Supreme Court Sends a Midterm Message

The Supreme Court’s refusal to back President Trump’s effort to ensure the integrity of California’s voting is a moment to mark. The high court rejected a White House request that Los Angeles County set aside some 20,000 mail-in ballots. It reminds that the Constitution ordains that states play the primary role in regulating elections. And, in a caution for Mr. Trump, that the Nine has scant appetite for political disputes over the fairness of the midterm vote.The Coast contretemps concerns the caution, mooted by Mr. Trump and the Justice Department, that non-citizens “appear to be registered to vote in California,” per Solicitor General John Sauer. In mid-October the DOJ filed suit to demand that California “segregate mail ballots cast by” the potential non-citizens “until the lawfulness of the ballots could be adjudicated,” General Sauer said in a filing to the high court. Lower courts had denied the request.So General Sauer, quoting Judge Patrick Bumatay of the Ninth appeals circuit, asked the high court to authorize the “modest remedy” requested by Uncle Samuel by “stopping California from mixing the ballots of citizens and suspected noncitizens.” The DOJ’s proposed solution, in General Sauer’s telling, would have had the virtue of preventing any ballots from being cancelled while the eligibility of the suspected non-citizens was verified. Congress, General Sauer said, has made it “unlawful for any alien to vote” in federal elections. Enforcement of that law is, he stated, “part of the sovereign’s obligation ‘to preserve the basic conception of a political community,’” citing a high court precedent from 1978, Foley v. Connelie. Even so, General Sauer lamented “despite that prohibition, aliens sometimes register to vote, and do vote, in our elections.” Feature, he said, recent irregularities in New Jersey.The president’s request was filed at the high court on Monday. What followed, per the Times, was “an extraordinary rebuke of the Trump administration.” The justices did not address General Sauer’s request by asking the opposing party, California in this case, to respond. That is “almost uniform practice for such emergency applications from the federal government,” the Times reports. Instead, the Nine within hours issued a one-sentence denial.The high court’s order was unsigned, and no dissenting votes were reported. This rejection of the president’s attempt to promote election integrity is in line with an earlier decision against Mr. Trump’s push to regulate mail-in ballots. He had issued an executive order to ensure that mail balloting was restricted to citizens. Left-leaning judges pointed to the role of states in making election policies and put a hold on Mr. Trump’s order. In that case, General Sauer cautioned the Nine that if the rulings by lower court judges were not reversed, there lurked a danger that “the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud.” Yet in September, the Supreme Court declined to lift that hold. That led Mr. Trump to suggest on his Truth Social platform that the court had been “bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”The high court’s apparent disinclination to intervene in state voting practices could be seen to undercut the DOJ’s rationale for today dispatching 1,000 vote monitors across all 50 states in what the department calls “its largest monitoring effort in history.” The DOJ is invoking the Voting Rights Act as a signal of its commitment to “election integrity.” Yet the primary responsibility to ensure the probity of America’s voting rests with the states.

Supreme Court Sends a Midterm Message

Supreme Court Sends a Midterm Message

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