Whoever first quipped “It’s all over but the counting” forgot about the lawyers. Over the past year, Democrats and their allies marched through state after state in an unprecedented legal campaign to upend longstanding rules of election administration. The result is more uncertainty than ever over the basic rules of voting, and an increased likelihood that races will have to be called by the courts. Although it’s too early to say for certain, that may include the presidential election.

President Trump on Monday signed an executive order establishing a federal 1776 Commission to promote “patriotic education.”

Trump tweeted on the eve of Election Day: “Just signed an order to establish the 1776 Commission. We will stop the radical indoctrination of our students, and restore PATRIOTIC EDUCATION to our schools!”

The president touted the order moments later at a campaign rally in Scranton, Pa., saying, “I just signed that executive order to teach your students pro-American values.”

Trump announced the idea in September in response to the removal of statues of colonial and revolutionary figures during national anti-police brutality and anti-racism protests linked to the May killing of George Floyd by Minnesota police.

The actual order instructs Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to set up the commission within 120 days. It’s up to 20 presidentially appointed members will serve for two years. Ex-officio seats go to the secretaries of education, state, interior, defense and housing and urban development.

The order allows agencies to “promote patriotic education” with federal resources.

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Picture a female jurist who has consistently defied social expectations imposed on women and whose legal thinking is closely bound up with her faith. No, I’m not talking about Amy Coney Barrett, reported to top President Trump’s list of candidates to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat. I’m talking about Ginsburg herself.

Ginsburg believed fervently that conventional expectations shouldn’t hinder women as they seek their full, fair share of public life. Nor was she shy about how her Jewish faith shaped her judicial mind. In an essay for the American Jewish Committee published in 1993, she wrote: “Laws as protectors of the oppressed, the poor, the loner, is evident in the work of my Jewish predecessors. . . . The biblical command ‘Justice, justice shalt thou pursue’ is a strand that ties them together.”

By those criteria, Barrett would make a most worthy successor to RBG. In nominating the 48-year-old Louisianan, the president would present the nation with an inspiring vision of what it means to be an American woman in 2020 — one that could by turns surprise and captivate the suburban women Trump is keen to court while also delivering for the GOP base.

Enlarge Image Federal Judge Amy Coney Barrettvia REUTERS“Amy represents an opportunity to showcase a generationally brilliant, special intellect — who also is a mom,” says O. Carter Snead, Barrett’s longtime faculty colleague at the Notre Dame law school, where Barrett also received her law degree.

Her rare combination of hyper-intelligence and humility is a matter of bipartisan consensus. “The smartest person in the room and also the most humble” was how Snead and two other sources intimately familiar with Barrett described her, echoing each other almost verbatim.

Harvard Law School prof Noah Feldman — a liberal who testified before Congress in favor of ­impeaching the president — hailed her as “a truly brilliant lawyer” in a 2018 column. Feldman should know. He and Barrett were members of the same class of Supreme Court clerks in 1998.

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