re: #147 Dopamine Fish

California has also used this threat to avoid challenges to its strict environmental regulations. It makes sense; this is also the primary reason why intra-state challenges are, as a rule, not permitted before the Supreme Court as a matter of course. This came up in the context of Texas v. Pennsylvania et al., when felon Attorney General Ken Paxton tried to sue other states for violating Texas’s electoral rights.

My wingnut AG joined that suit. Thanks for wasting my tax money.

There are cases where the Supreme Court will get involved in fights between states, but it normally has to be a novel application of law.

Two come off the top of my head.

The first was when arguments over islands in Lake Erie between Michigan and Ohio reached a crescendo in 1973 when the Supreme Court decided the boundary in Lake Erie as a relic of the Toledo Strip War. At odds: Turtle Island (privately owned). The court decided the boundary in the lake and divided Turtle Island between the two states.

The other was when the Missouri River changed course and lopped off part of Council Bluffs from Iowa, putting it on our side of the river and surrounded by Omaha. The court decided that the land still belonged to Iowa, and that since Council Bluffs no longer could provide city services it could become a city in its own right. Thus the birth of Carter Lake, Iowa, which during Prohibition was a haven of casinos and liquor, hangout of gangsters, and generally all-around pain for Omaha to deal with.

Most recently Carter Lake made the news because Mike Pence held a rally there for Donald Trump in the last election (the first time a Presidential rally was held in that city; the idea was to draw crowds from Omaha to prevent NE-2 from going for Biden—that failed).