Wouldn't the lack of standing be an aspect of the merits of the suit? In any case, the supreme court isn't the sole judge of the merits of a case, they are just the arbiters of the outcome.
That's my thinking -- an inability to comply could have been addressed with the court. Instead, it appears that they had no representation in front of the court in order to make that argument, have hearings and otherwise determine that compliance is impossible.
The merits of the case are one thing, however not appearing to address those merits (or lack thereof) seems to be the failure point.
The merits of the case were much more straightforward than the standing analysis. But if the plaintiffs didn't have standing, the merits wouldn't be reached. I was slightly surprised that they ruled on standing the way they did, but the underlying merits decision was completely unsurprising (because, as you say, this was a very clear overstepping — as top dems had admitted just months prior).
IANAL, but my understanding is that courts will make rulings without standing all the time. Most commonly in cases where constitutionality of a new law or statute is raised, without the law having gone into effect yet, not having affected anyone.
Lack of standing is lack of standing. It's not the courts job to hear random facts about things that aren't cases.
They did get to present cases where they had standing, and lost them. Guiliani couldn't even tell a judge whether he was alleging fraud or not. That doesn't mean they get to go to another court to present the same thing.
No to all of that, it was a civil not a criminal case.
The family brought the lawsuit, which was thrown out because they didn’t have standing. They lacked standing because the government hadn’t prosecuted them.
No, if they wanted to deny the case on its merits they could have done so. They chose to deny standing instead, probably to avoid pissing a lot of people off. They did not say it was impossible to grant relief, they said they would not grant relief. What this means is open to interpretation, for example, they could rule that the elections were conducted in violation of the Elections Clause but that it is up to the state legislatures to decide which electors to appoint, which would actually be a good outcome for the Trump campaign.
In order to say whether the case is good or not you would have to point to something specific that makes it legally weak. E.g. controlling precedent. Standing has no bearing on the merits of the case, so everyone using standing as an argument is not making a real argument but is just playing a shell game.
> But it’s in the Supreme Court so it can’t be completely without legal merit.
From my understanding, the lower courts haven't looked at that argument yet, since the question "do these people even have standing to sue" comes before any arguments.
Unfortunately, establishing standing is the hard part of the equation. And by hard, I mean effectively impossible. Clapper showed that quite clearly. And even in those instances where it might be possible, the DOJ will drop the case in question before they risk an undesirable ruling.
First, the position of the plaintiffs of those cases is that the actions of the “other half” have effectively disenfranchised them. If disenfranchisement is the issue at hand, it follows that one should investigate when someone claims to have been disenfranchised.
Second, every case that I’ve followed up on has been denied on the grounds of standing. My understanding is that this means that either the court believes that there was no harm or that the court believes that there is no reasonable way the outcome of the case could provide relief for harm that may have taken place. Either way, to my knowledge, none of the court cases have actually been heard. No evidence has been presented and no arguments have been made.
This "no standing" argument is really starting to piss me off. Are the judges blind to all the media releases in the past two years, or just pretending to be?
> - another judge said that there wasn't any evidence the plaintiff had suffered any harm from the data collection
Ugh. Where does it say in the 4th amendment that it's okay to seize and search all the documents without a warrant, as long as there's "no harm"?!
And it propagates all the way back down the stack (so to speak), meaning, the lower courts have to also refuse to hear the case. It doesn't mean they can't hear future cases where standing is clearly established.
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