DOJ Races to SCOTUS While Letting Parallel Case Drift

Obama Judge Blocks Citizenship Check on Mail Ballots, DOJ Begs Supreme Court to Step In

So let me get this straight. The president of the United States says, hey, maybe we should check whether people are actually citizens before they register to vote by mail in a federal election. And a federal judge in Massachusetts says no. Not just no, but no for the entire country, nationwide, all at once.

That judge is Indira Talwani. Obama appointee. And she has now blocked the U.S. Postal Service from implementing Section 3 of Trump’s Executive Order 14399 not once, not twice, but repeatedly, each time expanding the reach of her injunction until it covers every mailbox in America. Her reasoning? That requiring proof of citizenship on federal registration forms is, in her words, an “unconstitutional” directive that threatens the “fundamental right” to vote.

The fundamental right to vote. For whom, exactly? That’s the question nobody in the robe brigade wants to answer. Because the moment you ask it, the whole thing starts to smell.

U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who served as Trump’s personal attorney before taking the top spot at DOJ, is now begging the Supreme Court to issue a stay. His argument is simple and correct: if the Court doesn’t act fast, Talwani’s “erroneous orders” will run out the clock on the government’s ability to implement the citizenship check before November. Less than 90 days remain. The midterms are coming whether the judiciary likes it or not.

“It is critical that the Court act promptly on the pending stay,” Sauer wrote. “Otherwise, the district court’s erroneous orders will effectively run out the clock on the government’s ability to implement Section 3 of the Executive Order for the federal elections in November, thereby causing irreparable harm to the federal government, the public, and election integrity.”

Now here is where it gets interesting, and by interesting I mean rotten. In a separate but related case challenging the same proof-of-citizenship requirement, the DOJ quietly signaled this week that it will not appeal the judge’s order blocking the rule. They’re letting that lawsuit drift toward summary judgment, with discovery closing in September and a final ruling possibly not until late fall. After the election. Funny how that works.

So on one hand, DOJ is sprinting to the Supreme Court screaming urgency. On the other hand, they’re content to let a parallel case crawl through discovery at a pace that guarantees nothing changes before November. Ask yourself who benefits from that arrangement. The plaintiffs in the slow-walk case include the Democratic Party, the League of Women Voters, and the League of United Latin American Citizens. They call Trump’s order an “unprecedented assault on states’ constitutional authority.” The states themselves, meanwhile, are opposing the stay at the Supreme Court, warning about the “intolerable risk” of “disenfranchising a substantial number of voters.”

Disenfranchising. There’s that word again. Every time someone suggests verifying citizenship, the same crowd reaches for the same word, as if asking for a passport or a birth certificate is the moral equivalent of a poll tax. The First Circuit Court of Appeals backed Talwani in a 2-1 decision, with the majority noting that Trump had “directed unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials in how states administer elections.” Unprecedented. Another favorite. As if the federal government has no stake in whether federal elections are clean.

Timothy Holdiness (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia Commons

The whole play is obvious if you step back. Stall in one court, scream urgency in another, and bet that the clock runs out before anyone can enforce a commonsense rule that every sane country on earth already follows. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to see the pattern. You just need a calendar and a functioning memory.

The Supreme Court has the stay application. Whether six justices have the nerve to grant it before November is the only question that matters. Because if they don’t, the clock doesn’t just run out on Section 3. It runs out on the idea that the federal government has any say at all in keeping its own elections honest.

Sources:

Law&Crime: DOJ tells SCOTUS judge’s orders show urgent need to act

Democracy Docket: DOJ won’t appeal judge’s order against Trump voting decree