John Roberts: Public Enemy #1

The Trump administration’s strategy for the midterms is to get millions of legal votes thrown out in a purported attempt to stop completely imaginary “voter fraud.” Will John Roberts and his five minions allow this? Liz Dye has thoughts about how the litigation is proceeding:

The final rule propounded by the Post Office is every bit as invasive and infeasible as the plaintiffs warned.

It forces state officials to upload their voter rolls to the Post Office through a dedicated portal and purchase new envelopes with voter-specific bar codes for every piece of ballot mail. If a ballot is rejected, it won’t be delivered at all, and only the registrar can fix that — the voter won’t be told or given an opportunity to challenge her exclusion.

As multiple election officials attested, this cannot possibly be implemented in time for the November midterms. . . .

After the Supreme Court bigfooted in to stomp on Judge Talwani’s order, she invited the plaintiffs to amend their complaint to account for the fact that the rule has now been finalized. They took her up on it within hours, and by August 27, she had reimposed a temporary restraining order blocking the government from putting the rule into effect.

Temporary restraining orders are definitionally not appealable, since they last for a short time (typically 14 days) and are merely a placeholder to preserve the status quo while the judge makes a considered ruling. Here, Judge Talwani ordered the parties to appear on Thursday, September 3, for a hearing on a preliminary injunction, which is appealable. Despite this lightning-fast schedule, the government filed an immediate appeal to the First Circuit.

No other litigant would seek this kind of relief, much less get it. But the Trump administration routinely demands emergency relief from every adverse ruling, no matter how temporary. And in the main, it gets what it wants, thanks to the Supreme Court’s right-wing justices.

Time and again they leapt in to short-circuit the normal process to allow Trump to break the law, on the theory that saying no to the president is grave emergency. This is a power grab by the Court’s MAGA majority, who have kicked the legs out from under trial and appellate courts, at least when it comes to their golden-orange boy.

Lower court judges have contorted their jurisprudence and preemptively stayed their own orders against the government to avert the chaos of the Supreme Court’s six justices stomping in and doing it for them. In the case of Trump’s tariffs, lower courts allowed him to keep collecting billions of dollars in illegal levies because they anticipated — correctly! — that the Supreme Court would just make them do it anyway.

We watched this exact dynamic play out with respect to Trump’s illegal ballroom, which the Supreme Court just greenlit on Monday. That case had the added wrinkle of Chief Justice Roberts siding with the liberals in the minority to oppose the continued construction. But his righteous anger might ring more true if he hadn’t spend the past decade rewarding Trump for breaking the law and ignoring court orders.

And so the First Circuit sprinted to respond to the government’s demand that they stay Judge Talwani’s order and let the Trump administration enact this disastrous scheme immediately. The government points to special tracking requirements for shipping cremated pets as proof that it’s entitled to dummy up an entire ballot screening system and dump votes at scale.

The First Circuit raced to deal with the government’s emergency motion to set aside Judge Talwani’s order, instructing the parties to brief the case in less than 24 hours. As of this writing, they have not yet ruled — although if you asked me to bet, I’d wager that they’re likely to uphold the trial judge, as they did five weeks ago. But however they come down, we all understand that it will be a mere placeholder until the Supreme Court announces whether it will once again allow Trump to sow chaos and potentially steal the midterms.

Thanks, Chief Justice Roberts!

Roberts is the midwife of fascism in its contemporary American form, who very much thinks of himself as the very model of a modern major proponent of judicial rectitude and politically chaste jurisprudence. This schizoid personality gets expressed in various contradictory and confusing ways (see for example the ballroom case), and it’s impossible to know how it will work out in the context of the current litigation. Note Roberts does need one vote from among the rest of the sinister six to block Trump’s scheme to either steal or throw the midterms into complete chaos, with the latter being the next best thing from the viewpoint of the ongoing fascist takeover of the American political and legal systems.

Anybody who says they know how this is all going to play out is either a liar or a fool, because nobody knows, very much including John Roberts, arch-schmuck of our current calamity, and the worst chief justice in the largely disreputable history of the Supreme Court of the United States.