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Shortly after I sent out a notice that Steve Vladeck and I would convene tomorrow morning to discuss recent legal developments, including Trump’s effort to steamroll ahead with his Executive Order on mail-in voting, the Supreme Court weighed in. Not in the case brought by the League of Women Voters that we’ve been discussing; the one where Judge Talwani imposed a nationwide ban on letting the EO go into effect. Instead, the Court ruled on in the case brought by Blue State AGs, a case we’ve only been discussing, and one where the injunction only applied in the states that sued. The Court did away with that injunction.
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The Court’s order is an unsigned per curiam, with dissents from Justices Sotomayor and Jackson. Justice Jackson takes issue with the majority’s assessment that the administration is harmed if it can’t move forward with the EO. She writes, “This is not a close call. The Government suffers no harm from an injunction limiting unlawful actions, much less “hypothetical” and “speculative” acts that the Government says it was not even sure it would take. Denying this stay request preserves the status quo in the fraught period ahead of a national election. Granting it, on the other hand, risks significant harm, including continued affronts to the Plaintiff States’ sovereign interests, a strain on their pocketbooks, and the possibility that last-minute rule changes will cause confusion on the ground, jeopardizing the public’s interest in a fair and orderly election cycle.”
As I’ve observed before, and it’s obviously not an entirely cynical point, the Roberts Court invokes the Purcell principle to protect Republican voters, but seems far less inclined to do so when Democratic voters’ interests are at stake, as it did post-Callais.
Steve and I thought we’d get together tonight to tee up that issue and clarify what happened, what it means, and what comes next. So join us tonight at 8. It’s not often that we do the breaking news thing around here—we are, after all, about analysis, not news. But tonight, the two intersect, and we’re on.
We’re in this together,
Joyce
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