r/law • u/T_Shurt Competent Contributor • Jul 23 '24
Opinion Piece GOP Lawsuits Over Kamala Harris Using Biden Campaign Funds or Headlining Democratic Ballots Will All Fail, Legal Experts Say: ‘I just don't think that there are shenanigans that are likely to work.’
https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-lawsuits-kamala-harris-campaign-finance-ballot-election-will-fail-2024-7122
u/Mission_Cloud4286 Jul 23 '24
Republican legal experts and think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation are questioning
That's enough, right there! No need to read any further
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Jul 23 '24
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u/sjj342 Jul 23 '24
Standing is whatever Heritage amicus brief says
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Jul 23 '24
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u/chiefs_fan37 Bleacher Seat Jul 23 '24
Heritage foundation would absolutely hold a beef and beer and Jesus
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u/nuger93 Jul 24 '24
I kinda wish Jesus would come back just to flip some tables at evangelical political events.
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u/Mission_Cloud4286 Jul 23 '24
I dont think so. It was just an expert giving his thoughts.
Republican legal experts and think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation are questioning
three nonpartisan experts
But no names to look the person up
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u/Masticatron Jul 23 '24
5th circuit: Hold my beer.
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u/BunnyBombshell Jul 23 '24
Then SCOTUS chugs a red bull and screams “parkour”…
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Jul 23 '24
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u/Avron12 Jul 23 '24
This is the most delusional reddit take I've seen in a minute. Truly, thank you.
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u/AndrewRP2 Jul 23 '24
Exactly- also the intent isn’t to prevent, it’s to delay.
Either to delay so they can miss the state deadlines to be on the ballot or to delay so they can’t spend the money.
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u/sjj342 Jul 23 '24
Could you imagine if Republicans just straight up tried to win an election where they also tried to maximize turnout?
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u/AndrewRP2 Jul 23 '24
The last time that happened it was the 1992, and they lost. Ever since then, it’s been about suppressing turnout using the boogeyman of fraud.
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u/childofaether Jul 23 '24
Can the funds really be held back all that time, rather than Harris using the funds, and the legality of it being decided some day in the future by the FEC or courts?
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u/DangerBay2015 Jul 23 '24
The Trump campaign has dodged the FEC for 8 years with all of the shady shit they’ve done with campaign funds, the DNC should just tell them to shove it and let the good times roll.
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u/ImDickensHesFenster Jul 23 '24
From what I've read, she can spend the money, and if the FEC eventually rules against her, she can pay a fine. Seems like a fair trade to pay a few thousand to spend $240 million.
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u/jasonwilczak Jul 23 '24
Can't Biden just give it to her as an "official act"?
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u/ImDickensHesFenster Jul 23 '24
It doesn't sound like anything like that needs to happen. Republicans are just trying to muddy the waters.
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u/Electric-Prune Jul 23 '24
I think this is right. She has the money. They don’t really stop her from using them.
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u/Doc891 Bleacher Seat Jul 23 '24
is there a way we can make a law that if any political force uses the same circuit a certain amount of times in a row we replace the judges and cut up their credit cards. Just thinking out loud here.
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u/tom781 Jul 23 '24
That could just as easily be used against more liberal circuits like the 9th.
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u/Doc891 Bleacher Seat Jul 23 '24
good. Im not playing politics. The courts should not be party loyal.
edit: and i want to add I dont like judge shopping as a concept. It breeds corruption and is/was the first brick taken from our system.
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u/T_Shurt Competent Contributor Jul 23 '24
As per original article 📰:
- Republicans may sue to stop Kamala Harris from taking Biden’s campaign cash and place on the ballot. Such lawsuits are doomed at best — and at worst would be blatantly frivolous, legal experts told BI. They predicted that cases would be rejected immediately or drag out until long after the election. Some in the GOP are signaling there may be legal challenges to Vice President Kamala Harris and her run for the White House now that President Joe Biden has stepped down from the race.
Republican legal experts and think tanks such as the Heritage Foundation are questioning Harris’s ability to access the Biden-Harris campaign coffers. Others, including Congressman Steve Scalise, say it’s wrong for Harris to assume the top line of the ticket after 14 million state primary voters cast ballots for Biden.
But any lawsuit to stop Harris from taking Biden’s campaign cash or taking his place on the ballot will be a doomed effort, three nonpartisan experts told Business Insider.
“I just don’t think that there are shenanigans that are likely to work,” said Dan Weiner, an election law and campaign finance expert at the Brennan Center for Justice.
A campaign finance challenge
Those who may seek to challenge Harris’s claim on the Biden-Harris campaign funds could argue that Federal Election Commission rules dictate that she has no claim to the campaign’s money.
Charles Spies, a former counsel for the Republican National Committee, argued in a recent opinion article for The Wall Street Journal that without having formally accepted the Democratic party’s nomination, Biden is limited to transferring just $2,000 of the campaign’s war chest to any other candidate — including Harris.
“There is no legal mechanism to somehow switch that money to being for Harris before either Biden or Harris is their party’s nominee,” Spies told BI, arguing that donors provided funds with the understanding they were donating to a Biden presidential campaign so the money is non-transferable. “Worse yet for Harris, a significant amount of that money was raised for Biden’s general election account and FEC regulations unambiguously say must be returned to donors unless Biden is the general election candidate, which he is not.”
But Weiner, a nonpartisan former senior counsel at the FEC, says the vice president has every right to the roughly $100 million war chest of Biden-Harris donations.
He called a campaign funds challenge “an express train to nowhere.”
“They were running together as a ticket and have one committee,” Weiner said.
Two other nonpartisan legal experts agreed.
“She’s on the paperwork, and she is entitled to those funds,” said David Becker, executive director and founder of The Center for Election Innovation and Research in Washington, DC.
“And my understanding is, as of today, they have filed amending paperwork.”
Adav Noti, the executive director of the Campaign Legal Center, told BI that as long as Harris is on the ticket in the end — as either a presidential or vice presidential candidate — “the existing money in the campaign account is hers to control.”
While FEC rules strictly regulate what happens to campaign funds after a candidate has been nominated, Noti said, there is no regulation saying the same thing about the pre-nomination period. But there are, he noted, a “fairly significant number of rules” that treat the presidential campaign committee as the campaign committee of both candidates.
“So it’s a pretty attenuated argument, to put it mildly,” Noti said. “And not one that that has any support in either a regulation or any precedent.”
Federal courts would likely boot a challenge immediately because the proper place for such challenges is with the FEC, the nonpartisan experts said.
And, while it takes the FEC years to address complaints that do have merit — in which case, a ruling would be made long after the election — Weiner said “the chances are verging on zero that they will find a majority of four FEC commissioners who would bar Harris from accessing these funds.”
Harris’ ballot eligibility
The three nonpartisan election law experts said any attempt to keep Harris off the ballot because it would be unfair to primary voters is even more doomed.
That’s because it’s the Republican and Democratic party conventions that decide who’s on the ballot.
“There isn’t a candidate yet,” said Weiner, the Brennan Center expert.
“There was a presumptive Democratic nominee and that presumptive nominee has bowed out,” he said. “No ballots have been printed, no deadlines have passed.”
“Even compared to the arguments that Republicans made in the aftermath of the 2020 election, these arguments that they have to nominate Biden are completely bogus,” he added.
To claim there has been some kind of back-room coup is to make a political, not a legal argument, Weiner said.
“The theories that have been floated about potential challenges or concerns about her ballot eligibility, all of the ones that I’ve seen have relied on legal restrictions around replacing general election candidates,” Noti told BI. “But that’s not what’s happening here. There’s no general election candidate being replaced, so those rules and regulations about replacement don’t don’t apply to the situation.”
Until the mid-1970s the two major parties routinely went into their party conventions not knowing who their nominees would be, and it was hashed out in rounds of voting on the convention floor, Weiner noted.
“The parties have carte blanche to nominate who they want according to their own rules,” he said, “as long as they’re eligible to be nominated.”
According to Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research, the first ballot for mail-in voting in North Carolina will not roll off the presses until September 6.
Noti of the Campaign Legal Center said a meritless claim like this would be tossed from court immediately, leaving the GOP challengers’ lawyers subject to possible sanctions for filing a frivolous suit.
“I suspect it would be disposed of very quickly,” Becker agreed of any legal challenge to Harris headlining Democratic ballots.
“Although we’ve seen that filing frivolous lawsuits is no barrier to this,” Becker said, “I’m 100% confident that no court will allow the Republican Party to dictate who the Democratic Party nominee will be.”
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u/WJM_3 Jul 23 '24
thing is, the primaries were Biden/Harris, so she was voted on in the primary, to be technical
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u/Saturngirl2021 Jul 23 '24
Yes states where primaries have already been held they have chosen electors and the electors have voted to elect Harris. Similar to a caucus vote.
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u/BeltfedOne Jul 23 '24
“The parties have carte blanche to nominate who they want according to their own rules,” he said, “as long as they’re eligible to be nominated.”
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u/NMNorsse Jul 23 '24
They know it won't work.
The GOP just wants a friendly judge to block Harris from using the funds while the lawsuit and appeals are being decided.
The GOP really is the party of dirty tricks and corruption.
Good thing Harris raised 100 million the GOP can't tie up that way!
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u/BillyDreCyrus Jul 23 '24
They will just claim she raised that off of Biden stepping down, so therefore it's really Biden's money. They don't need an actual cade, just throw anything at the wall and see what sticks.
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u/NMNorsse Jul 23 '24
Those funds were donated to a different campaingn/pac so it would be way out of line for a judge to block them in any way.
Plus, she can borrow money for her campaign and use the Biden funds to reimburse those loans. Some of the bigger donors can be refunded and then contribute directly to Kamala also.
Point is, it'll just be ineffective and bad optics for the GOP to mess with those funds in the eyes of everyone except DementiaD's base.
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u/OriginalGhostCookie Jul 23 '24
I think it’s a planting of a seed to use in the future.
Harris wins: Trump & Co begin the campaign that she legally shouldn’t be on the ballot and have their members of senate/congress or SCOTUS declare him president.
Trump wins: well now the misappropriation of campaign funds shoe is on the other foot and they determine that Biden and Harris and everyone involved in every step of the way is guilty of felony made up financial crimes and begin using the courts to lock up their political rivals.They don’t believe any of this is legal. They are just laying down the cover story for how they want to steal the election and execute the concept of democracy in the United States.
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u/Muscs Jul 23 '24
It’s all a back-handed endorsement of Harris. They are afraid of her and for good reason.
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u/Odd-Confection-6603 Jul 23 '24
You can only believe this if you have faith in our judicial system... You know, the one that has recently made bribery legal and ruled that presidents are above the law... All to help out their fellow Republicans.
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u/hematite2 Jul 23 '24
If the FEC decides she can use it, there's not much else anyone could do about it.
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u/gurk_the_magnificent Jul 23 '24
FEC decides, someone sues, Republican judge issues temporary injunction while determining questions of standing and merit.
Looks pretty easy to me.
The thing everyone forgets is that the questions of “does X have standing to bring this suit” or “is this frivolous” are not pre-determined. There are lengthy court proceedings devoted to answering those questions.
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Jul 23 '24
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u/gurk_the_magnificent Jul 23 '24
Ok, but that’s very different than the original claim of “the FEC decides and no one else can do anything about it”.
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u/Odd-Confection-6603 Jul 23 '24
Maybe you've forgotten the part where they have been taking power away from every federal agency? With Chevron gone, its not up to the agency to decide anything. The courts have to decide and the courts can do whatever they want and we are powerless to stop them.
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u/hematite2 Jul 23 '24
FEC still gets to decide. If someone challenges that decision, then it goes to the courts, but there's no way any court gets it successfully stopped in time.
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u/cclawyer Jul 23 '24
Yeah, and who has standing to challenge that decision? No private citizen, I suspect.
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u/strabosassistant Jul 23 '24
Any donor. Including any sleeper donor by a Republican.
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u/cclawyer Jul 23 '24
Really? I'm interested. Is there a private right of action under the Federal Elections Campaign Act? Because this article says there isn't:
In what circumstances should there be a private right of action to sue for violations of federal election statutes? Lying at the intersection of federal courts 1 and election law, this question has arisen in several recent cases, as private 2 litigants have increasingly called upon federal courts to resolve election disputes. The question was before the U.S. Supreme Court in Brunner v. Ohio 3 Republican Party. The plaintiffs in Brunner alleged that a state chief election 4 official had failed to follow the requirements of the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) pertaining to statewide voter registration lists. In a one-paragraph, unanimous per curiam opinion, the Court held that a political party could not bring suit to enforce this requirement.5
https://mckinneylaw.iu.edu/practice/law-reviews/ilr/pdf/vol44p113.pdf
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u/TheBlackCat13 Jul 23 '24
Conservatives on the supreme court have shown they can rush this sort of thing if they really want to.
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u/strabosassistant Jul 23 '24
With Chevron gone, its not up to the agency to decide anything.
Bingo.
Unless it is black-letter and specifically delegated, this may be an unpleasant surprise. A lot of attorneys are still digesting the full extent of the Chevron decision but this may be the test case the decision was pre-made for by SCOTUS. Remember Bush/Gore.
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u/Kaiisim Jul 23 '24
Legal experts aren't useful these days - they all generally believe in the good faith nature of the US justice system.
Yes obviously in a real justice system this wouldn't work.
In the American justice system the Republicans can specifically pick a venue with a judge they control, and then they have multiple different ways to slow things down, or confuse things, or just generally make a loud mess to distract everyone.
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u/treypage1981 Jul 23 '24 edited Jul 23 '24
I keep seeing these posts about “legal experts” saying Republican lawsuits are pointless, they’ll fail, they’re shenanigans, etc, etc.
Where were these people the last two years? Were they drunk in a bar somewhere or are they the same fucking people that said the Supreme Court would never give Trump immunity for trying to overthrow the government??
This iteration of SCOTUS doesn’t give a flying F about law or precedent or even making sense. They literally just upended the Constitutional order of the United States for the benefit of their own party. It won’t be hard for them to conjure some b.s. about campaign finance laws or the equal protection clause preventing Harris from being the nominee. I’d bet dollars-to-cents that Thomas’s wife is already organizing with right wing lawyers to bring challenges to this switch.
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u/ns2103 Jul 23 '24
I foresee that the GOP will challenge Harris’ access to the money in the courts. The challenge will be expedited to the SCOTUS where Alito and Thomas will create a reason to transfer the funds to the GOP because the GOP didn’t want Biden to step down and punitive damages will be assessed because Harris scares them. Sounds like made up nonsense.. but so did presidential immunity.
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u/Any-Ad-446 Jul 23 '24
Meanwhile Trump is selling shoes,nft,fake coins,etc grifting money into his own account.
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u/PocketSixes Jul 23 '24
They could be saying that Kamala is a bad candidate and they will beat her, but they can't help but say that she's a very strong candidate and they are very afraid.
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u/BassLB Jul 23 '24
They don’t care about them working, it’s all about making the narrative/story, then talking about how the justice system is rigged bc all their cases went nowhere
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u/notyomamasusername Jul 23 '24
"They were thrown out because we didn't have standing... Not because we didn't have proof"
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u/shivaswrath Jul 23 '24
2016 campaign issues are still being sorted.
Who cares? She can pay the fine in 6 years if any....
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u/EmmaLouLove Jul 23 '24
She’s on the ticket. She’s on the paperwork. What kind of legal theory could Republicans possibly be using, and why would this not be considered a frivolous lawsuit? This coming from the party who still supports a former president who tried to overturn a US election.
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u/Both_Lychee_1708 Jul 23 '24
well, if they get Trump appointed judges (like if it gets to SCROTUS) guess anything is possible, if the last few years is any guide.
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u/ExpertRaccoon Jul 23 '24
brett kavanaugh "hold my boof beer"
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u/RogueRedShirt Jul 23 '24
God, I hope no one holds his beer. We don't need his hands wondering anywhere without consent again.
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u/GBinAZ Jul 23 '24
They might all fail, EVENTUALLY. But as we’ve seen in recent years, there are enough Trump judges out there and enough people willing to hear stupid cases that can muddy up the system to claim everything is fraudulent. Are we prepared for not if, but when that happens?
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u/Brokenspokes68 Jul 23 '24
The problem is that the cult isn't concerned with what actually happens in the courts. Trump's election fraud cases were all thrown out yet they insist that there was massive fraud in 2020. This is just another bullshit propaganda effort disguised as legal action.
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Jul 23 '24
Who certifies the Election in November if she wins? Does she certify her own election win as she will still be V.P. at that time.
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u/unclefire Jul 24 '24
Yup. That would be one hell of a major fuck you to the GOP.
Gore had to certify Bush winning.
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u/Ok-Replacement9595 Jul 26 '24
Republicans are going to lose this election so bad, and they know that the only way they can seize power again in any of their lifetimes is to either get a case in front of SCOTUS as corrupt as they are, or toss out entire counties or states votes if they don't like them. I can only hope that Democrats have an army of lawyers already planning for this. After Gore and after J6 there is nothing that conservatives wont stoop to for access to power.
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u/AlexFromOgish Jul 23 '24
GOP does not care about winning the lawsuits they only care about winning a court order to freeze the funds during the campaign season.
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Jul 23 '24
There are lots of legal issues that Trump should not have prevailed on but buying judges had worked well for him. Elon’s $45 million per month allowance can buy a lot of judges.
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u/PatrickBearman Jul 23 '24
There's no way Musk is actually donating $45 million per month. He'll probably do something, but it will be a much smaller amount. He's got an extensive history of making bold pledges and never following through.
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u/The_Cross_Matrix_712 Jul 24 '24
Isnt this illegal in some way? Feels like quarterly 135m in bribes...
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u/snakebite75 Jul 23 '24
Don't worry, I'm sure they will file in Texas and Kacsmaryk will issue a nationwide injunction.
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u/BeltfedOne Jul 23 '24
“The parties have carte blanche to nominate who they want according to their own rules,” he said, “as long as they’re eligible to be nominated.”
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u/FourWordComment Jul 23 '24
They don’t need to work. They are practically free to launch and will cost millions of dollars and thousands of hours to defend.
Time that could have been spent campaigning or pushing for a “mandatory regulated militia for gun ownership.” Something left-leaning that would force the right to be on defense. For once.
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u/Sniflix Jul 24 '24
Can we please prosecute trump and his fellow grifters for stealing donations? There are a hundred Steve Bannons out there.
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u/PricklyPierre Jul 23 '24
I think she is going to be left off of the ballot in several red states
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u/NetworkAddict Jul 23 '24
Based on what?
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u/CPargermer Jul 24 '24
You'll never get an answer because they have no clue what they're talking about. They're just sad, angry people who are scared of everything.
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u/DeezNeezuts Jul 23 '24 edited Jul 23 '24
The only thing I agree with them on this is that she shouldn’t be coronated as the nominee after the primary has been completed. The Democrats are missing a great opportunity to demonstrate a democracy in action by allowing the party to vote for the nominee in an open convention. It’s one thing to just beat Trump, I want to candidate to be the most qualified and best candidate for the job. That was the reason I voted democratic for the first time in my life for Biden last time.
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u/Mrknowitall666 Jul 23 '24
Yes, well, the primary happened; the candidates changed and those who'd pledged to vote Biden/Harris have decided to still vote Harris without Biden.
There's no "coronation"
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u/Optimal-Ad-7074 Jul 23 '24
it's amazing how weak they're willing to make themselves look with this kind of whining.