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“You’re saying the ruse was to make the PA legislature do its duty?”

Sort of... at least, facially structured to look that way. If the PA legislature had “done their duty” it would have had two or three direct consequences:

One, by not taking action they avoid giving the court the ability to look at it and say... “hey, thanks... looks good enough from here, and now we don’t need to do anything”.

By PAL not acting, the court can’t dodge its responsibility for addressing the errors in law served up by others, including lower courts. And, by not acting, not only is the path to the court cleared, the PAL isn’t prevented from acting again in the future, only with more authority... given a court ruling backing them up. Good in that, too... including that the finding of a court gives all the legislature(S) the ability to act on and in principle, rather than be accused of acting cravenly and purely politically. Win the case... and all the states flip... even while appearing to have a backbone we know they lack.

There is no denying that the entire exercise, thus far, has been one of Trump standing up for doing the right thing, Democrats doing the wrong thing, and everyone else trying to avoid responsibility. Only, in PA, that result actually has advantages that accrue to those doing the right thing.

Two, by taking the action, it would have enabled the provisions in law that impose the deadline issue. By not taking action, the imposition of a deadline created based on an action taken is avoided... leaving the court no valid reason to avoid hearing the issue only because the (non-operative) deadline has passed.

Three, by PAL taking the action, even if fully justified, it would have opened the door to arguing endlessly about IF the specific act was justified, rightly done, etc. By avoiding action, they prevent the court addressing any other subject than “did the election as conducted comply with the law and the Constitution”. If it didn’t, then you can talk about what is best to do about it.

Bush v Gore was a mess: complex, convoluted, with too many overlapping arguments resulting from the cross purposes inherent in the conflicts in its structure.

This case, in contrast, has a laser-like focus on one thing.

The resulting clarity in the dispute... likely to prevent anything but a reflection of that clarity in result.

This case doesn’t give the justices much of substance in conflicting arguments to hide behind.

They’ll either agree that law means something... and it has to be complied with... or they’ll validate that the law doesn’t matter, and you can ignore it and make things up as you go along.

Roberts... is going to hate it. No fig leaves here.