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John Roberts sticks two more knives in democracy’s back
The mail voting and ballroom decisions are a travesty.
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President Trump is catastrophically, comprehensively, wrecking our democratic order, but he couldn’t do it without the Worst Chief Justice of All Time, John Roberts, and the rest of the Supreme Court’s MAGA majority.
Trump should probably send the nation’s highest jurists a fruit basket or something as a wee bit of thanks for their latest gifts: the right to wreck the midterm elections and the right to keep building the bribe-funded ballroom.
The former is courtesy of the Court’s six conservatives, but the latter is a solo Roberts joint. Put another way, the mail-in ballots case is a shadow docket travesty, while the ballroom is an administrative stay travesty. Both are corrosive to democracy.
Up first: teeing up letting Trump screw with the midterms in an extremely unconstitutional fashion, because of course Trump will suffer immense harm if he can’t get his way.
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First, let’s be clear about a smallish silver lining here: the mail-in ballots decision is both reprehensible and a mess, but it doesn’t quite do what some of the reporting says it does. It doesn’t mean that the US Postal Service Final Rule, promulgated last Friday, goes into effect. A different case, brought by the League of Women Voters, still enjoins the administration from implementing that rule, and as Steve Vladeck notes, the litigation on that is yet to come.
But that doesn’t really make things better, at least as far as the whole constitutional crisis part goes. That’s because the Court’s right-wingers continue to swallow the Trump administration’s laughable lies about what they are doing, lies that contradict both their own public statements and the dictates of logic.
The majority’s decision here pretends to be a narrow one based only on the technical concept of standing — whether the 23 states that sued to block this have the right to sue at this point. The majority decided they did not, agreeing with Trump that the executive order doesn’t do anything yet and can’t be challenged until it does.
To get there, they had to write nonsense sentences about how this executive order, which Trump has touted as critical to ensuring election integrity, is nothing but “an internal directive from the President to his subordinates mandating that certain agencies pursue certain policies. It neither requires nor forbids anything of anyone outside the Executive Branch.”
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent points out what hogwash this is, because the administration is simultaneously arguing two wholly incompatible things:
“Yet even as the Government represents that it may not implement the Executive Order at all for purposes of defeating standing, it insists that it seeks to implement the Executive Order immediately for purposes of establi