. But something’s up. Scott has promulgated an “11-point plan” for what he thinks Republicans should do if they win back Congress this November. And now that McConnell has publicly rejected it, Scott has taken to the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal to boast of his courage in an op-ed.

Scott claims the “plan” contains 128 “ideas,” which may be accurate if you consider owning the libs and cutting culture-war capers “ideas.” The “plan” is innovative insofar as it marries the very latest in apocalyptic hate-filled MAGA rhetoric with fiscal and social positions from the museum of conservative ideology circa 1964. But if emblazoned on Republican banners going into the midterms, Scott’s “ideas” would ensure an otherwise unlikely Democratic midterms victory (perhaps coincidentally, or perhaps not, the Floridian is not up for reelection this year). Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell knows that, which is why he dismissed Scott’s handiwork contemptuously last week.

“If we’re fortunate enough to have the majority next year, I’ll be the majority leader. I’ll decide in consultation with my members what to put on the floor,” McConnell told reporters. “Let me tell you what will not be on our agenda. We will not have as part of our agenda a bill that raises taxes on half the American people and sunsets Social Security and Medicare within five years. That will not be part of the Republican Senate majority agenda.”

McConnell was referring to just two of the more politically disastrous “ideas” Scott was advancing: sunsetting all federal laws every five years, and requiring federal income-tax payments from those whose tax liability has been eliminated by tax credits. He didn’t bother to mention some of the other howlers Scott endorsed, a few of which I described when the plan came out:

“Many of Scott’s specific proposals straddle the line between stupid and evil pretty effectively. He wants to impose a 12-year limit on all federal employment (with ‘exceptions’ for national-security purposes). Think about the immense cost and inefficiency of that kind of required turnover in the federal workforce, whose numbers, by the way, would be reduced by 25 percent in five years according to another pledge in the agenda. Guess that would somewhat mitigate the massive cost and disruptions associated with Scott’s demands to ‘move most Government agencies out of Washington and into the real world” and “sell offall non-essential government assets, buildings, and land.'” 

Without specifically referring to McConnell’s criticism, Scott took to the conservative ideological bulletin board of the Wall Street Journal editorial pages on Friday to simultaneously boast and whine that he had angered the Swamp People of Washington.

“In the real world beyond the Beltway, Republicans and independents demand bold action and a plan to save our nation,” Scott wrote. “They see no point in taking control of Congress if we are simply going to return to business as usual.”

Actually, in the real world beyond the Beltway, Scott’s “bold action and a plan” would lay waste to Republican campaigns as far as the eye can see. But he’s too busy posturing as a lonely patriot speaking truth to power to consider that. He continued:

“The militant left has seized control of the federal government, the news media, big tech, academia, Hollywood, the Democratic Party, most corporate boardrooms and even some of our top military leaders. The elites atop our nation’s institutions are working hard to redefine America and silence their opponents. They want to end the American experiment and replace it with a woke socialist utopia, and we are sitting around watching it happen.”

If conservatives are “sitting around watching it happen,” why can’t you go a millisecond without hearing the same tired litany about the all-powerful Woke Police and the March to Socialism from a thousand voices? The truth is that the more popular of Scott’s “ideas” have been repeatedly and redundantly and incessantly advanced by demagogues for eons, particularly such tired chestnuts as congressional term limits, a balanced budget amendment, and the refusal to honor the national debt, all of which he mentioned in his op-ed before backpedaling to a defense of his tax-increase proposals with the bait-and-switch tactic of pretending he’s only concerned about President Biden “paying people to not work.” (Though as the Tax Policy Center noted in 2019: “Nearly half of those paying no federal income tax are retirees living on Social Security benefits. Many others worked but made too little to pay federal income tax. Nonetheless, they still paid sales taxes, payroll taxes, and perhaps state income taxes.”)

There’s something especially unsavory about Scott posing as the working man’s only friend in Washington and as a tight-fisted steward of the public treasury. This is a guy whose entire political career has been bankrolled by the golden parachute he was given by Columbia-HCA to go away after the health-care company he led as CEO was hit with a $1.7 billion fine for Medicare fraud.

The most accurate line in Scott’s op-ed is this: “There will be many more attacks on me and this plan from careerists in Washington, who personally profit while ruining this country.” If he keeps it up, his critics will include delighted Democrats who would love to depict Scott’s toxic manifesto as party orthodoxy, and “careerist” Republicans who would like their careers to last beyond this November.

Here was my quick take at New York on the international affairs segments of President Biden’s State of the Union Address:

As expected, President Joe Biden began his first official State of the Union Address by discussing the Russian aggression in Ukraine, devoting the first 13 minutes of his speech to the subject. Biden played it very straight. Despite the sub-strain of Republican admiration and even empathy for Vladimir Putin (exemplified by Biden’s predecessor), the president chose to depict Americans as completely united. “[Putin] thought he could divide us at home in this chamber and this nation and he thought he could divide us in Europe as well, but Putin was wrong,” Biden said. “We are ready. We are united and that is what we did. We stayed united.”

Biden projected calm resolution and even reassurance for nervous Americans, who have been hearing about possible nuclear war and absorbing frightful images of fighting and destruction in Ukraine. “I know news about what’s happening can seem alarming to all Americans. But I want you to know, we’re going to be okay. We’re going to be okay. When the history of this era is written, Putin’s war on Ukraine will have left Russia weaker and the rest of the world stronger.”

From a policy point of view, Biden was predictable enough, but he has positioned himself on very high ground in terms of public opinion, which favors strong action against Putin without troop deployments, and strong U.S.-led diplomacy based on red lines in Europe the Russians will not be alloyed to cross.

The contrast with the erratic, blustering Donald Trump was implicit rather than explicit. But Biden subtly undermined Republican claims that his administration’s weakness somehow drew Putin into aggression. Meanwhile the alliance Biden now leads — including even Switzerland — provides a clear alternative to Trump’s unilateralist hostility to NATO and lone-ranger approach to diplomacy.

His unity pitch also denied Republicans much of an opportunity to take issue with his remarks without looking churlish (as extremist congresswoman Lauren Boebert later did by shouting about casualties in Afghanistan when Biden was about to mention his late son, Beau). He was well into the domestic section of the speech before Republicans in the room could do anything other than dutifully, if reluctantly, standing and applauding his words. The impression that Joe Biden is a flailing president at the mercy of an emboldened opposition faded significantly during this address.

Will Biden’s remarks on Ukraine help him pivot to a more effective and popular presidency? It’s too early to tell for sure, but the signs are positive. His support has been flagging among Democrats lately. The stirring international section of the speech is bound to rally Democrats to his banner, and the rest of it was candy to them. For bipartisanship-craving swing voters, the unity pitch on Ukraine should resonate, and Biden cleverly laid out a “unity agenda” later on composed of four specific things the two parties might be able to do together. It was the sort of speech that played to his strengths as a president and as a politician. But he needs to keep the momentum up now that he has struck a new tone for his presidency.

Some days you read something that leaps right off the page and sinks an evil fang into your arm. That happened to me with a document released by Florida U.S. Senator Rick Scott, and I wrote about it at New York:

In nearly every midterm election cycle in which U.S. House Republicans are in the minority, you will hear suggestions that the GOP adopt a new “Contract With America,” like the one that (not really, but according to lore and legend) led the party to its first conquest of the House many decades back in 1994. The idea is that everyone knows what Republicans are against, but nobody knows what they are for, since their contributions to the great legislative accomplishments of American history since about 1929 are limited.

This craving for a midterm GOP election agenda is typically strong in the House, partly because of the 1994 mythology and partly because House Republicans are, relatively speaking, pretty well united around a conservative ideology. You usually don’t hear much about this from Republican senators, as they are not quite so uniform ideologically and their long-time leader Mitch McConnell famously thinks obstruction of what Democrats are trying to do works just fine as a party message when the GOP is not in power.

In January, McConnell recommitted himself to election-year nihilism, as Business Insider reported:

“During a press conference on Wednesday, McConnell declined to offer any details about what Republicans would do in the event they recaptured both chambers of Congress in November.

“’That is a very good question,’ he told reporters. ‘And I’ll let you know when we take it back.’”

But now the senator who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, Rick Scott of Florida, has released his own suggestion for an agenda, as Politico reports. “As a general rule, you know, probably this year’s election is going to be a lot about the Biden agenda. But I do believe we’re going to win,” Scott said. “We ought to have a plan and what we’re trying to get done when we get the majority.”

Scott’s “11 Point Plan to Rescue America” shows exactly why McConnell doesn’t like such exercises in hypotheticals. It is beyond extremist.

Sure, there is a lot of boilerplate conservative language in the document (the preamble harrumphs that “our government is eroding our work ethic by paying people not to work,” and one of the 11 points promises to end “the soft-on-crime days of coddling criminal behavior”). But there’s a weird “actually, science and scripture agree” tone running through the manifesto, which is quite an innovation. For example, here’s point 9:

“Men are men, women are women, and unborn babies are babies. We believe in science: Men and women are biologically different, ‘male and female He created them.’ Modern technology has confirmed that abortion takes a human life. Facts are facts, the earth is round, the sun is hot, there are two genders, and abortion stops a beating heart. To say otherwise is to deny science.”

Many of Scott’s specific proposals straddle the line between stupid and evil pretty effectively. He wants to impose a 12-year limit on all federal employment (with “exceptions” for national-security purposes). Think about the immense cost and inefficiency of that kind of required turnover in the federal workforce, whose numbers, by the way, would be reduced by 25 percent in five years according to another pledge in the agenda. Guess that would somewhat mitigate the massive cost and disruptions associated with Scott’s demands to “move most Government agencies out of Washington and into the real world” and “sell offall non-essential government assets, buildings, and land.” The IRS would receive an even more draconian 50 percent cut in funding and workforce, which might make it a bit tough to impose the new minimum income tax Scott wants to impose on the majority of Americans who now have no net tax liability.

But here’s the pledge that really takes the cake: “All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years. If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.” Presumably this would include the Social Security Act, the Medicare law, the Civil Rights Act, the Americans With Disabilities Act, and the immigration and criminal laws Scott is so determined to enforce with the maximum degree of viciousness. Any candidate running on that plank would be tarred and feathered.

I won’t go through the whole document, but you get the idea; whoever drafted this monstrosity must have been told to ask “What Would Trump Do?” on every topic and then ratchet up the right-wing anger and MAGA rhetoric considerably. Instead of just attacking affirmative action, the plan would ban collection of Census information by race or ethnic group. Criticizing excessive “wokeness” isn’t enough; Scott’s agenda promises to ban the use of “tax dollars for any diversity training.” And Trump gets his props in the plan, too: It proposes to “finish building the wall and name it after President Donald Trump.”

No wonder McConnell isn’t interested in a midterm election agenda, if this is what it means. There are undoubtedly multiple 2022 Republican Senate candidates who are trying to appeal to swing voters and would not particularly want to identify themselves with all this howling MAGA ferocity or explain why they want to destroy the federal government and some of its most popular programs.

Perhaps Democrats should disseminate Scott’s agenda themselves, beginning with Florida voters, who may be surprised to learn their junior Senator wants to let Social Security and Medicare lapse if they aren’t reauthorized every five years.

In all seriousness, it’s alarming that someone representing a large and reasonably competitive state would endorse a document that sounds like J.D. Vance wrote it in a panic after reading the latest primary polls in Ohio. Scott swears he’s not at this point running for president, which is a good thing, since his current thinking would be simply disqualifying.

In looking ahead to the 2022 midterm elections, there is one category of contests Democrats should pay close attention to, if only because the 45th president is already there, as I discussed at New York:

Even as Congress investigates Donald Trump’s attempted 2020 election coup and considers reforms to the Electoral Count Act of 1887 that aided his schemes for overturning the results, the former president is working hard to undermine future contests around the country. Beyond supporting gubernatorial candidates who have endorsed his election conspiracy theories, Trump is aggressively intervening in state contests for a less high-profile office: secretary of state. At stake is control of the election machinery in states where Trump failed to prevail in his false but vociferous claims that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.

Trump has endorsed candidates in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan, three very close 2020 states where he got no cooperation from secretaries of state in advancing his wild claims of election fraud. Arizona and Michigan have Democrats in that position, and in Georgia, Republican Brad Raffensperger famously defied Trump’s instructions to find some extra votes to overturn Biden’s win. The 45th president doesn’t want to face that sort of obstruction to his plans in 2024.

To carry out a purge of Raffensperger, Trump recruited Jody Hice, who gave up a safe U.S. House seat to launch a primary run. Raffensperger is also being opposed by 2018 primary rival David Belle Isle. A runoff is possible since Georgia requires a majority of votes to win in primary and general elections. But Hice is the fundraising leader and the overwhelming favorite to win the nomination in a primary that is being overshadowed by David Perdue’s Trump-sponsored effort to get rid of Republican Governor Brian Kemp (who seconded Raffensperger’s certification of Biden’s Georgia win). At this point, the biggest obstacle to a MAGA conquest of the Peach State’s election machinery is the likely Democratic nominee for secretary of state, highly regarded state legislator Bee Nguyen.

In Michigan, Trump’s candidate, community-college professor Kristina Karamo, has a more direct connection with the 2020 election coup effort, as CNN explains:

“Karamo rose to prominence in Michigan after the 2020 election when she alleged to have witnessed fraud as a poll challenger during the state’s count of absentee ballots. The month after the election, Karamo testified before a state Senate committee, signed onto the unsuccessful Supreme Court challenge to Biden’s win and appeared on Fox News conservative opinion shows to promote her allegations and falsely claim widespread fraud occurred in the state.”

If there were any doubt about her allegiances, Karamo dispelled them the day after January 6, 2021, declaiming: “I believe this is completely antifa posing as Trump supporters … I mean, anybody can buy a MAGA hat and put on T-shirt and buy a Trump flag.” She has opposed COVID-19 vaccines and the teaching of evolution and called public schools “government indoctrination camps.”

Karamo has an early fundraising advantage over her two Republican rivals, state legislator Beau LaFave and Township Clerk Cindy Berry. Perhaps most important, the nomination will be decided at an April 23 GOP convention rather than a primary, which should help the activist-fueled Karamo unless delegates decide she is unelectable. Incumbent Democrat Jocelyn Benson has been doing well in fundraising, but as with other battleground states, the expected nationwide Republican trend could be enough to tilt the balance, particularly in a down-ballot race in which party preferences will matter most.

In Arizona, incumbent Democrat Katie Hobbs is running for governor. The state is a hotbed of 2020 election revisionism, and three Republican candidates for secretary of state — Shawnna Bolick, Michelle Ugenti-Rita, and Mark Finchem, all state representatives — have been active in efforts to question the 2020 results and skew future elections in the GOP’s direction, as the Associated Press reported last fall:

“Bolick introduced legislation that would allow the Legislature in future presidential elections to disregard voters and choose its own electors to represent Arizona in the Electoral College …

“Ugenti-Rita has been one of the Arizona GOP’s most active proponents of legislation imposing new restrictions on voting, drawing stiff opposition from Democrats who say her measures would disenfranchise people of color.”

But Trump endorsed Finchem, who really does take the MAGA cake:

“Finchem brought Trump attorneys, including Rudy Giuliani, to Phoenix after the election to air bogus allegations that the former president’s narrow loss in Arizona was marred by fraud. Though he’s in the state House, he’s been a mainstay in conservative media promoting Senate Republicans’ partisan review of the 2020 vote count in Maricopa County, the state’s most populous.”

Finchem has been subpoenaed by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack for questions about his antics with Giuliani. He also attended Trump’s January 6 rally in Washington and was photographed near the Capitol, though he claims he never entered it.

Fontes, one of the two Democrats in the race, is a former Maricopa County elected official whom Finchem is blaming for trying to interfere with the phony “audit” of the 2020 election in that county.

Only one of the Republicans in the race, businessman Beau Lane, is not running on a MAGA vengeance kind of platform, so depending on general election dynamics, the odds of Trump getting an ally controlling the Arizona election machinery are pretty good.

While these are the three close 2020 states where Trump has already intervened in secretary of state races, others could follow. In Nevada, former state legislator Jim Marchant has proclaimed himself a leader in a national coalition of “America First” candidates for secretary of state, which includes the Hice, Karamo and Finchem. He leads the three other Republican candidates in fundraising. The vibrant GOP field was buttressed by the retirement of two-term incumbent Republican Barbara Cegavske, who was censured by the Republican State Central Committee for her failure to buy into Trump’s election-fraud allegations.

If some of Trump’s candidates do prevail in November, it might make him more confident about running in 2024. He’ll know that in the event of another close race, his acolytes will put their thumbs on the scales and make victory that much more likely.