A panel of judges on Thursday unanimously rebuffed Black Tennesseans’ attempt to block the state’s new 9-0 Republican gerrymander.
Continue reading “Tennessee Gerrymandering Challenge Fails, Just as Supreme Court Intended”Election Deniers’ Grip on the Republican Party Strengthens in Arizona
Hello, and welcome back to The Franchise!
Three prominent 2020 election deniers won GOP primary elections in Arizona for secretary of state, governor and attorney general. It’s concerning news for the future of election administration in such a crucial state.
Arizona GOP state Rep. Alexander Kolodin, who is a known election denier, won the Republican primary for secretary of state this week. Kolodin is a member of the right-wing Arizona Freedom Caucus and in 2023 was sanctioned by the State Bar of Arizona for his participation in the so-called “Kraken” lawsuits, challenging the results of the 2020 election.
The fact that an election denier could be in charge of running elections in a state that has been ground zero for election conspiracy theories since 2020, is, of course, a harrowing prospect.
Kolodin will face off against Democratic incumbent Secretary of State Adrian Fontes in November.
Staunch MAGA ally Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) won the GOP nomination for Arizona governor this week too, and will now face off against Democratic incumbent Gov. Katie Hobbs in November.
Biggs, who is the former chair of the Freedom Caucus, has a rich election denial history. He has consistently supported and repeated Trump’s baseless conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and was subpoenaed by the House January 6 select committee in May of 2022 as part of its investigation into the events leading up to the attack and efforts to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.
On January 6, 2021, Biggs objected to the counting of electoral votes in Arizona, as well as five other Biden-won states that were all subject to election misinformation in the aftermath of 2020.
“I object to counting the votes of Arizona electors because the federal courts went around the legislatively constructed mechanism for choosing Arizona’s presidential electors allowing tens of thousands of voters to unlawfully cast votes,” Biggs wrote in a 2021 press release.
Hobbs had this to say about Biggs in a post on X this week: “Andy Biggs has spent his career selling out Arizona families for billionaires, special interests, and even convicted sex offenders.The more Arizonans learn about Biggs, the more they’ll realize he’s one big problem they can’t afford.”
Lastly, Arizona Senate President Warren Petersen secured the GOP nomination for attorney general this week. Earlier this month, Petersen complied with a federal grand jury subpoena — part of the administration’s ongoing investigation into non-existent fraud in the 2020 election. Petersen handed over documents to the FBI related to a 2021 scam of an election audit in Maricopa County that found no traces of election fraud.
As always, there is lots more to catch up on. Let’s dig in.
Trump Admin Escalates Threats of Criminal Charges Against Election Administrators
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin continues to threaten state election officials with criminal persecution over non-citizen voting, in yet another attempt by the Trump administration to exert control over elections and elevate Trump’s conspiracy theories about non-citizens voting en masse for Democrats, a repeatedly debunked myth.
Earlier this month, the DOJ sent election officials in all 50 states letters threatening criminal prosecution if non-citizens are found on voter rolls.
On Friday, during a press conference, Mullin doubled down on these threats, demanding that states run their voter rolls through a federal database — or risk losing federal election-related funding and/or face possible criminal persecution.
“We’re saying that the machines had to be secure, and that your voter registration list needs to be scrubbed,” Mullin said on Friday.
“We need to make sure that individuals that are legally able to vote are voting,” he continued. “If you’re illegal and attempted to vote, or you tried to vote illegally for someone else, we will find you and we will charge you.”
Mullin is insisting that states participate in the Federal Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements (SAVE) system, a database typically used for verifying the citizenship and immigration status of individuals applying for certain governmental benefits. It’s been co-opted by the Trump administration to purge alleged non-citizens from voter rolls. There is evidence, however, that this tool has been incorrectly flagging eligible citizens to be booted from the voter rolls.
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties, and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mullin said.
This comes as the use of the database for the Trump administration’s aims has been challenged in court. The use of the SAVE system to purge voters from the rolls was blocked by a federal judge last month.
A Remarkable 16 Losses for the DOJ’s Campaign to Seize State Voter Data
The DOJ has officially earned its 16th loss (with an impressive zero wins) in the administration’s ongoing and failing campaign to seize sensitive voter roll data from the states. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Kari Dooley, a Trump-appointee, dismissed the DOJ’s case against Connecticut, ruling that the state’s voter data is not something the federal government is entitled to.
For many long (and embarrassing) months, the DOJ has been desperately trying to force at least 44 states and Washington, D.C. to give the department access to unredacted voter roll data, which includes private information like Social Security numbers and drivers license numbers, to the federal government.
The DOJ has been relying on provisions in the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Civil Rights Act of 1960 (CRA) to argue that the federal government is entitled to this type of personal identifying information.
So far, not a single judge has agreed.
“…the Court concludes that the Connecticut SVRL is not a record that falls within the scope of Title III, and is therefore not subject to the preservation and production requirements contemplated therein,” Dooley wrote in her order on Friday.
“This lawsuit was an illegal attempt to disenfranchise Connecticut voters and today, the court shut it down,” Connecticut’s Democratic Attorney General William Tong said in a statement on Friday. “The Constitution is clear: the President does not control our elections and has no right to manipulate Connecticut voter rolls. Connecticut follows federal law and takes its obligations under federal law very seriously. We will not be bullied into handing over sensitive voter information just because Trump demands it.”
In Other Election News
New York Times: How the G.O.P. Turned Olive Garden Into a Voter ID Talking Point
ABC News: State officials preparing if the federal government tries interfering with how they run elections
Democracy Docket: Georgia Secretary of State’s office responds to Trump DOJ threats, defends voting policies
Trump Is Reshaping Immigration Courts With Help From a Brutal Comic Book Character
This story was originally reported by Candice Norwood of The 19th. Meet Candice and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.
Masked law enforcement officers in tactical gear throwing civilians to the ground. In some cases — like Renee Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero — officers shoot people dead. Others disappear into detention before being deported to countries where they may have no family or connections.
Critics argue that the great country President Donald Trump envisions could be taken right out of a dystopian novel. A version of this society has existed since 1977 in the comic book world of Judge Dredd, a British series set in the year 2099 AD that depicts an authoritarian police state in the eastern United States.
And Judge Dredd is the image the Trump administration has chosen to assist with recruiting new immigration judges.
Continue reading “Trump Is Reshaping Immigration Courts With Help From a Brutal Comic Book Character”Bubble Don
Perhaps some of this is by design. But Donald Trump adding Israel normalization to an apparently already signed nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia is an example of a recurring issue. Trump seems only loosely connected to the people who are negotiating foreign policy deals on his behalf — something at least somewhat odd coming from the purported avatar of unitary executive authority. We saw this again and again with his “deals” with Iran. A deal gets initialed and he’s out the next day claiming that agreements are in the deal that clearly aren’t. As I said, some of this may be by design. Some of it may be Trump’s need to hold attention and demand post-signature fluffing to keep him on board. In private business, he was notorious for coming up with new demands or needs after finalizing deals or simply never making payments the deals required. But at least part of it seems to be a feature of the bubble environment of the second term White House. Difficult issues are kept from him; he’s yesed or reassured that things are in agreements that are not (“Oh that one agreement is definitely in there, Don. Don’t you worry!”)
From Our Correspondent in Wisconsin
Longtime TPM Reader JB gives us a rundown on the rather suboptimal gubernatorial situation in Wisconsin …
If I may, a few thoughts on the confusing campaign for Wisconsin governor:
Continue reading “From Our Correspondent in Wisconsin”First: Tony Evers (pronounced Eeevers here, incidentally) is personally well liked throughout the state. He is regarded by most Democrats here as the guy who saved Wisconsin from Scott Walker. He is also widely regarded as a poor administrator who missed many opportunities and was often ineffective in getting his message across to the public.
Second: Sara Rodriguez based her candidacy on her knowledge of state government and ability to manage a large organization (she had worked in healthcare administration). That’s why her campaign manager freelancing and her campaign going close to broke drove her out of the race. She had run on having some of Evers’s strengths without his biggest weakness. Live and learn.
Democratic Activism in an Anti-Institutional Age
A few days ago I wrote about popular constitutionalism and Slate’s new podcast series on that topic. This is a critical civic topic because it is probably the only and certainly the proper path back from systemic corruption of the current Supreme Court and the broader problem of judicial supremacy. (If this is fuzzy or if it’s unclear what I’m talking about see that earlier post.) But what that Slate discussion quickly arrived at is that to have that kind of popular constitutionalism, the ability of the people to make decisions about what the U.S. Constitution requires or forbids, you need robust and functioning political parties. And one of the key features of American politics over the last 50 years is that parties really don’t exist anymore in the sense they did for upwards of a century and a half in American politics.
What’s Really Behind Trump’s Corrupt US Attorney Scheme
Only Loyalists Need Apply
A new and ironic development in the first-of-its-kind legal challenge to President Trump’s U.S. attorney scheme gives me a chance to pull back the lens a bit to show the full scope of the corruption involved and why it matters.
The lawsuit by fired U.S. Attorney Roger Rogoff of Seattle that I wrote about at length yesterday has been re-assigned to Judge Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee from outside the district, since the federal judges who appointed Rogoff have a stake in the case.
One irony of Bastian hearing the case is that he is chief judge in the Eastern District of Washington, which has had its own recent U.S. attorney issues. The Trump administration has used one of its patented blue-state workarounds in Bastian’s district to install a U.S. attorney without Senate confirmation or allowing federal judges to appoint an interim U.S. attorney.
It started when acting U.S. Attorney Richard R. Barker, a career prosecutor, resigned last July from the Justice Department rather than sign off on an indictment of ICE protesters. (Barker’s successor scaled the case against the protestors way back, dropping most of the felony charges to misdemeanors if the defendants stayed out of trouble for 18 months, the New York Times reported.)
“I knew there was no place for me in the Justice Department if I was being asked to bring felony charges against these protesters in a way that would compromise my integrity,” Barker later told the NYT. “This was not an organized conspiracy. It was a protest where people were exercising their free-speech rights.”
Barker was succeeded as acting U.S. attorney by another career prosecutor, Stephanie Van Marter, who lasted only a month. She was succeeded in August by Pete Serrano, the mayor of Pasco who had no apparent prior experience as a prosecutor.
That is when things started to get even more squirrelly.
Serrano’s statutory 120-day term ended in December. By statute, the judges of the district could have appointed Serrano to remain on past the 120 days. They did not. Whether that was an affirmative decision by the judges reflecting a lack of confidence in Serrano or simply a failure to act isn’t clear, but I’m not sure there’s much of a difference between those two scenarios.
At that point, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi engineered a workaround that as of March she had used in at least nine other districts around the country, mostly in blue states, including in high-profile postings like the Los Angeles U.S attorney’s Office: Bondi named Serrano a special attorney and made him the first assistant U.S. attorney, which without an acting or interim U.S. attorney in place effectively means he has remained the top prosecutor in the district without Senate or judge approval.
The workaround has been used mostly in cases where the interim U.S. attorney has exceeded their statutory term and judges have ruled that they’re unlawfully serving in the post, Politico noted. In Serrano’s case, Bondi acted before he had overstayed his 120 days. President Trump has not nominated anyone for the permanent position in Spokane. The plan seems to be to keep Serrano, like other similarly entrenched top prosecutors, in place indefinitely.
The underlying motive for the scheme goes back to Trump’s frustration with the Senate’s blue-slip tradition, which essentiallygives senators veto power over U.S. attorney nominations in their own states. When you’re turning the Justice Department into a tool of your White House, non-loyalist U.S. attorneys simply won’t do.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) has been public in her opposition to Serrano and to the workaround to entrench him in place: “The Trump administration is attempting a transparent end run around the Constitution and Congress by appointing Pete Serrano to a position he is not qualified to hold after the Eastern District declined to extend his tenure as U.S. Attorney.”
It’s against this backdrop that Judge Bastian will be hearing Rogoff’s legal challenge to Trump’s scheme. In Rogoff’s case, the district judges acted and unanimously appointed him as interim U.S. attorney, but Trump fired him in less than an hour, the fourth such termination of judge-appointed interim U.S. attorneys around the country.
Trump’s scheme in all it various forms is intended to keep blue-state U.S. attorneys from being too independent, too autonomous, and too un-beholden to the Trump White House. There is great utility in having loyal and compliant U.S. attorneys in blue states as Trump targets Democratic elected officials and other political foes for retribution. See, for example, the next two items below.
The Retribution: Midterms Edition
The Trump White House has come up with an inventive new way to sic the Justice Department on Democratic elected officials ahead of the midterm elections, Bloomberg reports: “DOJ’s National Fraud Enforcement Division, which Vice President JD Vance established in January, is building out a team exploring how politicians and state officials facilitate the misuse of taxpayer dollars — either by actively participating in or failing to prevent schemes under their watch, said three people familiar with the effort.”
The Retribution: Jack Smith Edition
House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) sent a criminal referral against former Special Counsel Jack Smith to the Trump DOJ yesterday, accusing him of perjury in testimony to Congress in December, the NYT reports.
Smith’s lawyers immediately rejected the allegation that Smith committed perjury and accused Jordan of making a “spurious claim.”
The pattern here is now tediously obvious and has gone on since at least the Benghazi investigation more than a decade ago: House Republicans launch politicized investigations against civil servants, Democrats and other foes of President Trump and march their targets into a perjury trap on the Hill. At the same time, they use their investigations to gin up fodder in the form of documents, emails, and other communications that they leak to right-wing media.
What’s new is that House GOPers now have a Justice Department run out of the Trump White House that is eager to play along.
Must Read: AF1 Leak Probe Edition
Like orcas pulverizing a sunfish, the NYT has eviscerated the Trump DOJ for subpoenaing its reporters in a new filing that comes ahead of an important hearing scheduled for this afternoon in federal court in Manhattan.
The unusual and unprecedented use of subpoenas to reporters as an early (rather that last ditch) investigative step in the Air Force One leak investigation has come under intense scrutiny as a threat to a free press and civil liberties.
As I explained earlier this week, the Trump DOJ conceded to the judge that it made major legal missteps in how it handled the case. In the new filing, the NYT seizes on those admissions, with a level of aggressiveness and urgency rarely seen in a such a major case, and urges U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian not to let the Trump DOJ get away with just putting the subpoenas on hold for two weeks, as prosecutors had suggested, but rather quash them today at the hearing.
The filing takes the form of a letter, which makes it an easier read. It’s worth your time.
Blanche Lavishes Alaska for Murk’s Vote
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche is pulling out the stops in lavishing Alaska with goodies in an effort to win undecided Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote for his confirmation to the permanent position, Politico reports.
The 5th Circuit Pulls a Wild Move
In an important new development in the legal fight over the Trump administration’s unprecedented policy of mandatory detention of undocumented immigrants without bond hearings, it wasn’t just what the 5th Circuit did but how it did it, Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck writes: “[T]he Fifth Circuit went out of its way to grant the federal government an unprecedented form of unexplained emergency relief without deigning to explain why such relief was remotely appropriate.”
On a Slow Boat to Venezuela
For those keeping track, the slow-rolling contempt of court inquiry against the Trump administration in the original Alien Enemies Act case is still crawling along. The full D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is re-hearing the case after a three-judge panel cut U.S. District Judge James Boasberg off at the knees. The Trump DOJ filed its appellate brief yesterday. Oral arguments are scheduled for Sept. 29.
What Could Possibly Go Wrong?
Financial Times: “The Trump administration has collected more than $13bn in revenues from Venezuelan oil sales this year, according to FT calculations, but has said almost nothing about what has happened to the money.”
The Latest Trump Attack on Higher Ed
The Trump administration’s ongoing attack on colleges and universities is now merging with its corrupt tendencies to create an alarming new scheme to divert the pipeline of government funding for “life sciences” research into the private sector, with an ostensible focus on AI, robotics, and nuclear energy.
The scheme combines weakening higher ed with the politicization of scientific research while opening new pathways for corruption and self-dealing. What’s not to like?
Graphic of the Day
NYT: How Trump Is Getting Richer in Office
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Lindsey Graham’s Sister Pledges Her Allegiance to Trump by Way of SAVE Act
Freshly sworn-in Sen. Darline Graham Nordone (R-SC) made her loyalty to President Trump and the rest of the MAGA movement known with a simple post on X this week when she announced the SAVE America Act would be “the first bill I am cosponsoring in the Senate.”
Continue reading “Lindsey Graham’s Sister Pledges Her Allegiance to Trump by Way of SAVE Act”A Key House Dem Breaks Down the White House’s ‘Unfathomable’ Iran War Funding Requests
Weeks after the Iran War began, Rep. Joe Morelle (D-NY) predicted to TPM that it would become a billion-dollar-a-day “mess.” Now, with Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth taking to Capitol Hill to request almost $67 billion in supplemental war funding, Morelle says his fears have been confirmed. And though Morelle is a member of two key committees with oversight of the Pentagon, he claims Congress has been given little information about where all the money is going.
Continue reading “A Key House Dem Breaks Down the White House’s ‘Unfathomable’ Iran War Funding Requests”Is Iran Really a ‘Forever War’?
With the United States and Iran now clearly back to “war” from “ceasefire,” we’re seeing a host of stories arguing that President Trump, despite all his promises, has found his own “forever war.” It’s a tempting claim, especially for Trump’s critics. But we shouldn’t jump too easily into it without recognizing how profoundly different the situations are. For the United States, Iraq and Afghanistan were fundamentally occupations. In both cases, existing governments were rapidly shattered or melted away. The U.S. began occupations in which it stood up new, friendly governments which it hoped would eventually be able to stand on their own with the pro-U.S. friendliness intact. The U.S. eventually tired of the conflicts and withdrew its forces. Mostly.
The present situation is entirely different. The Iranian government is wholly intact and continues to fight the U.S. in an asymmetric but still conventional manner. Early U.S. hopes that the shock of the conflict would lead the Iranian government to crumble were quickly dashed. The U.S. has made no effort overthrow the Iranian government by force or even to occupy any of its territory. Even now, with the two sides back in active conflict, there is little evidence that the new attacks have any strategic goal beyond inflicting pain to shape some future negotiation. Both sides appear to be inflicting damage and pain with the hope that the other side will relent, soften their negotiating position or give up, but with little evidence either will.