This may be the first time I’m writing the Open Thread the night before it’s scheduled to be published. I’m greeting at the polls starting at 7 am. Regardless, there’s some pretty current stuff to talk about.
Supreme Court Ixnays Trump’s Cali Voter Suppression Scheme:
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s push to force California to set aside thousands of ballots from people the federal government claims are noncitizens, a decision that came hours before the final day of voting in the pivotal midterm elections.
The high court refused to immediately intervene in a case involving 20,000 people the Republican administration flagged as likely noncitizens on the largely Democratic state’s voter rolls.
The swift rejection capped a string of losses for the president’s effort to intervene in the election before the counting of ballots to decide who controls Congress in the last two years of his second term. No justices publicly dissented.
Several lower courts also rejected the Justice Department’s push to set aside the challenged California ballots until the voters’ citizenship status could be verified. In Alaska, a judge did not even hold a hearing before dismissing a Trump-ordered suit to prevent a possible Democratic Senate win.
Also on Monday in Washington, another federal judge ruled against the administration’s efforts to make last-minute demands of California election officials, finding they violated the U.S. Constitution.
“The Executive Branch has likely violated the Constitution’s Elections Clause, which commits authority over election rules to the states and Congress alone,” Chief Judge James Boasberg wrote.
Pretty sure the courts’ pushback on the blatant illegality of DOJ and Trump is just beginning. In fact:
Judge Throws Out Retribution Prosecution Of Ex-FBI Agents:
A federal magistrate judge on Monday dismissed the Justice Department’s criminal case against two former FBI officials charged in connection with the bureau’s investigations into former President Joe Biden’s son.
Bradley Benavides and Nikki Floris were charged around two weeks ago with lying to Congress in 2023 about their knowledge of the FBI’s investigations into Biden’s son, Hunter Biden. It is one of several politically charged actions by the Justice Department under President Trump in the run-up to the midterm elections on Tuesday.
At a hearing in federal court in Washington, D.C., U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui castigated the government’s investigation into Floris and Benavides, describing it as rushed and riddled with errors.
The judge noted that the investigation into Floris and Benavides was opened on FBI Director Kash Patel’s orders the day after President Trump delivered a primetime address on national TV in mid-July. In that speech, Trump repeated his false claims about fraud in the 2020 election and urged the FBI to investigate.
Faruqui noted that the alleged false statements were made to Congress in 2023, yet the Justice Department waited three years to pursue the case. Prosecutors then brought charges some two weeks before the midterm elections, despite a DOJ policy prohibiting timing any action to influence an election.
That was not the only unusual decision by the department. The judge also noted that charges were filed as a criminal complaint, a document usually used when there is some need for urgency such as an imminent danger, a statute of limitations deadline or a risk of flight—none of which existed in this case.
The only event that was looming here, he said, was the midterms.
“I will not bury my head in the sand and pretend I cannot read a calendar,” Faruqui said. “I will not lobotomize myself that way.”
Saying the president was “grasping at straws,” a federal judge on Saturday threw out Donald Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal and media mogul Rupert Murdoch over a story reporting on his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.
U.S. District Judge Darrin Gayles in Miami dismissed the suit with prejudice, ruling that the president did not prove the defendants made defamatory statements with actual malice as required by law. The ruling said the lawsuit had attempted to “manufacture” flaws in the Journal’s investigative reporting.
When a case is thrown out “with prejudice,” it cannot be refiled again and the dismissal is permanent and incontrovertible.
Let’s cut through the BS–The courts are sick of Trump’s shit. This will continue. It’s time that the people who Trump goes after get compensated for his malice.
Yes, Trump Set In Motion The Seeds To His Looming Senate Losses:
It is a given of the 2026 midterms that a wave of still-uncertain magnitude is likely because of Donald Trump’s historic unpopularity. What gets less attention is how much the Senate races themselves — like who is running and whether an election is even being held — have been shaped very directly by his actions. Ohio, South Carolina, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas and Iowa all, amazingly, fall into this bucket.
Let’s start with Ohio and Florida. You wouldn’t have elections in these states at all if Trump hadn’t brought JD Vance and Marco Rubio into his administration.
In Iowa and Texas, Trump played central roles in driving incumbents Joni Ernst and John Cornyn out of public life.
In North Carolina too it’s hard to imagine Tom Tillis would have retired if Trump hadn’t essentially forced him to retire. In this case, though, Trump went on to gift the nomination to Michael Whatley as a make-good for babysitting Lara Trump when she was the head of the RNC. Whatley is, by bipartisan estimation, a uniquely weak candidate.
In South Carolina, Trump insisted on supporting Lindsey Graham’s sister as his permanent replacement. She’s still likely to win. But she is a uniquely weak candidate. Any actual South Carolina politician would almost certainly be faring better.
Georgia is hard to see at first. But John Ossoff would likely not be the incumbent at all if not for Trump’s 2020 election-stealing shenanigans.
Amazingly, this accounts for the vast majority of contested Senate races. In every case, the particular candidate or even the existence of a candidate (because there’s even an open seat) comes down to Trump’s treating the GOP as a tool to serve his immediate political and emotional needs.
What do you want to talk about?
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