Trump’s Mail-in Voting Executive Order Is Ready to Begin Its Trip Back to SCOTUS

Posted on by John Light

Trump’s Mail-in Voting Order Is Blocked, Again, for Now

As I wrote a few days ago, we’re particularly focused on this battle, playing out in multiple courts, over Trump’s March executive order on mailed ballots because it remains a particularly viable way for his administration to inject chaos into the midterms. The order would require the U.S. Postal Service to make last-minute changes to how ballots are mailed, and for the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration to compile “a list of individuals confirmed to be United States citizens” who may vote. Both provisions lay the foundation for election administration chaos — the USPS changes would be implemented just as the residents of some states begin early voting — and for Trump and his agencies to spread new election conspiracy theories and launch new, baseless investigations into how the election was conducted and who voted that could be used to meddle with its outcome.

Trump’s ill motives aside, the order is a reconceptualization of how America does elections: the Constitution leaves it to states to oversee their elections, including for federal office. It leaves no role for the federal executive branch.

And, so, as this executive order ping-pongs from the Supreme Court to various lower courts and back, we are keeping close tabs on it.

Last night, U.S. District Court judge Indira Talwani again blocked the executive order from being implemented. The Supreme Court, and then a series of lower-court rulings, had unblocked it earlier this week.

That case is now, again, likely Supreme Court bound.

Here, in a nutshell, is what happened: Ahead of Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, the justices had been considering whether states could sue to stop the order before it was implemented. The conservative majority found they could not. But while the justices were writing their ruling, the Trump administration went ahead and began implementing the executive order, a bold move that violated a lower-court injunction.

Now, the way in which the administration implements the executive order is no longer a hypothetical: USPS has laid out plans with which states must comply. This, in theory, should mean that the conservative justices are ready to engage with the executive order on the merits. “Now that the USPS has published the Final Rule, Plaintiffs’ challenges are ripe,” Talwani wrote, agreeing with plaintiffs that the USPS rule was likely to sow chaos and impose significant burdens on states.

The administration is now arguing that it’s too late — too close to the election — to put a stop to its efforts to implement the executive order, a trollish approach given everything that got us here, but one that, experts worry, the conservatives on the high court might go for.

Republicans’ Bad Situation in Georgia

JACKSON, GEORGIA – MAY 19: Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mike Collins acknowledges supporters at a primary night event on May 19, 2026 in Jackson, Georgia. Positions on the ballot in Georgia also include state governor, secretary of state and attorney general. (Photo by Jason Allen/Getty Images)

Georgia is a purple state — one Trump won by 2.2% in 2024 and just barely lost in 2020 (a fact that has loomed large in his psyche and launched a half-decade of right-wing disinformation).

Despite that, Republicans seem to be in the midst of fumbling winnable, state-wide races this fall.

  • In the race that has attracted the most attention, Sen. Jon Ossoff (D) is up against Rep. Mike Collins (R), a man who is seemingly surrounded by so many extreme figures it is getting absurd.
  • A former Collins chief of staff was dogged by allegations of violence and fired after making disgusting comments about a Matt Lauer accuser. A second chief of staff tried to collaborate with such figures as Richard Spencer and Nick Fuentes to spring a Holocaust denier from jail. Collins’ daughter’s husband is an actual white supremacist influencer who, despite the media attention, continues to post. Now, the Washington Post has revealed that his PAC employed a guy who described himself online as “racist” and “fascist,” and used the term “white power.”
  • I guess you might give Collins’ the benefit of the doubt, assume this is all a coincidence, but, as Layla A. Jones notes in our own coverage of this, Collins has himself made jokes that riff on far-right memes, including repeatedly invoking the idea of tossing one’s political enemies from aircraft, as far-right, 20th century Latin American dictators did.
  • Let’s look at another statewide race: the Republican primary for governor was fought out between two strongly Trump-aligned candidates (a contrast to the current, popular Republican governor Brian Kemp, who has made a point of quietly resisting Trump’s influence). This year’s second-place candidate, Lieutenant Governor Burt Jones, continues to be furious with the winner, healthcare executive Rick Jackson, over his primary campaign, during which Jackson sued Jones for defamation, and Jones sued Jackson. Despite similar politics, the feud between the two threatens to hurt Jackson’s election prospects.
  • NOTUS reported this week that Trump offered to make Jones ambassador to Germany if he would endorse Jackson. Jones denied that report to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution but said he had no current plans to make amends. “I’m open for discussion but it’s their move to make, to have a genuine conversation about it,” Jones told AJC. “Let’s not forget they filed a defamation lawsuit against me.”

Tabs

  • CIA Director John Ratcliffe traveled to Moscow amid intelligence indicating the Kremlin sees the U.S. as weakened by its war with Iran, the Washington Post reports.
  • Hungary, in the midst of an inspiring turn away from right-wing authoritarianism, has elected an “anti-graft czar” to investigate what happened during Viktor Orbán’s reign — though the fact that she has no experience with this type of work has inspired controversy.
  • The Trump administration is sending more frequent deportation flights to Haiti, after dropping Temporary Protected Status protections for Haitians, the New York Times reports.

Man of the Hour

WASHINGTON, DC – MAY 15: U.S. Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) arrives for a House Republican caucus meeting at the U.S. Capitol on May 15, 2025 in Washington, DC. House Republicans met to discuss the Republican budget bill as they attempt to bring it to the floor next week for a vote. (Photo by Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

It’s Chuck Edwards, the member of Congress who will likely soon be censured by his colleagues after the House Ethics Committee found numerous flagrant and bizarre examples of Edwards engaging in inappropriate conduct with two women in his office. His defense, which he released yesterday and which Nicole documented in Where Things Stand, included such lines as “an affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition” and “poetry is not sexual misconduct.”

Are We at War

Six months today.

Maybe Trump’s Fraud Czar Should Be Looking at Florida

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

‘A Sophisticated Scheme to Fund Political Activities’

As part of President Trump’s pretextual war on fraud, he anointed Vice President JD Vance as his “fraud czar” to, essentially, find creative ways to withhold federal funding from blue states and cities. This is being done under the guise of cracking down on amorphous and sprawling fraud in how states’ spend federal funding that is dispersed for programs like Medicaid and Medicare.

Vance made it clear this spring that no one — not even red states! — is safe from the administration’s watchful eye.

“Now, we have red states and blue states that go after fraud aggressively. But we also unfortunately have some states — mostly blue states, unfortunately — that do not take Medicaid fraud very seriously,” Vance said in May when announcing the Trump administration would withhold $1.3 billion in Medicaid payments to California because it was, apparently, not taking its rife fraud problem seriously enough.

No one really believed that Vance would actually target red states, even when the words came out of his mouth earlier this year. The Trump administration used claims of rampant fraud, and the frantic rumors spread by right-wing influencers online that animated it, as an excuse for invading Minneapolis, Minnesota with federal immigration forces earlier this year. And Vance continues to use his platform as supposed “fraud czar” to withhold federal funding from states that do not support the president politically.

It’s a pellucid retribution scheme. But this week brought news of some actual Medicaid fraud in Florida.

A state grand jury in Tallahassee found that GOP Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration “misappropriated” taxpayer dollars when it funneled $10 million from a Medicaid settlement into a non-profit fundraising group tied to Florida First Lady Casey DeSantis, called the Hope Florida Foundation. The grand jury found the diverted funding to be “part of a sophisticated scheme to fund political activities,” according to CBS News Miami, which obtained a copy of the sealed grand jury report. More details from CBS News:

The grand jury report said the money, which was supposed to be used to provide health insurance for poor children, was instead hastily passed through multiple organizations before eventually landing in the bank accounts of two political action committees and the Republican Party of Florida. Those funds were then used in 2024 to defeat Amendment 3, the citizen initiative to legalize marijuana in Florida.

“Despite our finding that the money was misappropriated, we find insufficient evidence to charge anyone criminally,” the report concluded. “Nobody will take responsibility for deciding the $10 million of taxpayer money would go to Hope Florida… or had any memory of who made it.”

“We recognize that this would be an impediment to criminal prosecution,” the report noted. “While we can’t prove who is responsible, we can plainly see that taxpayer money was misused for political purposes and we would like to see changes made to prevent this from happening again.”

The grand jury identified Sen. Ashley Moody (R-FL), who was the Florida attorney general at the time, and James Uthmeier, the current attorney general and former chief of staff for DeSantis, as being involved in the flurry of activity that surrounded the transfer of funds.

You can get more details from CBS here but the broader point still stands — if the Trump administration actually cared about fraud both in social safety net programs and other uses of taxpayer dollars, red states would be just as closely scrutinized. But Vance’s work was never really about rooting out fraud.

Data Center Showdown in Texas?

President Trump heads to Dallas, Texas in a few weeks to deliver the keynote address at the Republican Party’s bizarre midterms convention there, with Trump set to stump for Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate bid. As an extreme MAGA candidate with lots of messy personal life drama, the two are essentially in lockstep on most issues, except a pretty major one that I wrote about a bit earlier this week.

In response to widespread bipartisan backlash to the development of data centers across the country, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) recently announced that he was placing a pause on the ability for new data center projects to be connected to the state’s power grid; Paxton backed him on the matter. While Abbott has openly courted tech company’s who want to construct new data centers in his state, he made the announcement in response to mounting backlash from constituents who are worried about rising power costs linked to the projects.

Trump — who signed an executive order that would expedite data center construction nationwide — called Abbott’s decision “a mistake.”

“If I were the mayor of a town or the governor of a state, and I had a chance to get a big plant in an AI plant or a data center, I would absolutely want it because the jobs are enormous, and the money paid, the taxes paid are just enormous,” Trump said last week. “And if you don’t take it, you’re going to be left behind because there are plenty of places that want it.”

As Trump heads to the state to campaign for Paxton, but mostly brag about his record ahead of the midterms, it’ll be interesting to see how both sides manage the policy rift on an issue uniquely despised by Americans across the political spectrum.

‘Poetry Is Not Sexual Misconduct’

Rep. Chuck Edward’s (R-NC) defense of himself in a six-page letter to colleagues this week ahead of an expected censure vote on the House Ethics Committee’s sexual harassment findings is nearly as cringe as the allegations themselves.

“An affectionate friendship is not a sexual proposition. A gift is not sexual misconduct. A compliment is not sexual misconduct. Poetry is not sexual misconduct. Socializing with a colleague is not sexual misconduct. Caring deeply about someone with whom you have worked and come to know for years is not sexual misconduct,” Edwards wrote in the letter obtained by Politico.

Read More From TPM Today

Khaya Himmelman checks in on how Democratic governors are responding to the recent Supreme Court decision that opened the door for the Trump admin to move forward with the president’s executive order seeking to control who can vote and who can receive a ballot in this week’s edition of The Franchise: Dem Guvs Renew Vow to Fight for States’ Right to Administer Their Elections in Wake Of SCOTUS Mail-in Voting Decision

“The most prominent throughline that has emerged in the 2026 Georgia Senate race is that one candidate, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), seems to be virtually surrounded by fringe figures,” writes Layla A. Jones on the latest revelations of Collins’ ties to racists: The Many Extremists in Mike Collins’ Orbit Have Come to Define His Campaign

Yesterday’s Top Story

Judge Unblocks Trump’s Executive Order to Tamper in Midterms — But Don’t Panic

What I’m Reading

The Many Extremists in Mike Collins’ Orbit Have Come to Define His Campaign

Posted on by Layla A. Jones

The most prominent throughline that has emerged in the 2026 Georgia Senate race is that one candidate, Rep. Mike Collins (R-GA), seems to be virtually surrounded by fringe figures.

Collins himself has — at times slowly — responded to each new revelation by denouncing things he should, including antisemitism and racism. But his ties to out-right antisemites and racists have continued to emerge. Those ties, the most recent of which was exposed by a Washington Post article on Thursday morning, shine a new light on Collins’ own controversial social media presence, where he’s interacted with openly anti-Jewish accounts and at least twice invoked a violent historical reference popular with white supremacist groups like the Proud Boys.

Collins will face incumbent Sen. Jon Ossoff in November. A slate of polls have Ossoff with a healthy lead over Collins in the general election.

Continue reading “The Many Extremists in Mike Collins’ Orbit Have Come to Define His Campaign” →

Dem Guvs Renew Vow to Fight for States’ Right to Administer Their Elections in Wake Of SCOTUS Mail-in Voting Decision

Posted on by Khaya Himmelman

Hello, and happy Thursday! Welcome back to The Franchise. 

On Monday, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration in an unsigned order, with the conservative majority allowing the Trump administration, at least for now, to move forward with implementing rules to help carry out Trump’s March executive order. The order called for the creation of citizenship lists to control who can vote, and for the U.S. Postal Service to get heavily involved in policing who can receive a mail ballot. 

A group of 23 blue states and Washington D.C. challenged the implementation of the order, arguing in federal court that the executive action — which directs the Department of Homeland Security to create a federal citizenship list to determine who can vote by mail and exclude anyone not on that list — violates the Constitution. 

On Monday, the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits of the executive order but rather lifted a lower court injunction on it, saying the states lacked standing to challenge the executive order because any wrongs they might suffer are still hypothetical. It gives Trump administration federal agencies, like the USPS, the greenlight to begin drafting policies and rules that would allow it to implement Trump’s executive order. The USPS formally published a final rule last week (confusingly before this decision came down, more on that here). 

There has been a flurry of procedural developments since SCOTUS issued its decision that will ultimately clear the way for the case to make its way back to the Supreme Court for the justices to, potentially, rule on the merits. My colleagues Kate Riga and John Light have been covering it diligently. You can read some of the latest here, here and here.  

In the face of the Supreme Court’s formal can-kicking — keeping us in legal limbo for an unclear amount of time about whether Trump’s executive action to try to give the federal government control over who can vote and whether someone receives a ballot before the midterms — Democratic governors are seizing the moment to remind Americans that states have the constitutional right to administer their own elections. And to rail against the Supreme Court for dodging on the merits of an issue that could radically impact the midterms.

In a post on X, Democratic New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill called Monday’s news a “terrible decision from Trump’s Supreme Court.”

“States run elections, not Donald Trump. I will do everything I can to protect New Jerseyans’ right to vote – by mail and in person,” she added. 

California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) also railed against Monday’s decision. 

“WOW. The Supreme Court just let the Trump Admin move ahead (for now) with its plan to disenfranchise voters across the country,” he wrote on X. “California will be suing AGAIN to block these Orwellian rules from being implemented.”

Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont (D) similarly called the decision “disappointing” but assured constituents that it is “not the end of the story.” 

“SCOTUS allowed the Trump Administration to begin planning for the executive order, but it did not rule on whether carrying it out would be lawful,” he wrote on X. “While the Court defers that decision for another day, Connecticut will continue to defend the safe, secure, and accessible elections we hold in this state—including mail-in ballots.”

And Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro vowed to keep fighting the Trump order. 

“Not so fast. Today’s SCOTUS decision does NOT deal with the substance of Trump’s unconstitutional Executive Order and does not mean his illegal attempt to restrict mail-in voting will go forward,” he wrote on X. 

“Donald Trump does not run elections here in Pennsylvania — or in any state,” he added. “We’ll see the Trump Administration in court. In the meantime, I’ll keep defending Pennsylvanians’ right to free, fair, and secure elections.”

As always, there is a lot more to catch up on. Let’s dig in. 

DHS Can’t Actually Backup Noncitizen Voter Claims

Democratic Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar is pushing back on the Trump administration’s unfounded claims that close to 16,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in Nevada. 

Here’s how the rumors began. Last month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that the administration had identified “250,000 noncitizens registered to vote in just four states.” Mullin threatened to prosecute state election officials if they didn’t hand over sensitive voter roll data. Trump made the same claims during his primetime national address in July, during which he did little other than elevate old conspiracy theories about the 2020 election. 

The administration arrived at this seemingly staggering number by comparing public voter lists in Nevada, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and California with immigration records. These numbers have not been substantiated. 

In a July 13 letter to Aguilar, Mullin specifically said that in Nevada there could be as many as 15,903 noncitizens on the rolls. But, in a surprise to no one, the administration is unable to prove how it got these numbers. 

In fact, DHS later admitted in private conversations with Aguilar that it was able to identify just 185 “potential” noncitizens on the rolls, according to emails records and a recording of an August 13 meeting between Aguilar’s office and DHS, obtained by the Nevada Independent. 

Mullin’s big bombshell discovery is, of course, in keeping with the Trump administration’s continued efforts to sow seeds of doubt in the election system by perpetuating the myth that noncitizen voting is widespread and out of control. 

“The Secretary of State’s Office will not risk disenfranchising eligible voters and ripping away their Constitutional right to vote without the highest confidence of their ineligibility,” Aguilar said in a statement to MS NOW.

In an interview with Democracy Docket, Aguilar said that “the fact that they are so flippant about a fundamental constitutional right is unsettling.” 

“They are not sophisticated in their efforts to determine who is eligible to vote and who’s not, and that’s dangerous,” he added. “Their whole desire to create confusion, create chaos, create lack of confidence in the electoral process is all bullshit.”

Darline Graham Dodges 2020 Certification Questions 

Darline Graham, the sister and Trump-backed successor of late-Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) who won the South Carolina Republican primary runoff this week against Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC), dodged questions on Monday from MS NOW about the 2020 election. 

During an interview, MS NOW’s Mychael Schnell asked Graham: “Senator, you just mentioned that you agree with your brother on everything except for one matter, that being illegal immigration, you’d go farther than him on that,” Schnell noted. “That being said, I’m curious, do you agree with him about the 2020 election, that Joe Biden was certified the winner of that election, was lawfully elected, and that you would’ve voted to certify the election, as your brother did?”

Here’s her Trumpian non answer. 

“I think our election system is broken,” she said. “That’s why I think it’s so important that we get the SAVE America Act passed. That’s why I wanted to stay through recess to get that done.”

When pressed again, she simply ignored the question, planting her flag firmly in the camp of Trump’s election denialism.

In Other Election News:

TPM: Trump Gets Significant Early Win in Mail-In Ballot Case from Supreme Court

Star Tribune: Mike Lindell stops payment for primary election recount, calls terms ‘unlawful’

Los Angeles Times: “Will Trump interfere in the midterms? Democrats and their allies are preparing”

Jailed ICE Agent Wanted in Minnesota Released in Texas

Posted on by David Kurtz

The Cold Civil War

The ICE agent indicted for a shooting during Operation Metro Surge has reportedly been released from jail in Texas after Gov. Greg Abbott successfully stonewalled Minnesota’s extradition request.

Christian Castro’s release this morning came the day after a federal judge in Brownsville ruled against Minnesota in its legal bid to force Abbott to extradite the ICE agent accused of shooting an undocumented immigrant through the front door of a home then lying about it.

While accepting that Abbott “has considered this particular extradition request for an atypically long duration,” U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr. ruled that he lacked subject matter jurisdiction to intervene because Abbott had not officially rejected it yet and the law provides no explicit deadline for a governor to respond to an extradition request.

Minnesota’s argument effectively asks the Court to impose into the Extradition Clause, the Extradition Act, and the UCEA a deadline for a state governor to sign a rendition warrant or decline to do so. The Court is unaware of any authority supporting the creation of a court-imposed deadline under these circumstances.

Texas law does, however, only allow the state to keep a fugitive in custody for 90 days while extradition is pending. Castro’s 90 days ended today; hence, his release. Judge Rodriguez also rejected Minnesota’s alternate request to keep Castro in jail while the legal fight plays out to prevent him from fleeing across the border to Mexico.

Abbott managed to pull off his successful political gambit of protecting a fugitive ICE agent wanted on criminal charges in a blue state without ever having to deny outright Minnesota’s extradition request. He slow-rolled the request for two months even as he routinely processed other extraditions to Minnesota. Then when the state prosecutor in Minnesota pressed the issue, Abbott at the last minute ordered a Texas investigation into whether Castro was really a fugitive under extradition law.

In a nod to Minnesota’s legal position, Judge Rodriguez used a lengthy footnote to express skepticism about the legal validity of Abbott’s claim that Castro might not really be a fugitive because he didn’t flee Minnesota but was ordered by ICE to return to his home base in Texas. The Trump DOJ had leaped into the case at the last minute to buttress Abbott’s argument, offering proof that Castro had in fact been ordered by ICE to return to Texas.

“The Court has doubts that caselaw supports the construction of ‘fugitive’ that Texas is considering,” Judge Rodriguez opined in a signal of how he might rule if a riper version of the case comes back to him.

In his ruling, Judge Rodriguez allowed for the possibility that a governor could stonewall an extradition request for so long that it effectively became a refusal to extradite, but that the circumstances of this case didn’t amount to that yet. Regardless, Abbott violated no law but considering Minnesota’s request for three months, Rodriguez ruled.

Minnesota is left with the bleak options of appealing to the 5th Circuit, the most MAGA-ified of the federal appeals courts — or of biding its time until Abbott either officially refuses to extradite Castro or, more likely, enough time has passed without Abbott taking any action to argue that he’s constructively refused the extradition request. Rodriguez offered no signals in his ruling on how long would be long enough to be deemed a constructive denial.

By that time, Castro may be ensconced in Mexico, where Minnesota prosecutors say he owns property and has a romantic partner he plans to marry.

Rep. McIver Not Immune in Delaney Hall Case

The 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-NJ) is not immune from prosecution for the Delaney Hall incident last year even though she was conducting congressional oversight.

“The charged conduct … is unambiguously non-legislative,” the three-judge panel concluded in a 2-1 split decision.

Criminalizing Dissent as Terrorism

The State Department has designated three groups based in Europe as transnational terrorist organizations as part of its effort to breathe life into the myth of far-left political terrorism at home that is tied to an imagined international conspiracy of leftist extremism, the NYT reports:

In a statement, the department said that it would impose sanctions on Palestine Action, which is based in Britain and organizes acts of support for Palestinians and opposition to Israeli policies; Masar Badil, another pro-Palestinian group with branches in Western Europe and Canada; and Autistici/Inventati, known as A/I Collective, which is based in Italy and offers free digital tools to leftist activists around the world.

Scenes From a Personalist Presidency

The legal fight over adding Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center may be the most direct confrontation over the gaudy trappings of his personalist regime — and it is doing an amazing job of revealing the absurdity of the current moment.

In their latest filing, lawyers from Washington Litigation Group and Democracy Defenders Action who are representing Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH), an ex officio member of the Kennedy Center Board, let it rip. Here’s a small sampling:

  • “The Department of Justice has offered up a cocktail of fabulous pronouncements and stunning inaccuracies untethered to law or reality.”
  • “In their words, astonishingly, if the Court prevents them from returning President Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center, they will ‘be required to’ demolish the Center and build ‘a large outdoor amphitheater’ as a ‘replacement.’
  • “In plain English, Defendants have not-so-subtly said: ‘What a nice Kennedy Center you have here. What a shame should something happen to it.’ This is a breathtaking assault on the rule of law. It is delusional. And it must stop.”
  • “Defendants consciously chose to play a dangerous game of chicken with the law. They voted to defy the Court’s decision and restore Donald Trump’s name to the Kennedy Center. They refused to wait for the Court to rule, manufacturing an unnecessary fire drill. And now they have threatened the destruction of the Kennedy Center, a sacred memorial to a fallen President, all in the name of one man’s vanity. Enough is enough. This has to stop.”

You can read the full filing here.

An Ominous Sign

CIA Director John Ratcliffe’s surprise visit to Moscow this week was to deliver a warning to Russia not to attack NATO countries, the WSJ reports. Ratcliffe’s warning was particularly focused on potential Russian aggression toward the Baltic states, according to Politico.

A Manmade Disaster Decades in the Making

Some of the stunning videos and eyewitness accounts of the catastrophic flash flood in the Himalayas after a glacier collapsed are almost to much to bear. This particular video manages to capture the breathtaking spectacle without having to confront directly the extensive loss of life:

The energy released from the glacial collapse and debris flow initially registered as an earthquake before the U.S. Geological Survey figured out the likely cause. Subsequent satellite imagery seems to have pinpointed the site of the collapse, though the exact mechanism of the disaster remains unclear pending further analysis.

At the risk of sounding smug or pompously dreary, this is a disaster triggered by a warming world, where glaciers around the globe are in retreat — sometimes in sudden and dramatic convulsions. The upper elevations of the Himalayas have been frozen in place for eons and as they become unfrozen, they’re unleashing not just ice and meltwater but millennia of rockfall and till embedded within the glacial ice plus loose boulders and rock fragments on high slopes and ridges only recently freed from the grip of non-glacial ice.

It’s not just happening in the Himalayas, as the WaPo reports: “In the past five years alone, glacier collapses have buried a Swiss village, killed 11 mountaineers in Italy and triggered floods that destroyed two hydropower plants and swept away at least 200 people in India.”

Five years is a long time for us to compute multiple disasters across Eurasia. It seems like a slow-motion disaster happening just beneath our capacity to clock it. But in geological time, this is an incredibly fast-moving epochal change, the seeds of which were sown by human carbon emissions decades ago. The genie is already out of the bottle.

News? Tips? Feedback? Please let me know. For sensitive information, use the encrypted methods here.

The Pandora’s Box of Trump’s Executive Order on Mail-in Voting

Posted on by John Light

Not Just a Problem for Democrats

Right-wing politicians in the U.S. have for decades pursued forms of voter suppression under the theory that the voters who are less likely to be able to overcome various hurdles to cast a ballot are also the voters more likely to support government spending or lenient immigration policies. Voters who might lack easy access to identification documents, or lack the time to stand in long lines on Election Day, or show up in databases with conflicting information about their citizenship, might be poorer, less healthy, or non-white: more likely, in other words, to support Democrats.

But in the Trump era, this logic is beginning to get a little more convoluted: in part because of the way in which party coalitions have shifted, but in part because of Trump’s singular fixation on a restricting voting by mail. It is used by — among others — older, white, rural voters, leading some large, Republican-run states to meekly object to his various attempts to restrict it.

We saw some more of that this week after the Supreme Court gave an initial greenlight to the administration, allowing it to draft policies implementing Trump’s March executive order on mailed ballots.

“One thing is, I think you’re going to see some blowback from Republicans in the coming weeks, because after all, Republicans are the older party and older folks like to vote by mail. They’re the rural party,” Ben Ginsberg, a prolific Republican election lawyer, said on CNN in the wake of that ruling (in remarks I first saw aggregated by The Hill).

Throughout this year, we’ve been interested to see signs of wariness from Republicans about Trump’s assault on the franchise. The comments by Ginsberg, who represented George W. Bush in Bush v. Gore and who in recent years has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s outlandish election conspiracy theories, were the latest installment.

“Certainly vote by mail is important to people in rural areas,” he continued. “And thanks to Donald Trump, there are many more low propensity voters in the Republican Party.”

“So this is kind of a flawed political strategy wrapped in a rather vocally charged policy from the president,” he added. 

This is of course not to say that Trump’s executive order would hurt Republicans more than Democrats, or that it is something Democrats should cheer. It would be a disaster, potentially disenfranchising large numbers of voters (of both parties) and creating fertile ground for Trump to launch new theories about and schemes to meddle with the results.

But it is one more indication of how policy ideas that are downstream of conspiracy theories can create chaos.

Trump’s Anti-Abortion FDA Pick Encounters Opposition From MAHA

WASHINGTON, DC – AUGUST 10: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (L), and Deputy Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy Dr. Heidi Overton (R), stand in the Oval Office after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order calling for childhood vaccine shots to be spaced out into separate visits at the White House on August 10, 2026 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

The Trump administration has for a year and a half of avoided acting on calls from the Christian right to use the FDA to curtail access to long-approved medications involved in abortion, perhaps concerned about voter backlash in the midterms. Now, however, there are signs officials are laying the groundwork to give these activists what they want after November.

Last week, Trump appointed abortion opponent Heidi Overton to the head the agency, the latest clue that the administration may try to restrict the abortion pill mifepristone.

But her nomination is already encountering some trouble.

  • Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), who has opposed some of the excesses of the MAHA movement (though did vote for RFK Jr. to head HHS), has said he has “strong concerns” about Overton’s involvement in a recent White House executive order changing childhood vaccine schedules.
  • Overton’s alignment with the White House, where she is a domestic policy aide, is encountering resistance from within the MAHA movement as well, as recent Washington Post and Politico articles document.
  • Activists in the movement are upset about her involvement in an executive order to expand domestic production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the weed-killer Roundup.
  • Alex Clark, a prominent MAHA influencer, instructed her followers on X to call their senators to oppose Overton’s nomination, leading to the bizarre spectacle of the White House distancing Overton from the glyphosate order. “Heidi was only looped in at the end of this EO’s very close-hold process when she pushed as many MAHA-minded edits as possible to a mostly-baked EO that, again, was written with national security considerations in mind,” a White House spokesperson posted on X, quote-tweeting Clark.

Tabs

  • The federal government is withholding public safety funds and counterterrorism funds from cities and states it believes haven’t done enough to confront the (largely made up) problem of noncitizens voting, leading those municipalities to sue with the contention that Trump is trying to “defund the police,” Axios reports.
  • A geography professor was fired from West Point after attempting to teach about climate change, he said in a lawsuit filed Monday and reported by Stars and Stripes.
  • Maine’s Republican nominee for governor told activists he will ask the Trump administration to send ICE to his state’s polling places, explaining he has a relationship with border czar Tom Homan, Nicole LaFond writes for TPM.

Man of the Hour

US Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. speaks before President Donald Trump signs an executive order calling for more research and flexibility on vaccines, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on August 10, 2026. (Photo by Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images)

It’s HHS Secretary RFK Jr., baselessly claiming in an X post that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro’s office “altogether fabricated” news of two measles deaths in his state.

Are We at War?

The Atlantic has new details on the theme from Axios I highlighted yesterday — an effort by the administration to get the war out of the headlines ahead of the midterms, even if it’s not over. “Part of the plan, Trump advisers and allies tell us, is to try to push Iran to the background, while hoping that gas prices come down even a little and that Republicans can shift the nation’s focus to more politically palatable topics ahead of the midterms,” Jonathan Lemire and Nancy A. Youssef write.

Maine GOP Gov Nominee Tests Whether Trump’s Noncitizen Voting Delusions Are a Winning Strategy

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

Strange Bedfellows

It’s a strange move for a Republican candidate running in a race that Cook Political Report has rated a “solid D.” Ever since he won the Republican nomination in Maine’s gubernatorial race, candidate Bobby Charles has attempted to walk a fine line between courting President Trump’s fans in the state and not running as a too-openly-MAGA candidate.

Continue reading “Maine GOP Gov Nominee Tests Whether Trump’s Noncitizen Voting Delusions Are a Winning Strategy” →

Judge Unblocks Trump’s Executive Order to Tamper in Midterms — But Don’t Panic

Posted on by Kate Riga

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani on Wednesday lifted an injunction that was the last bulwark against President Donald Trump’s order to let the federal government take over large parts of voting by mail. But the executive order is unlikely to remain unblocked for long.

Continue reading “Judge Unblocks Trump’s Executive Order to Tamper in Midterms — But Don’t Panic” →

This May Be the Worst Wrongful Deportation Yet

Posted on by David Kurtz

It Just Keeps Happening

I’m keenly aware that at a certain point the numerous wrongful deportations by the Trump administration begin to blur together into an indistinguishable mass of human suffering, lawlessness, and indifference.

Unable to chronicle each one, I keep raising the bar for what’s worthy to bring to your attention. Regrettably, the Trump administration keeps finding new and unlawful ways to clear that bar.

A new case that emerged Friday out of Baltimore sets several new standards for egregiousness. It involves a Mexican national illegally in the United States whose testimony for the Justice Department against the drug cartels prompted an immigration judge in 2024 to bar his deportation to Mexico “after finding that he was more likely than not to be tortured by the government or by individuals acting with the acquiescence of the government if he were returned to Mexico.”

The details of the unusual case emerged entirely in an opinion issued by U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher of Maryland accompanied by an order that the Trump administration try to bring him back. The Trump administration deported him to Mexico any way — multiple times.

Most of the case file remains sealed, so it’s difficult to get full visibility into the case. That’s by Gallagher’s design because of her concerns that the Mexican man’s life is in danger. Gallagher took the rare step of sealing entirely an earlier iteration of the case because “the sensitive and urgent nature of this case requires a higher degree of confidentiality and security than it was originally filed under.” She had the case refiled as a John Doe case with additional protections.

What follows is drawn from Judge Gallagher’s opinion.

Released by ICE in 2024, the man lived in Maryland and complied with ICE requirements until he was re-detained in January during a routine ICE check-in. He was shipped to an ICE detention center in Louisiana, and then without notice he was deported to Guatemala last month.

This is where things go from bad to surreal, even though the man had a pending habeas corpus case in Louisiana.

Guatemala, refusing to take non-Guatemalans, turned him over to the Mexican consulate. After learning about his protections from deportation to Mexico, a Mexican consular official properly declined to accept him and he was returned to the United States the same day.

After bouncing him around various of its facilities, ICE deported him again a few days later, this time directly to Mexico in violation of the immigration judge’s order. To its credit, Mexico for a second time properly refused to take him, and he was returned to the U.S.

Again he was bounced around various ICE facilities before he was allegedly given notice (only in English and he only speaks Spanish) of a highly unusual move that requires intervention at the highest levels of government: The Trump administration had terminated the immigration judge’s order barring his removal to Mexico. More on that in a moment.

On Aug. 1, the Trump administration deported him for a third time — again to Mexico. “He has been in hiding since that date,” Judge Gallagher wrote in her order, “fearing that the cartels that he provided information against will find him and torture or kill him before he can return to the United States.”

This is not Gallagher’s first rodeo. Last year, she oversaw a case where a 20-year-old Venezuelan man referred to in the case filings only as “Cristian” was unlawfully deported to El Salvador’s CECOT prison under the Alien Enemies Act in violation of an existing court-approved settlement agreement. For months, the Trump administration stonewalled Gallagher’s order to facilitate the man’s return to the United States, then abruptly repatriated him to Venezuela — the very country from which he was seeking asylum in the United States. At that point, his lawyers lost contact with him.

While Gallagher declined to hold the Trump administration in contempt of court for its conduct, she thrashed it for its role in putting Cristian’s life at risk:

It is possible, at this point, that Cristian has decided to forego a return to the United States and has voluntarily absented himself from contact with his counsel. It is equally possible that Cristian has been the victim of the anticipated violence that caused him to seek asylum in the United States in the first instance.

Gallagher has closely patterned her rulings in wrongful deportation cases on those of her Maryland colleague U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, who has overseen the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the poster child of wrongful deportations. In the beginning, Abrego Garcia was perhaps an incidental casualty of the administration’s mass deportation operation but he became a target when he fought back. It’s not clear why this John Doe was targeted, especially given his cooperation in testifying against the Mexican drug cartels.

The answer to why — to the extent it’s ever answerable — seems like it may be found in the decision to terminate the immigration judge’s order barring his removal under the Convention on Torture. When I say that that termination only happens at the highest level of the government, I mean Cabinet level:

“The Notice stated that the Department of State had received diplomatic assurances from the Mexican Government that Doe would not be tortured if returned to Mexico, and that Acting ICE Director David Venturella and Secretary of State Marco Rubio had consulted and determined that these assurances were reliable,” Judge Gallagher wrote.

In an eye-raising footnote in her opinion, Judge Gallagher signaled that she, too, was perplexed by this extraordinary intervention by the secretary of state and the acting ICE director:

It was agreed upon by the parties at a hearing that this form of termination, which requires the participation of a Cabinet member and another high-ranking U.S. government official, is extremely rare. No information was provided to explain why these top-level officials personally involved themselves in this case or why they terminated Doe’s CAT Deferral within a week of his removal to Mexico on July 15 or 16, allegedly in violation of the CAT.

The upshot of all of this for now is that Judge Gallagher issued a temporary restraining order requiring the Trump administration to take “active steps” within 14 days to “facilitate” the John Doe’s return to the United States. She also ordered daily status reports from the administration on the “specific efforts to facilitate” his return. If he returns, it must be within 200 miles of Baltimore, she ordered.

Subsequent status reports filed since her order are under seal, so it’s not clear what the precise state of play in the case is right now. Among the new filings is a sealed motion from the Justice Department asking Judge Gallagher to reconsider her TRO, so it looks the administration is still fighting to deport the man.

As it happens, Secretary of State Marco Rubio met with Mexican Foreign Secretary Roberto Velasco this morning at the State Department:

WASHINGTON, D.C., UNITED STATES – AUGUST 26: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio (R) greets Mexican Foreign Secretary Roberto Velasco (L) before a bilateral meeting at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on August 26, 2026. (Photo by Mehmet Eser/Anadolu via Getty Images)

For Your Radar …

A federal judge in Brownsville said he would rule as soon as today after a hearing yesterday on Minnesota’s lawsuit to compel Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to extradite a fugitive ICE agent to charges related to a shooting during Operation Metro Surge.

Initial reports from the hearing suggest the judge is not inclined to grant Minnesota’s request to keep ICE agent Christian Castro in state custody in Texas, but it’s less clear whether the judge was favorably disposed to the broader extradition argument Minnesota was making:

At an hourlong hearing Tuesday in Brownsville, the judge said he was “not inclined” to order the Cameron County sheriff to continue holding Castro beyond Thursday, adding that a written order could come Wednesday.

The 90-day window that Texas has by law to hold Castro in custody on a nationwide arrest warrants ends this week. The Trump DOJ has sided with Abbott, who is making spurious legal arguments about why he doesn’t have to extradite Castro … at least not yet.

In related news that is rather puzzling, CNN reports that the Trump DOJ is considering bringing federal charges against Castro. DOJ originally charged the two immigrants involved in the incident with Castro, before the case fell apart amidst evidence that Castro and another agent had lied about the shooting.

No decision on charges has been made yet, DOJ told CNN, but officials in the DOJ Civil Rights Division have “held conversations” with federal prosecutors in Minnesota about the case.

A reminder that the Civil Rights Division is led by the boundary-less Trump loyalist Harmeet Dhillon.

Chicago Police Investigate CBP Shooting

A special unit within the Chicago Police Department is now investigating the shooting of Marimar Martinez by Border Patrol agent Charles Exum during Operation Midway Blitz. Martinez was shot five times in the Oct. 4 incident but survived and recently participate in a mass filing of complaints with police over the conduct of federal agents during the Chicago operation.

The Criminalizing of Protest

Two new pieces from TPM’s Josh Kovensky

Immigration Officers Focus on Voter Fraud

Hundreds of immigration officers have been diverted from their normal duties to hunt down non-citizens who registered to vote as part of President Trump’s disinformation campaign to denigrate immigrants and delegitimize U.S. elections, the WaPo reports:

Fraud detection officers with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have been tasked with screening voter data to look for noncitizens who registered to vote, said the former officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal security operations. The officers’ work screening immigration applications for false information and possible security threats has effectively ground to a halt, they said.

Elon Musk Off the Hook in Wisconsin

A local prosecutor has declined to bring charges against Elon Musk for his stunt during the state 2025 Supreme Court election of offering two $1 million checks to voters.

Trump DOJ Watch: Nevada Edition

A county Republican chair in Nevada is alleging that he is the victim of vindictive and selective prosecution by Sigal Chattah, the top federal prosecutor in the state and a GOP rival. Leo Blundo, a former county commissioner, also alleges that Chattah involved herself in his case despite an order from Main Justice for her to recuse herself:

Chattah’s role in Blundo’s case leading up to his March indictment for alleged pandemic loan fraud was one of multiple instances in which the first-time prosecutor and staunch Trump ally sought status updates from prosecutors despite warnings that she was disregarding her pledge to be walled off, Bloomberg Law reported earlier.

Bloomberg Law previously reported that Chattah “pushed to launch investigations at the behest of former clients and friends while repeatedly bypassing Justice Department orders recusing her from cases.

Last week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a lower court ruling that Chattah was unlawfully installed as the top prosecutor in Las Vegas in a workaround designed to bypass Senate confirmation and federal judges.

Trump Destroyed USAID and Then …

The fastest-growing Ebola outbreak on record, which is raging in the Democratic Republic of Congo, threatens to become the worst such outbreak in history, the WaPo reports.

Dolly Parton, 1946-2026

My favorite Dolly Parton story is actually three stories in one that she tells, all involving “I Will Always Love You“: Why she wrote it, why she refused to let Elvis record it, and her first time hearing the Whitney Houston version. It’s a window she offers beyond the vamp and the camp into herself as a songwriter at core with astute business sense. Self-serving? Perhaps. But I want to believe.

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