Paratroopers assigned to the 82nd Airborne Division walk to a C-17 Globemaster III before an airborne operation at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, March 13, 2025. The 82nd Airborne Division regularly conducts airborne operations as part of their Immediate Response Force training. (U.S. Army photo by Pfc. Nicole Miller) (Photo Credit: Spc. Nicole Miller)
During the oil embargo of the 1970s, a buddy was a cocky, M60-toting scout in the 82nd Airborne based in North Carolina. It’s a combat force capable of deployment on 18 hours of notice. He used to say that in a parachute assault his life expectancy upon hitting the ground in a combat zone was measured in seconds. He’d regale me with stories about being rousted out of bed, fitted out with full combat gear and ammunition, hustled onto a transport and flown around for hours before being ordered to bail out in the dark … over their own base, IIRC. It was a training. But during the 1970s oil crisis, my friend said, he wasn’t sure that if the 82nd bailed out over the Middle East exactly who the enemy would be or what they’d be asked to sacrifice their lives for. That, as they say, was above his pay grade.
The Pentagon on Tuesday ordered a couple thousand paratroopers from the 82nd Airborne Division to deploy to the Middle East, U.S. officials said, as President Donald Trump weighs a significant escalation in the U.S.-Israeli war with Iran and declines to rule out putting U.S. troops on Iranian soil.
U.S. officials approved written orders for soldiers from the division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team and the 82nd’s headquarters at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, said two U.S. officials and a third person familiar with the move, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. Verbal orders previously had been approved, two people said. It is not yet clear whether they will deploy to Iran itself, officials said.
And it’s one, two, three What are we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn Next stop is Vietnamcould be Iran
I think he’s just making stuff up or someone is whispering “good news” into his ears to buck him up since the war is going terribly. But here he is with the latest:
Trump on Iranian leaders: "They're gonna make a deal. They did something yesterday that was amazing actually. They gave us a present, and the present arrived today. It was a very big present worth a tremendous amount of money. I'm not gonna tell you what that present is but it… pic.twitter.com/tgtOhEtYNd
President Donald Trump said Tuesday that Tehran had offered Washington a “very significant prize” related to oil and gas, expressing optimism that a deal to end the conflict could be possible.
Trump did not provide details about the offer he said Iran had made but described it as related to oil, gas and the Strait of Hormuz.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio were among the officials leading the talks and were “dealing with the right people” in Iran.
Tehran has not publicly acknowledged any such proposal. Iranian officials, however, have been quoted by various outlets as saying that they have received proposals conveyed through intermediaries and are reviewing them.
It’s nothing but happy talk coming from these psychos — if you can call stuff like this happy:
According to international media reports, including Bloomberg and Lloyd’s List Intelligence, Iran has begun charging oil tankers for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz.
Iranian outlets such as the state-owned Mehr News Agency and Tabnak—affiliated with Mohsen Rezaei, senior military adviser to Iran’s new leader—had previously reported that Tehran was considering the strait as a potential source of revenue for the Islamic Republic.
News reports say Iran is charging around $2 million per tanker. However, because U.S. sanctions prevent Iran from conducting international banking, it remains unclear what currency is being used and who ultimately receives the payments.
Earlier, Iran’s Foreign Ministry announced that various countries and oil companies should contact Tehran directly to coordinate safe passage.
The idea of monetizing control of the strategic waterway has also been echoed in Iranian political commentary. The IRGC-linked daily Javan wrote that it was Iran’s new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, who first introduced the concept.
“He revived a forgotten historical truth in the geopolitics of the Persian Gulf,” the newspaper wrote on Tuesday, March 24.
In an editorial titled “The Strait of Hormuz: Iran’s Winning Card in the Post-War Order,” Javan argued that the waterway should become a strategic lever for the Islamic Republic and “the most important fund to compensate Iran’s losses in the war.”
Former Defense Secretary James Mattis offered a sobering take Monday on the Strait of Hormuz, criticizing the Trump administration for what he saw as a failure to think strategically about Iran.
The CERAWeek conference here has been clouded by uncertainty over the future of a conflict that’s bringing historic supply disruptions — and upending industry planning in the process.
“We’re in a tough spot, ladies and gentlemen, and I can’t identify a lot of good options,” the retired Marine general told attendees at the CERAWeek by S&P Global conference.
If President Trump declares victory and pulls back the U.S. military, Iran “would now say we own the Strait,” said Mattis, who served in the president’s first term before resigning in 2019 after the commander-in-chief reportedly rebuffed his advice on Syria.
“I think that you could see a tax for any ship going through — something completely unsustainable in the international market,” Mattis said.
The overall U.S. and Israeli strategic objectives for Iran remain “murky,” he said.
“The Americans are fighting in a markedly limited war, and I think that what we’re seeing is a situation where [airplane] targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy,” he said.
Mattis also explained why naval protection of ships would prove a huge challenge and leave major vulnerabilities.
Even a degraded Iran retains the ability to attack ships from shore along a vast stretch of coastline in the wider region, he said.
“If you look at the Texas Gulf Coast, that’s about 367 miles, that gives you an idea of how difficult this will be for the U.S. Navy to try and protect ships in that shipping lane, 600 miles down the Gulf, 100 miles through the Straits and then out into the water,” Mattis said.
“And they’ve got anti-ship cruise missiles that could be fired off the back of a pickup truck that can go 100 miles. So there’s the problem.”
I’m pretty sure he does know what he’s talking about and this is grim.
At this point it’s best to assume that anything coming out of the administration is bullshit. There may be an element of truth in it but we have no way of knowing what parts of it might be. It’s possible that we’ll see a cease fire soon but how that changes the catastrophe we’re looking at for the foreseeable future is very unclear.
I’m telling you, he makes Tommy Tuberville look like Daniel Patrick Moynihan by comparison.
They’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel with this one but since Stephen Miller is actually running DHS I don’t suppose it makes any difference except that they will look extremely stupid every time he opens his mouth. But then what else is new?
Speaking of Miller, here’s his latest:
Stephen Miller: President Trump believes in merit and competence and people who get things done. You look around the table people chosen for these jobs, Pam, Pete, Kash… He chooses people based on their skill, competence, ability, determination, dedication and loyalty, and you… pic.twitter.com/aUgteNLt1c
House conservatives are firing a warning shot at their Republican counterparts in the Senate as a deal begins to take shape on ending the six-week Department of Homeland Security (DHS) shutdown.
Senate Republicans are eyeing a second “big, beautiful bill” via the budget reconciliation process aimed at funding portions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that would likely get little to no Democratic support.
That bill would also include parts of the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act (SAVE America) Act, legislation to require proof of citizenship to register to vote and photo ID to cast ballots in federal elections.
But a growing contingent of House Republicans who are refusing to vote for any Senate-led legislation are crying foul on that portion of the plan. “Senate Republicans refused to force a talking filibuster to pass the SAVE America Act because it would have allowed Democrats to offer unlimited amendments. Now, Senate R’s claim they will pass SAVE America Act via reconciliation (which may not even be possible under the Senate’s arcane rules), which would… checks notes …allow Democrats to offer unlimited amendments,” the conservative House Freedom Caucus said in a statement posted to X on Tuesday.
“This is gaslighting. The American people are not stupid and will not accept more failure theater from Republicans in Congress.”
Lol. This is so typical. The GOP solves a political problem that’s killing them but these far-right wing nuts won’t take yes for an answer. They demand everything on their wish list or nothing.
I guess we’ll have to see if Trump has really been persuaded that he needs to do this and if so if he’s still got the clout he thinks he has to get these hard core types to do his bidding. If I had to guess, I’d think they’ll put up a fight and then relent, giving Trump the adulation he craves. But everything depends upon Mike Johnson allowing it to be passed with a bipartisan vote anyway. If Trump wants it, he’ll get that done.
It seems highly unlikely that Trump’s ridiculous insistence on the SAVE act, which many Republicans don’t want because it will actually hurt their own voters, will pass muster as a Reconciliation Bill which may be the off-ramp the GOP is looking for. (Reconciliation is supposed to only be for items related to the budget.) It’s unknown it Trump knows this or simply thinks he can order the Senate to overrule the parliamentarian if she decides it can’t be included.
Trump’s change of heart is basically a capitulation to the Democrats although nobody wants to say that — he’s a neurotic child whose psyche is so fragile that he cannot deal with any loss and will change his mind if he feels the slightest tingle of embarrassment. It’s obvious that this can’t go on so there’s a good chance this crisis will end this week. The Democrats won.
Update — looks like the deal’s on ice:
Key negotiators circulated a potential deal Tuesday to end a five-week standoff over Department of Homeland Security funding and, among other things, pay beleaguered transportation screeners as mounting security lines snarl airports.
Nobody in Washington, however, seems too excited about it.
Conservative Republicans pushed back on the idea that some Immigration and Customs Enforcement funds would be left out of the agreement and pursued separately under the party-line reconciliation process, calling it a capitulation to Democrats.
Even President Donald Trump, who has gone back and forth on the DHS shutdown talks but hosted the White House meeting Monday evening where the latest proposal was hatched, gave the plan only a tepid endorsement in his first public comments on it Tuesday.
“We’re going to take a good hard look at it,” he said in the Oval Office, later adding, “They are getting fairly close. But I think any deal they make, I’m pretty much not happy with it.”
I would not be surprised if the Dems opposed it as a way to get the Republicans to sign on. Or maybe they are just willing to let this go on to achieve something on the ICE front. They may see some hope for getting the body camera and mask issue.
But then you have Orange Julius Caesar saying he won’t be happy no matter what, so who knows?
Did you know who is really making America’s foreign policy decisions?
Saudi Arabia’s de facto leader, Prince Mohammed bin Salman, has been pushing President Trump to continue the war against Iran, arguing that the U.S.-Israeli military campaign presents a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East, according topeople briefed by American officials on the conversations.
In a series of conversations over the last week, Prince Mohammed has conveyed to Mr. Trump that he must press toward the destruction of Iran’s hard-line government, the people familiar with the conversations said.
Prince Mohammed, the people familiar with the discussions said, has argued that Iran poses a long-term threat to the Gulf that can only be eliminated by getting rid of the government.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel also views Iran as a long-term threat, but analysts say Israeli officials would probably view a failed Iranian state that is too caught up in internal turmoil to menace Israel as a win, while Saudi Arabia views a failed state in Iran as a grave and direct security threat.
I don’t imagine you’re surprised. I know I’m not.
Between these guys and Steven Miller (with Lindsey Graham) we are on the verge of WWIII.
Even for Donald Trump, who is in the middle of a conquistador phase, the declaration was unusually crude. “I do believe I’ll be having the honor of taking Cuba,” he said in the Oval Office on March 16. “Whether I free it, take it — I think I could do anything I want with it, you want to know the truth. They’re a very weakened nation right now.”
The president is correct: Cuba is in a fragile state at the moment. But that’s mostly due to Trump, who instituted an oil blockade against the island nation in the wake of January’s Venezuela operation. Cuba is now on the verge of collapse — and the Cuban people are suffering greatly because of it.
The country has suffered three major blackouts this month, leaving 10 million people without power for days at a time. Hospitals are unable to perform surgeries, food is spoiling, garbage is everywhere because there is no fuel for the government trucks to pick it up. School has been canceled. Businesses are shuttered; there is little to buy or sell.
The New York Times reported the administration is seeking to oust President Miguel Díaz-Canel from power while allowing the island’s Communist government to remain in place — a repeat of what they allowed in Venezuela — and giving Trump a “symbolic win.” As his botched Iran “excursion” has begun to falter, taking Cuba would be a soothing salve for the president’s ego.
Significantly, it could also be a boon for rich Republicans. While the Times reported that the administration could keep “the repressive Communist government that has ruled Cuba for more than 65 years” in place with a new leader — in effect, following the model Trump set in Venezuela — the Atlantic noted that plans could also give “wealthy Republican donors with Cuban ancestry” leadership roles in a transition or even permanent government. Current discussions between the U.S. and Cuban governments are said to include “restitution for owners of property seized by the Cuban government” during the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power — many of those wealthy expatriates settled in south Florida and became Republicans — and “securing broad U.S. latitude to invest, develop, and ultimately capitalize on Cuba’s under developed cities and beaches.”
Political change, in other words, is not necessarily the priority. As was the case with Venezuela, Trump could not care less about freedom and democracy, even though they have used it as an excuse to declare a national emergency in order to legally justify any actions they will end up taking with Cuba. This is all about business, and it’s unlikely they will listen to anyone who doesn’t have a financial stake in the country’s future and there are plenty of people anxious to get started. Idealists need not apply, especially since Secretary of State Marco Rubio is calling most of the shots.
After a lifetime agitating for the overthrow of the communist regime in his father’s native country, Rubio will now by all accounts be happy to work with the repressive regime as long as they are willing to welcome the capitalists. He spoke at length about this at the recent Munich Security Conference, acknowledging that while Cuba faces other issues, “the fundamental problem [is that] Cuba has no economy.”
The Trump administration has made sure of that, capitalizing on the tremendous economic and political stress the country has been under since the fall of the Soviet Union, as well as the recent sanctions and tariffs leveled by Trump following his return to office in January 2025.
But relations between Cuba and the United States have been fraught for centuries. The U.S tried to buy the country from Spain throughout the 19th century and ended up occupying it many times over the years. In a strange circumstance, Cuba even achieved its independence as a result of the American victory in the Spanish-American War. First as an American protectorate and then as an independent nation, Cuba was exploited by Washington to such an extent that it was pretty much owned by U.S. interests before the 1959 revolution.
The anti-communist politics of the Cold War and the tensions caused by the Cuban Missile Crisis dictated the antagonistic relationship between the two countries for decades until Barack Obama began the process of normalizing relations in December 2014. Both commerce and political reform were on the agenda, and Cuba began to emerge from its isolated existence. But that progress was reversed when Donald Trump took office in 2017 and, as he did with most foreign policy, trashed all agreements that had been signed under Obama. The two countries were again on the road to normalization by the end of Joe Biden’s presidency, but Trump’s win has taken relations to a place we haven’t seen since the late 19th century, with the U.S. openly seeking to dominate the island — if not own it altogether.
According to the Atlantic, one of the people familiar with the administration’s plans said, “We control our hemisphere, and we have the ability to do this. We want these hostile regimes out of our hemisphere, and we’re going to set up the business community, because we don’t believe in diplomacy.”
They believe someone’s going to make money and, if you had to guess, one of them will almost certainly be Trump himself.
The president apparently talked about financial opportunities in Cuba with government officials and the Trump Organization during his first term, and he was excited about the possibility of Trump-branded hotels and condominiums on the island. A source said that “he’s interested in Cuba as a market for him, and completely agnostic about the politics.” Trump doesn’t care, they claimed.
All this brings to mind a famous scene in “The Godfather Part II.” As the mobster Hyman Roth and Michael Corleone plot to take over even more of a Cuba on the verge of revolution, Roth says:
Here we are, protected, free to make our profits without Kefauver, the god d**n Justice Department and the FBI 90 miles away, in partnership with a friendly government. Ninety miles! It’s nothing! Just one small step, looking for a man who wants to be president of the United States, and having the cash to make it possible. Michael, we’re bigger than U.S. Steel.
The mobsters were thwarted back then. But now it appears that Donald Trump and Marco Rubio are preparing to make their long-deferred dream come true.
The headline at CNN describes “worsening lines” at U.S. airports: “Travelers continue to see hourslong security lines as TSA officers work without pay amid the ongoing partial government shutdown.”
• At the airports: Some airports are again seeing agonizing security wait times due to callouts from Transportation Security Administration officers who haven’t been paid since mid-February, although other airports are experiencing improvements. In Houston, travelers have been warned they could be waiting for more than four hours, but in Atlanta, today’s lines pale in comparison to yesterday’s.
Amidst the chaos, Donald Trump stands firm until he doesn’t (USA Today):
President Donald Trump isn’t yielding. Instead, he upended sensitive negotiations among lawmakers over the weekend, bucking Senate Republicans and aides by tying the shutdown fight to a voting restrictions bill that has little chance of surviving Congress.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-South Dakota, spoke to Trump on March 22, according to a person familiar with the conversation, to discuss a deal floated by White House staffers to potentially bring the funding crisis to an end before Congress is supposed to leave for a two-week Easter recess.
As part of the proposed compromise, which has support among key Senate Republicans, lawmakers could vote to sustain the rest of the department, including the Transportation Security Administration, while postponing a vote on ICE funding.
Dear Leader said no to pushing through funding under the reconciliation process. He wants his War on Voting.
The Guardian explains how long lines at airports are about Donald Trump making voting harder:
Congress has yet to pass a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security for this fiscal year. Democrats blocked funding the department, demanding that ICE agents be held accountable for acts of violence in the course of their enforcement operations, including the killings of Alex Pretti and Renee Good in Minneapolis. Democrats have also demanded policy reforms, including an end to masked operations and warrantless entry of buildings. Republicans voted against legislation that would have funded the salaries of TSA agents and the US Coast Guard while leaving other parts of the department shut down.
Many TSA security screeners have refused to work while unpaid.
Meanwhile, the US Senate has been debating the merits of the Save America act, which would impose changes to voter registration rules on states that its opponents – including all Senate Democrats at the moment – say would infringe on the right to vote for many Americans. The bill does not have enough support to overcome a Democratic filibuster. Nonetheless, debate stretched through the weekend.
Donald Trump has threatened to refuse to sign any legislation that passes until the Save America act passes.
“I don’t think we should make any deal with the Crazy, Country Destroying, Radical Left Democrats unless, and until, they Vote with Republicans to pass ‘THE SAVE AMERICA ACT,’” the US president wrote on Sunday in a Truth Social post. Trump is demanding an end to the filibuster, if necessary to pass the bill.
Will he or won’t he TACO? Your wait at the airport depends on it.
FWIW, Sen. Chuck Schumer explains today in The New York Times that what Trump really wants to save is his presidency from the 2026 midterms.
“Republicans like to pretend that the SAVE Act is a voter ID bill,” he begins. But it’s more. “Though on the surface it appears to be one, something far more insidious lies beneath: a system for purging eligible voters from the electorate — voters who are disproportionately likely to vote against Republicans. In the bill, voter ID comes into play only at the very end of a process designed to systematically disenfranchise Americans.” He itemizes.
What’s important to know, Schumer writes, is who Trump’s victims are (gift link):
The burdens of the SAVE Act would fall most heavily on the socioeconomically disadvantaged, the working class and voters of color. They would fall on Americans who cannot spend hours navigating bureaucratic obstacles, on older people who depend on voting by mail, on those without passports, on rural communities far from election offices. In other words: millions of everyday Americans.
Including Republican voters so long as the GOP thinks more Democratic voters get disenfranchised, as I’ve pointed out before.
Sleepless in the White House posted about ICE and the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility” Act (SAVE) early this morning without mentioning the latter by name. In what Daily Beast oversells as a “frantic early-morning” rant, Donald Trump smushed together two of his favorite grievances in one 1:48 a.m. ET Truth Social post:
“Democrats are desperate to keep illegals, no matter how bad or dangerous they may be, in the Country. They want them to VOTE! That’s why they are fighting so hard to neutralize ICE. We will fight them all the way, and WIN!
By “we,” Trump means someone else.
“Pull yourself together. We have work to do. And by ‘we,’ I mean you,” Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) tells sleepy assistant Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) in the trailer for The Devil Wears Prada 2. Which is how Trump operates.
Trump told a roundtable in Memphis, Tennessee that Republicans should work through the Easter recess to pass SAVE for him.
“You don’t have to take a fast vote. Don’t worry about Easter, going home. In fact, make this one for Jesus,” Trump said. He’ll be golfing, cheating at it, and shouting at clouds.
In Memphis, Trump struggled to keep his eyes open, Daily Beast reports, “occasionally jerking his head around as he appeared to drift off, while MAGA acolytes took turns giving him ‘Dear Leader-style’ compliments.”
This is a man who does not use email and puts nothing in writing other than his sharpied signatures. But he’ll issue directives to underlings at all hours for all to see via Truth Social, or at events far from Washington, D.C., and expect others to jump. Or maybe bomb Iranian power plants or invade Cuba.
Yes, noncitizen voting is extremely rare, Daily Beast acknowledges. And yes, SAVE has virtually no path forward where the House bill sits in the U.S. Senate. And, by the way, Trump has a war he started with Iran and can’t seem to finish on his plate when he’s not obsessing over his gilded ballroom and gutting the Kennedy Center. But what keeps him up at night is losing control of Congress in the fall elections.
Daily Beast remarks on SAVE:
Critics have raised concerns that Trump’s push for stricter voter ID rules in a country where nearly half of residents do not own passports could be an attempt to meddle in the 2026 midterms, where Republicans are widely expected to suffer heavy losses.
In whatever way he fails, Trump makes sure someone else pays the price. It’s one of his few talents.
It’s not too late to remind any Republican representing you in the Senate not to save SAVE.
1. Voters Are Likely to Blame Republicans, Not Democrats
Most shutdowns are high-profile affairs that dominate political coverage, with intense focus on the stakes and the human cost.
Not this one.
It’s one department, much of which is already funded, and it’s unfolding in the middle of a war. Most Americans have been going about their daily lives largely unaware of the shutdown — until they get to the airport.
And even then, it’s not obvious to travelers that the lines are the result of a government shutdown.
And even if people in line figure out that a shutdown is the cause, I don’t think they’ll automatically blame Democrats. They’re much more likely to blame Republicans.
We saw this pattern in the last shutdown: all of the polling showed that a plurality of voters blamed Republicans, not Democrats, even though Democrats had initiated the shutdown and were very public about their reasons for doing so.
This reflexive tendency to blame Trump and Republicans stems from two things. First, Republicans control everything. When something isn’t working, voters hold the party in power responsible for fixing it. Second, Trump’s personal brand is such that whenever there’s a dispute or a crisis, most people’s default assumption is that he’s the one being unreasonable. The majority of voters presume he is at fault.
The key point for Democrats: as more people pay attention to the shutdown, the political pressure should fall on Republicans, not Democrats.
2. Democrats Have the Better Argument
The Democratic case is two-fold. First, they are demanding commonsense reforms to ICE following the killing of two American citizens and countless other examples of dangerous and illegal behavior by the agency.
That argument has real purchase. Americans are deeply unhappy with ICE and Trump’s broader approach to immigration enforcement. A Marist/NPR poll from February found that 60% of Americans disapprove of ICE, 65% believe ICE has gone too far, and 62% think ICE is making Americans less safe.
And immigration is no longer a political asset for Trump. According to Nate Silver’s model, Trump is nearly ten points underwater on the issue.
This is why Trump’s idea to send ICE agents to help TSA is a potential political disaster for Republicans.
The second part of the Democratic argument may be even stronger. Republicans are the ones blocking TSA funding. Democrats want to fund TSA and the rest of DHS now, while negotiations on ICE reform continue. Republicans have voted down bills to fund TSA alone at least half a dozen times.
Last night, Trump made the Republicans’ position even weaker by saying that he wouldn’t sign a bill funding DHS unless Congress passed the politically toxic SAVE Act.
That’s a powerful political and rhetorical position: Democrats want to pay TSA workers and fix a broken agency. Republicans are saying no.
They need to make sure that the public understands that and it won’t be easy. The right wing noise machine is shouting to the rooftops that the Democrats are at fault. Some are even saying that this show ICE are really the good guys just helping out in a crisis. (See? They aren’t even wearing masks now that Trump asked them not to!)
I don’t think most people will buy it but you can’t take anything for granted. The Democrats have to find a way to penetrate the cacophony. I’m not sure what it takes but I would guess that as the lines get longer and people get more and more impatient they are going to be looking for the explanation and the Democrats have to be everywhere, in national and local media, social media, mailings, outreach of every kind. They need to own that narrative. I don’t know if they can do it.
The Supremes heard a case today about whether or not elections officials can count ballots that have been postmarked on or before election day but arrive later. It went about as you might have expected, via TPM:
Voting by mail has become a contentious, political issue in the last several years, primarily fueled by President Donald Trump claiming falsely that it helped his shadowy enemies steal the election from him in 2020. Faced with the inconvenient reality that voting by mail is not actually rife with fraud, many of the conservative justices had to content themselves with increasingly hallucinatory what-ifs. An inordinate amount of time on Monday centered on the possibility of voters “retracting” their votes, a complicated and rare procedure. Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas obsessed over the granularities of having a neighbor or relative drop off a voter’s ballot in their stead.
Many on the right sounded Trumpian in their feigned concern about voting fraud.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh fretted over the chance that late arriving ballots would prompt cries of fraud, creating a “perception” that lawful elections might appear rigged. As has become rote for the Court’s conservatives, in the absence of any actual evidence of voter fraud, they fell back on the impossible-to-substantiate risk that people might think something fishy is going on.
These rabbit holes, which tripped up Mississippi Solicitor General Scott Stewart, distracted from the meat of Monday’s attempt by the Republican National Committee and the Trump administration to make voting by mail harder to do because Democratic voters have used it more in recent history.
The GOP had long been a prime proponent of mail-in voting even as they were rending their garments over non-existent voter fraud long before Trump. This particular innovation is all Trump.
But it’s not the only one, it sounds like Alito is all in on Trump’s inane contention that all voting must be on election day (and probably that only votes counted on election day can count.)
“We have lots of phrases that involve two words, the second of which is ‘day,’” began the Princeton and Yale-educated Justice Samual Alito. “Labor Day, Memorial Day, George Washington’s birthday, Independence Day, birthday and Election Day,” he continued, “birthday” apparently so compelling as to warrant double-dipping.
“They’re all particular days — so if we start with that, if I have nothing more to look at than the phrase ‘Election Day,’ I think this is the day in which everything is going to take place,” he concluded.
Why they think all this is only going to hurt Democrats I’ll never understand.
This is the real kicker:
While the Roberts Court attacking voting rights has long been a dog bites man story, the action it’s at least seriously contemplating is extreme: ripping up a routine, widely practiced state policy on the grounds that Congress actually meant federal law to forbid it, but it just randomly hasn’t come up until now.
And the Court is considering doing this months before the midterm elections, a seemingly clear violation of the Purcell principle: the idea that courts shouldn’t change how elections work too close to them, so as to not confuse voters. But the Court has become comfortable applying the rule sparingly, only when people likely to vote Republican are at risk.
Good luck with making a rule that the law only applies to Democrats. But if anyone can do it, this conservative majority can. They are rank partisans and increasingly aren’t even trying to hide it.
