The Republican challenges to the election outcomes in Penn., Ga., Michigan., and Wisconsin all seem party symptomatic of the extreme legal positivism that's been part of the American right for years.

It's like the argument against illegal immigration that does, "It's illegal. Period. What part of illegal don't you understand?" Or the idea it doesn't matter what happens to prison inmates because "they wouldn't be there if they hadn't broken the law."

It's a simplistic binary: The law says what it says, and that's it. There's no consideration for other values, or indeed other laws that make the legal argument more complex. So Trump backers, following in this tradition, say "election law is election law, and that's it."

That's why there's this myopic focus on "only state legislatures can make election law." It completely ignores several factors. But mainly, it ignores the fact that courts are simply not going to disenfranchise millions of people who voted under the rules that states presented...

to them at the time. Courts are not going to toss those votes made in good faith, even if the process that got to those rules is dubious. Any injunction is going to be leveled at the lower courts/executive branch officials alone, not the voters.

The fact Republicans didn't challenge these changes *until after Trump lost* (the legal theory of latches) and they are not disputing their down-ballot wins, shows they're guilty of opportunistic selectivism, too.

To sum up, "what part of illegal don't you understand?" is not, historically under the common law or constitutionally, the decisive argument the right in general and Trump supporters -- in this instance -- in particular, think it is. It never has been.

And the courts are not going to endorse a remedy (tossing millions of good-faith votes) that is orders of magnitude more severe than the claimed procedural error. To do so would be a greater affront to the legal/constitutional principles at stake.

This has been Legal Analysis from Someone Who Didn't Go to Law School Much Less Harvard Law.