Errata: I pushed the wrong button and sent out tomorrow’s book report this morning. The zoom meeting will be tomorrow morning at noon ET/9 am PT. My apologies for the confusion…
— Trump’s Justice Department has sued to throw out Alaska’s Senate election before anybody’s finished voting in it, but — surprise! — only if the Democrat wins. Just 12 days before Election Day, Trump’s corrupt Attorney General has filed an unprecedented lawsuit demanding a federal judge block the state of Alaska from certifying its Senate race unless the incumbent Republican, Dan Sullivan, wins. Trump is now saying that he ordered this outrage. There are two Republican Dan Sullivans on the ballot, the first being their actual Republican guy and the other a guy with the same name from a remote part of the state. (The Democrats did NOT put him up to it; he’s just an eccentric Alaskan.) When Republicans tried to get the second/spoiler Dan Sullivan kicked off the ballot it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled that anybody named Dan Sullivan or anything else had the First Amendment right to speak on the issues and run for office. The state is trying to reduce confusion by making it clear on the ballot that the “real” Dan Sullivan is a Republican and the incumbent; the other DS won’t get either designation. But Trump’s subservient DOJ says that’s not enough and if Democrat Mary Peltola wins they’re claiming it’ll be because of “ballot confusion”…and she’s currently leading in the polls by two points. The same day, AG and former Trump criminal defense lawyer Todd Blanche refused to promise never to block a state’s certification, so this happening in other states, too, is moving from weird to probable. The US Constitution hands elections to the states, and a federal court has no business pre-rejecting a result that hasn’t happened yet, but the law and the Constitution have rarely stopped this criminal enterprise that’s taken over the GOP from moving ahead. And if they succeed in Alaska, it’s a safe bet they’ll try contesting as many Democratic victories as they can elsewhere. Will the six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court again ignore the Constitution and the law to go along with Trump’s efforts to turn America into Russia (remember, as Bette Dangerous points out, 4 of them worked successfully to overturn the 2000 election and deny Al Gore his victory)? Stay tuned…
— The Supreme Court just told New Hampshire’s college students to go find a different ID two weeks before an election, and did it in the name of not changing the rules too close to an election. While Texas allows voters to use a gun permit as ID to vote, in an unsigned one-paragraph order Thursday the US Supreme Court overturned a lower court and an appeals court order so they could forbid New Hampshire college students from using student ID. The so-called “Purcell principle” — long followed by the Court — says that decisions that could influence the conduct or outcome of an election shouldn’t be handed down within 90 days of that election, as Kentanji Brown Jackson pointed out in her dissent, saying they shouldn’t now “disturb a clearly justifiable federal-court order.” But here we are and this GOP-dominated Court has been doing everything they can to tilt elections toward Republicans for at least 20 years.