The law says you can't purge voter rolls within 90 days of an election. Nevertheless, Gov. Glenn Youngkin of Virginia has been removing suspected noncitizens from voter lists ever since August. This runs the risk of leaving people with too little time to fix things if an inevitable mistake is made.
In any case, it's a plain violation of black letter law. A trial court agreed and so did a unanimous appellate panel. But today the Supreme Court allowed the purge to continue. The three Democrats objected, but the Republican justices in the majority outvoted them.
What the hell is going on? The case was on the emergency docket so no reason was given for the decision. But what justification could there possibly be? Are Republicans on the Court trying to send a message that they're just partisan hacks and we'd all better get used to it?
"Are Republicans on the Court trying to send a message that they're just partisan hacks and we'd all better get used to it?"
Yes. This has been another simple answer to a silly question.
They have been saying this for a while now.
Or maybe they just don't care whether you think they're partisan hacks. They just do what it takes for people on their side.
This is a nod to Trump. A not so subtle quid pro quo. He got them their conservative majority, they help him cheat to get back into the Whitehouse. With a wink, wink, nudge, nudge. I'm sure more of these rulings are coming if Trump loses the election.
Yes. This has been another simple answer to a silly question.
Disagree. I don't think they're trying to send a message about their full on political work on behalf of Movement Conservatism.
Rather, they simply don't care one way or another about which message gets transmitted.
They care about results (helping Movement Conservatism) and deliverables. Here was an opportunity to potentially help Republicans in close races in that state (Virginia itself is obviously going to be taken by Harris).
But who knows which races end up deciding control of the House?
"What the hell is going on?" is a pretty naive question at this point.
Yup.
The inability of some people to recognize rhetorical questions baffles me.
They're sending a message that their goal is dictatorship and everyone else can suck their dicks or die.
Correction: suck their dick and die.
Idk. There are 6 dicks on the Court who (minus 1) each have a dick that they would love every individual liberal and centrist who appear before the Court to suck. Sounds like the plural dicks might be correct here, and as the anti-Kamala T shirts imply, it is possible for 1 person to suck multiple dicks.
Are we still in denial? Prepare to fight.
Can you do that while trolling from your mom’s basement? It would be such a shame to lose your contributions to society in Civil War 2.
Two of them are 110% total partisan hacks -- Alito and Thomas.
One of them is a 99% political hack but sometimes (1%) likes to pretend that he isn't -- Gorsuch.
Three of them think Democrats are harmless but are scared shitless of their own -- Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett.
Three of them are representative of the % of Americans who would actually step up and do the right thing -- Brown Jackson, Kagan, and Sotomayor.
In 2020 Trump's claims of fraud were so specious that he lost in 61 of the 61 court cases they filed. That included many Trump-appointed judges. I don't expect this year to be any different. Thomas and Alito might agree with anything Trump says, but if he has no more behind him than he did four years ago, he's not going to get Roberts, Kavanaugh and Barrett to go that far out on a limb for him.
It's not that they're going out on a limb for Trump; it's that they fear for the lives of their family members and themselves, as well as losing friends and colleagues who will ghost them if they rule against Trump.
True, but why wouldn't Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson be subject to the same fears? Is it that Dem/lib folks are braver or is it just that it's only Rep/cons who get the death threats because they're seen as betraying their own cause?
Yes
What gets me is there are a lot of people who vote for Republicans who remain utterly unaware of anything Republicans actually do and what they're all about and who will insist that I am way over-reacting to all this and I need to relax, chill out, and everything will be just fine.
How to reach the confidently ignorant? They always vote and they will always vote for fantasy.
How? By making them uncomfortable? I mean blue hair usually drives them over the edge – just price eggs out of reach.
Or set them out of reach on the high shelf and the low shelf, they're so stiff they'll never be able to wrap their heads around it.
Heehee
Just become a vegan and the price of eggs won't concern you anymore.
Democrats always bail out, provide cover for and clean up after Republican excesses. So the voters NEVER actually experience unbridled GOP rule,* and only experience GOP-getting-some-stuff-halfassed-done-with-lots-of-Dem-votes for longer than about 4-8 years at a stretch. This leaves many voters unable to distinguish between Democratic and Republican governance.
True neverending GOP rule will come as a great shock to all but the most attractive and wealthiest.
*unless they live in the increasingly ungovernable red states, but even there, federal judges rein in Republican excesses (until recent years).
If Trump would only hurt his base, which is a given, I'd be OK with him winning. Unfortunately thats not the case. His idiotic economic policies will hurt everyone. But maybe that's what we need. An unrestrained Trump presidency. Maybe it needs to get really bad before people snap out of their cult trance. But maybe I'm giving them too much credit.
Given that just a few months ago the court made up Presidential immunity, how could there be any surprise here?
Of course this happened. There will be more to come.
The supreme court has put themselves above the law. It started years ago and this is the latest salvo.
Not only above the law, above the Constitution, which explicitly permits indictment and prosecution of an ex-President, without noting any exceptions.
Huh. Is it possible to sue Youngkin for defrauding voters of their right to vote, via a normal process? Can we find someone who has been harmed by this?
The Virginia ACLU's suit already included actual voters who were citizens and residents of Virginia unfairly purged. The local media has already interviewed dozens of people purged. I've read that 6,000 voters were purged and about 1,600 were determined to be US citizens eligible to vote so that's about 1 in 4 false positives.
The report on NPR stated that (re-)registration is allowed up to and including Election Day, and that legal voters could vote a provisional ballot. It did not further describe the process — what a voter must do/provide to have his/her ballot counted. Would a court only find harm if a rightful voter had a vote disallowed, or is there some degree of hassle that counts as ‘harm’?
If you read a story in NPR, many of those purged are U.S. citizens, maybe up to 25%. Many of the individuals who are U.S citizens did not check because they didn’t notice it at the end of the form. I don’t understand what logic (they don’t say) the Supreme Court used to invalidate a U.S federal law.
They don’t say what logic the Court used to defend its decision because the Court never issues any documentation of that for cases on the shadow docket, like this case was. They all simply vote and majority rules, with no explanation or anything else for lower judges to go on in future similar cases. Very similar to how a jury operates, except that jury decisions affect many many many fewer people (typically just the defendant, the victims and the victim’s families). The jury that found Trump guilty of 34 felonies didn’t explain itself, the jury that left OJ off the hook didn’t explain itself either, and this Court will also never explain itself on its shadow docket rulings. (Congress should really get around to reforming the shadow docket, along side a thousand other items that are causing democracy and the rule of law to erode, but it won’t.)
Jury decisions *typically* affect many many many fewer people, is what I meant to write, despite the examples I gave. The examples I gave of juries making decisions that affect millions of other people are few and far between.
Hear, hear!
Thankfully, at least in Virginia, there is same-day registration that allows you to cast a provisional ballot that day. It's still another obstacle though, which is the whole point.
And it doesn't change the "the law doesn't apply to us" lawfare that Republicans have been waging, successfully in this case.
I started to mention this ruling on a previous Drum post today but hit the wrong key & deleted it in my fury at this, another one of Youngkin's habits of ignoring not only the customary nineties wen dealing with Democratic legislators,but ignoring actual old dominion law - he has indicated when displeased by saying "That's not the Vitginis I get up in." (It was still segregated when my father moved us to what he said was the East.)
And although Dwight Yancey of Cardinal News opined that this won't appreciably affect the outcome, the fact is that not all disenfranchised voters will receive, read, & acted upon the notifications & submit a ballot for review & confirmation of their citizenship.
This is not the first time that "The future is ours, not theirs" Youngkin has simply ignored tradition, Virginia law, or Federal voting law. He removed voters from the rolls previously.
I remember an initial "party doesn't matter" video from this guy & how he has decided that he's not only are unity candidate/ governor, but another clutching trump's coattails
Are Republicans on the Court trying to send a message that they're just partisan hacks and we'd all better get used to it?
Yup they're saying they won't make the same mistake they made in 2020 when they "mistakenly" asked for actual evidence to make the case for voter fraud
The way I heard it explained, is that the 90 day rule applies to en masse changes of the voter roll. This generally pertains to eligible voters moving in and out of jurisdictions. However, the 90 days rule does not pertain to removing voters that were never eligible to vote in the first place (e.g. illegal aliens).
And how does that allow for the remedy of errors (inadvertent or deliberate)?
That is correct. The proper procedure is for the claimant/investigator/official to make a statement of facts pertaining to an individual, naming the individual unambiguously. Then the voting official can investigate the individual, and if that individual is not entitled to vote, he/she can bee removed from the rolls.
The Youngkin procedure is to make en masse changes, then leave it to the slowly turning wheels of the system to correct the errors sometime in the future (long after the election, of course).
Except, of course, that they did remove eligible voters.
Most of those interviewed so far are US citizens who failed to check a box on their DMV form when applying for a driver's license.
Fuck you Atticus. Hope your voter registration is deleted by error right before an election and you have to scramble to restore it.
This is the only response that actually addresses the legal question. And of course the commentariat's response is "fuck you."
Read my response, it is the correct one Atticus is parroting the VA GOP crazy defense. I'm an Oracle SME with decades of experience supporting various systems. I know databases and servers. This was plainly a systemic purge of voters, clearly forbidden by the 1993 Motor Votor Act during the 90 day safe harbor period. This is backed up by the ACLU evidence submitted that identified that 1 in 4 false positives using the parameters they did.
+1
His response doesn't accurately state the law or the illegal actions taken by the Governor. Atticus repeats propoganda and pulls these misdirections regularly.
Given this, the f- you's make sense.....
But there are several responses that directly address his legal misstatement and attempted misdirection.... somehow you missed all of those?
+1
They didn't miss it, they outright ignored it.
That was the outrageous reasoning of the AG and Youngkin. Meanwhile on planet earth an interface between two systems run daily based on descrete parameters is the very definition of "systemic" and plainly illegal.
My hunch is that the Robert's court is preparing to declare all of the 1993 motor voter act unconstitutional.
Where did you hear this explained...Fox News? Please. Or maybe it's "lots of people are saying"?
Weird, I'd call 6000 people 'mass'.
But weirdly, that's not what the law says. Atticus is, of course, lying again.
WTF are you talking about? I'm not lying about anything. I repeated how I heard the situation explained. (By someone on TV, don't recall who it was or the channel I was watching.)
Okay you're not lying you're oblivious to the facts of the matter.
Over the long term the Senate has a lot of say over the makeup of the federal judiciary. Give Wyoming or the Dakotas 50 times the per capita representation in the Senate as California, and pretty soon the judiciary will come up with opinions that please Wyoming and the Dakotas and displease California.
They've been saying it for some time now. Their decisions will be far worse if Trump wins. They won't even bother with any pretense.
They aren't trying to show you anything. They just don't care what impression you come away with. Six little dictators will run the country.
A short while back they decreed that the law doesn't apply to Republican presidents. They're just extending the idea now.