At the very least, any judge who did so would almost certainly be saying goodbye to any aspirations to higher judicial position he might have had (not to mention the aspiration of merely keeping the position he already has).
Way to go, snipping my remark out of all its preceding context - and then replying as if that remark had failed to adequately account for some critical factor. That's some truly lawyer-like behavior, there!
But given that even the bit your retained explicitly refers to the "aspirations to higher judicial position [a judge] might have", I was quite clearly
not referring to SCOTUS judges - precisely because they have no such aspirations, as there is no higher judicial position to which they can advance. I'd have thought this was rather obvious, but apparently not ...
Of course, this doesn't explain the action of the Trump-picked SCOTUS justices who ruled against pro-Trump plaintiffs.
Of course it doesn't explain it - apart from the fact that I wasn't referring to SCOTUS (obviously - see above), merely "rul[ing] against pro-Trump plaintiffs" (on the one hand) and "seriously questioning or challenging (let alone actually overturning) a U.S. presidential election" (on the other hand) are not even remotely commensurable things. My remarks explicitly concerned the latter, not the former.
SCOTUS justices (you can't get higher than that) have life tenure, and it's extremely unlikely that they could ever be impeached for making an unpopular ruling, despite popular calls for such action -- e.g., "Impeach Earl Warren!" following the Brown decision (never mind that decision was unanimous).
That's nice.
However, non-SCOTUS justices - you know, the ones I was actually referring to: the ones you
can get higher than, and who do
not have tenure for life, and who
are more vulnerable to impeachment - are the ones who are going to initially make (or not) the rulings that SCOTUS eventually hears (or not) and decides to uphold (or not). "The buck starts there", so to speak - if it starts at all (which is why it is little wonder that such judges found procedural grounds for not grabbing on to such a hot potato
[1]).
The fact that the Court overruled Roe v. Wade suggests that it isn't gun-shy about making momentous rulings.
I didn't say "the [Supreme] Court" (i.e., SCOTUS judges) are gun-shy about making "momentous rulings" (although they are - and the higher the court, by the nature of higher courts, the greater the tendency to conservative circumspection). Again, I was quite clearly and explicitly referring to other non-SCOTUS judges being reluctant about making, not just "momentous rulings" in general, but a quite particular kind of
especially "momentous ruling" (and one that would be "historical" in more ways than rulings such as Roe v. Wade are often said to be)- namely, rulings that involve "seriously questioning or challenging (let alone actually overturning) a U.S. presidential election".
One could also point to Bush v. Gore.
Could one point to where, in Bush v. Gore, any court (SCOTUS or other) "seriously question[ed] or challeng[ed] (let alone actually overturn[ed]]) [the announced result of] a U.S. presidential election"? Because if one can't, I'm not seeing the relevance of Bush v. Gore to anything I said, unless it is merely that Bush v. Gore also had something to do with a presidential election. (And IIRC, there were justices who did not want to hear the case - or to rule in favor of either party - precisely because they did not want the Court to be seen as deciding the outcome of the election one way or the other.
[1])
[1] And i can't say I blame them, really.
Bush v. Gore ... Texas v. Pennsylvania ... Trump v. whomever ... corrupt and/or incompetent candidates on one hand ... incompetent and/or corrupt election systems/officials on the other ... who needs this clown-show shit? I'd probably wash my hands of it, too, if I could.
