 It is impossible to overstate the gravity of this moment, and how serious this is. This could be the end, literally. This could be the end of U.S. democracy. And again, it's not like we really had a functioning democracy in the first place. But what's left of it goes away like that. That's it. That's the end. That was my reaction from nearly a year ago to news that the Supreme Court would be taking up independent state legislature theory in the case of Morvey Harper. Now the case is about North Carolina's gerrymandered map, but the argument itself centered around this democracy ending theory that three justices presumably were going to support because at the time NPR reported that Gorsuch, Alito and Thomas all signaled support for independent state legislature theory, which means that we just needed two more votes and that would functionally mean the end of U.S. democracy. But let me catch up to speed. If you haven't been following this case as closely as I have. So let's look at another short clip from that same video that I uploaded on July 1st of last year. So as Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow explains, independent state legislature theory attempts to vest all control of elections in the hands of only the state legislature, letting them throw out the decisions of state courts, redistricting commissions, secretaries of state, and even state constitutions. It's a theory that University of Michigan law assistant professor Leah Litman and Cardozo law professor Kate Shaw say should have been called the state legislature as the end of democracy theory in an upcoming paper that heavily critiques the doctrine. If the court applies this theory, because Republicans control both legislative houses in 30 states, including swing states like here in Michigan, it allows them and only them the ability to choose how an election is decided, run, and what districts should look like. If the Supreme Court enshrines independent state legislature theory, it means Trump's Republican Party won't need a coup after the election to install him as president in 2024. They can just change the rules and swing states ahead of time to ensure they get the outcome they want. So as Ken Clippenstein puts it, looks like the Supreme Court is trying to finish what Trump started. In other words, if the Supreme Court embraces this bogus theory, they are instilling in state legislatures virtually unlimited power when it comes to elections. So in the event, for example, there's a presidential election and a Democrat wins in a state like Michigan that's dominated by Republicans. Republicans can do what Trump wanted them to do last time and they can do this legally. They can just toss out the results of the election and appoint their own electors to the Electoral College. So in that state, the legislature can unilaterally decide who everyone is choosing as president, removing the choice from voters entirely, allowing them virtually unlimited power to override secretaries of state, the state constitution. It's genuinely tyrannical. And this is something that they're going to be taking up. So by 2024, many, many states might lose the ability to choose the president, which means that Republicans from here on out, they permanently will win. So needless to say, this could have been one of the most consequential Supreme Court decisions in our country's history, effectively ending democracy as we know it. But thankfully, that did not happen because they decided to not kill democracy today. As more perfect union explains, in a six three decision, the Supreme Court decides Morvey Harper and rejects the independent state legislature theory, which claimed state legislatures have total authority over elections. This ruling ensures that courts can still strike down state election laws and maps. Now we're going to get to the specifics in a moment, but let's just all pause for a moment and take a collective deep breath together. Feels good to get this news. We were this close to losing democracy, but we didn't. The Supreme Court outright rejected this bogus theory, which is good to see. This doesn't mean that everything is peachy keen, obviously, but things could have gone a lot worse if the Supreme Court embraced this bogus legal theory. And I think that that's genuinely good news. And as late senior writer on legal issues explains, Chief Justice John Roberts opinion for the court holds that state legislatures do not have plenary authority over election law. That just means unlimited authority, by the way. And that federal courts do not have freestanding authority to strike down election laws that ostensibly conflict with the state legislature's preferences. He continues, in my view, the decision in Morvey Harper is a huge victory for democracy, ensuring that state courts can continue to review election laws enacted by state legislatures under state constitutions and that federal courts do not have freewheeling power to meddle in state election schemes. And finally, he says, only Justices Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch dissent and Alito only dissents on grounds that the court should have dismissed the case. Kavanaugh and Barrett joined Robert's opinion in full. This is a route for proponents of the independence they legislate your theory. So it wasn't even as close as we all thought because Alito dissented on grounds that they shouldn't have taken up the case. So this is this is really a relief to see. Having said that, though, not to read on everyone's parade, we really can't let our collective relief distract us from the fact that there's still two Supreme Court justices who voted against democracy. As Richard L. Hason of Slade explains, Justice Clarence Thomas joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, two of the most conservative members of the court, dissented and embraced a version of this extreme theory. Justice Samuel Alito also joined part of Thomas's dissent, which argued that the case should be dismissed on mootness grounds as the partisan makeup of the North Carolina Supreme Court has since changed hands and the new court has since rejected the findings of the earlier one. So I think that the finer details of this case are going to be probably glossed over by people who are just relieved to see the outcome went in the direction of democracy. But I think it is very important that we know where the justices stand precisely, especially when it comes to issues like this of immense importance. So that's one thing to keep in mind why Alito dissented. But another thing to keep in mind is what Hason calls a time bomb within this decision. And that is something that I think we shouldn't necessarily be too freaked out about, but it's something that we should be cognizant of. So Hason continues, more is not all good news. In the last part of his majority opinion for the court, the chief justice got the liberal justices to sign on to a version of judicial review that is going to give the federal courts and especially the Supreme Court itself, the last word in election disputes. The court held that state courts may not transgress the ordinary bounds of judicial review, such that they irrigate to themselves the power vested in state legislatures to regulate federal elections. To understand these dense words, we need to go back to the last time the Supreme Court decided a major election case, the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision, a case cited in more for the first time ever in a majority opinion in the 23 years since that decision in Bush. The Florida Supreme Court had ordered a recount of only certain ballots in Florida to determine if Democrat Al Gore or Republican George W. Bush had won the state's electoral college votes and therefore the presidency. At the time, Bush was ahead by only hundreds of votes out of millions cast. After the Florida court ordered the recount, Bush appealed to the US Supreme Court. A majority held that the recount ordered by the Florida court violated the Equal Protection Clause because there was no guarantee that uniform standards were used or could be used to conduct it. But three justices, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, joined by justices Antonin Scalia and Thomas, adopted this milder version of the independent state legislature theory at the time. In essence, they argued that the Florida court's interpretation of the Florida election statutes to allow this recount was so far from ordinary statutory interpretation that the Florida court was essentially making up the law for itself and taking away the legislature's power to decide the rules for conducting federal elections in the first instance in this milder version of the independent state legislature theory that the court embraced and more. It did not spell out its contours and whether to adopt the Rehnquist-Busch approach or some other approach, but Kavanaugh in a concurrence endorsed the Rehnquist approach and said that engaging in this second guessing, federal courts need to compare election law in the state in earlier decisions. The greater the deviation, the more likely they'd be to find a violation of the independent state legislature theory. Make no mistake, this apparent new test would give great power to federal courts, especially to the U.S. Supreme Court to second guess state court rulings in the most sensitive cases. So there's a little bit of an FYI for you all, but even with that in mind, I don't want to be overly negative here because the most important takeaway from this news, as Wendy Weiser of the Brennan Center for Justice puts it, is that ISLT is dead. This crackpot theory could have decimated many voting rights and been a real chaos agent for our elections. It is no longer a thing. State courts can freely enforce state constitutional rights and guarantees election officials can freely administer elections. So that's the bottom line, and that's what I want the main takeaway to be from this video, not negativity, even though you should know about the details of this case. Our very flawed and fragile democracy will live to see another day. And during these dark times when the far right is winning and far right extremism reigns supreme and has taken over many institutions within our governments, I think that this is genuinely good news worth celebrating, especially considering the fact that we don't get good news like this very often. So we can all breathe a little bit easier, knowing that at least one of these democracy slang demons has been defeated.