The Supreme Court Gives Trump a Boost

The Supreme Court is handing quite a victory to President Trump in his efforts to ensure the integrity of the midterm elections. The high court’s ruling Friday in Department Of Homeland Security v. League Of Women Voters allows Mr. Trump to use a federal database of immigration records to help states confirm the citizenship of voters. The decision contrasts with the court’s failure to back Mr. Trump’s push to tighten rules around mail-in voting.Net, net, this is progress. “The Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters,” says the high court’s unsigned majority ruling. A lower court order, the majority said, would have prevented the Feds “from using the program it believes is best suited to the task.” The Nine reversed the lower court’s order, which had been upheld by a federal appeals court.The Nine concede that the ruling could have a limited effect on the midterm election, in part because federal law “prohibits state and local election authorities from clearing their voter rolls in the weeks leading up to federal elections.” Yet the majority deemed overly broad the lower court’s order barring use of the database. The order, per the Nine, forbids states before elections to “conduct individualized inquiries, which are permitted under federal law.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissent joined by Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, laments that the majority ruling could cause “harm” by “burdening or disenfranchising” voters. That concern, she says, “outweighs” what she calls “the nonexistent harm that the Government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.” She points to the use of the database as a violation of privacy rights.The dispute arose after Mr. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security updated the immigration database, known as SAVE, “so that a user could enter a person’s Social Security number, rather than his alien registration number, as a numeric identifier,” as Solicitor General John Sauer tells the high court. The update “made SAVE significantly more responsive,” he adds. Yet “several voting-rights and privacy-rights organizations,” he says, balked.A federal judge at the Columbia District, Sparkle Sooknanan, nominated by President Biden, ruled for the activist groups, which include the League of Women Voters. The use of the database, she found, infringed on “the right to privacy and the right to vote.” She held that using the “unreliable” database was leading to “removing United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”Per Judge Sooknanan, Uncle Samuel “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” She ordered a halt to the verification effort. Riders of the District of Columbia Circuit denied Mr. Trump’s request to pause Judge Sooknanan’s order. Her order echoed rulings by activist judges against Mr. Trump’s other attempts to issue postal rules to ensure only citizens were voting by mail.In those postal disputes, though, the Supreme Court declined to intervene despite Messrs. Trump’s and Sauer’s concerns that failure to act meant that “the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud.” Yet in the case of Judge Sooknanan, a majority on the high bench had the clarity to hold that her ruling “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”

The Supreme Court Gives Trump a Boost

The Supreme Court Gives Trump a Boost

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