South Carolina tripping up GOP efforts

 

Texas Representative Ann Johnson

GOP reeks of desperation

 

This is where we are, folks

 

They know 2026 is going to be a blowout if they don't interfere.

If by some miracle Democrats get back in control of Congress, they need to do some serious Supreme Court reform.  They need to do a lot of things, but none of them are more important than that.

UPDATE 05/12/2026:

GOP is toast

 

Bingo

 

Hallelujah!

 

[M]ore Republicans are retiring ahead of the midterms than at any point in nearly a century, according to an ABC News tally of retirement announcements and a review of historical data since 1930 compiled by the Brookings Institution.

[...]

It includes powerful committee chairs, including Graves and Rep. Jodey Arrington of Texas, the Republican leader of the House Budget Committee; veterans such as retired Navy SEAL Rep. Morgan Luttrell of Texas and retired Air Force brigadier general Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska; and 20 Republicans running for Senate or governor of their home states.

[...]

Many of the lawmakers cited personal reasons, including long careers and their families, as shaping their decisions not to seek office again.

  ABC News

They wouldn't be retiring if they thought they had a chance at winning. It's obvious they don't want to have a loss on their record, and they don't want to be blamed for the party crashing. Whatever their reasons, good riddance.  

Incredible incompetence plagues the Trump administration

The Department of Justice (DOJ) has once again tripped over the basics of litigation in its relentless quest for state voter registration records, blowing a deadline to properly serve Washington’s secretary of state with its lawsuit.

In a filing Monday, Eric Neff, the acting chief of the DOJ’s Voting Section, said miscommunication with local U.S. attorneys led to the complaint being sent to the wrong addresses. Neff said he then mistook a separate court order in the case — demanding to know why Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs had not yet been properly served — as an extension of the service deadline.

Neff begged the court to forgive his mistake. “The United States acknowledges that it should have filed a motion for extension of time from this Court and requested additional time to serve Defendant,” Neff wrote. “Counsel apologizes to the Court for not having sought a timely extension.”

  Democracy Docket

I guess that's a start.

“We would expect the U.S. Department of Justice to know how to properly file a lawsuit in federal court,” Hobbs’ office told Democracy Docket. “We would also expect them to follow official procedures of serving the complaint prior to reaching out to media outlets, considering the important nature of voter data.”

Surely they DO know. This isn't the first time they've missed a deadline in a case.

The DOJ appeared to make a similar error in its lawsuit against Massachusetts.* Despite this, Neff averred “under penalty of perjury” in a declaration to the Washington district court accompanying Monday’s filing that “[m]y Section has successfully served all other lawsuits of this nature in all other jurisdictions successfully.”

They know. They lie.

After Attorney General Pam Bondi took office, career DOJ attorneys fled by the hundreds and upwards of 75% left the Civil Rights Division as it shifted its focus from protecting voting rights to attacking them.

Last year, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said she welcomed the exodus of experienced attorneys, and has repeatedly advertised openings at the office on social media posts and urging inexperienced, but ideologically aligned, lawyers to apply.

Neff was one of those new hires. [...] Before the DOJ, Neff was a Los Angeles County prosecutor who brought flawed charges based on a conspiracy theory pushed by election deniers. That mistake ended up costing L.A. taxpayers $5 million in a settlement.

Was there no vetting? Actually, it's possible that since the experts in every agency have been fired, perhaps they simply look at loyalty oaths for new hires.

“The United States instituted multiple related actions across the country and is coordinating these actions out of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division, Voting Section,” [Neff] wrote. “Litigating in multiple jurisdictions presents unique challenges to navigate each District’s local rules and varying service requirements in each state.”

Does that fit under the rubric of "ignorance of the law is no excuse?" Sorry your boss fired everybody who knew, but, too bad.

Election law experts have questioned the strategy behind filing dozens of nearly identical lawsuits, some in jurisdictions with adverse case law.

[...]

So far, the DOJ’s machine gun litigation strategy hasn’t been working. To date, three courts have ruled against the DOJ on the merits; the agency is now appealing all three. Another court in Georgia dismissed the case without prejudice because the DOJ filed in the wrong jurisdiction — they made the same mistake in California, but the judge there decided to rule against the DOJ on the merits.

Those are hardly the only legal errors. The DOJ’s filings have been riddled with typos, miscited statutes, and included undeleted drafting notes. The agency spent months emailing the wrong address in Oklahoma to demand voter rolls, and they sent demand letters to the wrong state officials in Rhode Island and Wisconsin.

And we can't forget the filings they've made using AI in which nonexistent cases are cited.

[W]hile the mistake is unlikely to doom the DOJ’s case, it is embarrassing.

And the delays this filing fault has already caused could frustrate the raison d’etre for the DOJ’s demands for state’s unredacted voter rolls — forcing election officials to purge their voter rolls ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

So, they win even if they don't know what they're doing?

America is failing

 

It's on a par with everything he does: disregard for the law, and buying whatever he wants.  Or selling, as in the case of pardons.  It's all transactional, and it all involves money changing hands.

Yikes

 

So if two or three of the top four Democrats don't bow out, California could end up with a Republican governor next year.

The suppression and oppression are going to get worse

Be prepared.   Because it's not just the House GOP that's threatened.

Every vote counts

 

Another arrow in the anti-voting quiver of the GOP

 

One more win for elections

 

We need all we can get.  I fully expect the Supreme Court to destroy the Voting Rights Act.

Oh God, what now?

An attempt to explain Trump's batshit crazy claim he can order Voter ID to be a thing...

One of the odd parts of Trump’s post was the statement that “I have searched the depths of legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the near future.” What could Trump have been referring to? I originally had no idea, but then a reader wrote to me for comment about an obscure post which seems insane but could explain the big Trump reveal to come:

  Election Law Blog

Read it here.

Total batshit bullshit.  

Head so far up his own ass

 

Magic wand?

Also, can you picture Trump searching the depths of anything legal or scholarly or remotely requiring reading?

Good one.

UPDATE 04:53 pm:

They don't want to use computers to count votes, but they do want to use them to purge the voting rolls.

UPDATE 02/14/2026:

One of the odd parts of Trump’s post was the statement that “I have searched the depths of legal arguments not yet articulated or vetted on this subject, and will be presenting an irrefutable one in the near future.” What could Trump have been referring to? I originally had no idea, but then a reader wrote to me for comment about an obscure post which seems insane but could explain the big Trump reveal to come:

It’s possible states innocently believe they have unrestrained Constitutional authority to create election rules within their borders.

[...]

A former manager for Marriott Hotels, [John N. Goodman, a retired Hallandale Beach man] spent six weeks at the main branch of the Broward County Library System in Ft. Lauderdale. He was reading a microfilm copy of the original U.S. Constitution, eventually spotting an apparent shadow that turned out to be a significant find.

According to Goodman, a Kentucky native, he stumbled upon wording that wasn’t commonly known, although he speculates Supreme Court justices were familiar with the words because a majority opinion in U.S. Term Limits v Thorton echoed that hallowed language.

In an email this morning, he wrote, it’s “important to point out to your readers that the Constitution on the surface says that the states do have 100% power over elections, but (there was an) obstructed console that was not noticed for many many years because it looks exactly like a faded shadow from the line above it, (so) I decided to go back the next day with a high-powered magnifier to add to the microfilm magnifier in order to still barely make out what it said… it said dictate electoral outcomes unfairly and the states cannot do that and then the actual words dictate electoral outcomes is also in that 1995 Supreme Court case and they elaborate in great detail such as the states powers designed by the framers were meant to be procedural, and their actions cannot compromise integrity of the election (to) favor or disfavor a certain class of candidate, or evade constitutional restraints.”

[...]

Clearly, though, Goodman isn’t a Constitutional scholar, let alone an attorney. However, his research eventually put him in touch with two attorneys who are working with President Trump to clean up our voting system, he says.

  Election Law Blog

From out of the woodwork and QAnon they come.

The idea that there is hidden language in the Constitution that vests electoral power in the federal government, in contradiction to the actual vesting in the states subject to congressional override in t elections, is laughable.

It's not laughable. It's batshit crazy.

If this is what the President was referring to as “irrefutable” proof to support an executive order on elections, he’s more gullible and ignorant than I thought.

Well, he is indeed both of those things, but he's also batshit crazy. I do hope he tries this one on publicly, though.

[The lawsuit Goodman cites] does not come close to saying what the substacker implies. Justice Stevens in U.S. Term Limits was commenting on the limited power of states under the Elections Clause to do things like dictate electoral outcomes. That’s surely right. But nothing in the case, or in the Constitution, or in the super-secret part of the Constitution visible only on microfilm in a Florida library, says that the President, acting unilaterally, has the power to make or alter state regulations on the conduct of elections. The elections clause indeed provides that the only body that can override states’ regulations of elections is Congress.

Which is why Democrats MUST retake Congress.

When are the Dem elites going to figure it out?

 Special election primary in New Jersey.

Another one

 

Virginia followingCalifornia

Virginia’s state Supreme Court will decide whether state Democrats’ gerrymander push can proceed after an appeals court on Wednesday pushed the case to the high court.

The state Circuit Court of Appeals, in a motion, stated that the case is of “such imperative public importance as to justify the deviation from normal appellate practice and to require prompt decision in the Supreme Court.”

The move comes after a court in Tazewell County last week blocked Virginia Democrats from going forward with gerrymandering, ruling that the Democrat-led Legislature had wrongly approved a constitutional amendment that would allow for mid-decade redrawing of congressional districts ahead of the midterms this fall.

  Politico

 

The Tulsi Gabbard-Maduro connection

Norm Ornsteing has reposted Allison Gill's assessment of the Gabbard-Maduro connection to interfere in the 2026 (and beyond) elections. That's a pretty darn good recommendation.

Back in 2020 after losing to Joe Biden, Donald Trump conspired with multiple individuals to overturn the results. There were multiple conspiracies that all failed, leading to his final act of desperation: sending a violent and angry mob to the Capitol to block the certification of the votes.

[...]

But there was another conspiracy afoot that Jack Smith outlined as part of the fraudulent elector scheme: fabricated foreign election interference.

Going back to November and December of 2020, Trump tried furiously to seize voting machines in multiple states. He asked the Department of Justice to seize voting machines, but Bill Barr said he didn’t have the authority, nor was there any evidence of election fraud that would justify it.

Trump then asked the Department of Homeland Security to seize the voting machines, but they also rebuffed his demands. Finally, in a contentious meeting in the Oval Office on December 18th, 2020, Trump floated the idea of the military seizing voting machines. During that meeting, Rudy Giuliani told Trump that they couldn’t involve the Pentagon unless there was proof of foreign election interference.

  Allison Gill 

Continue reading.

They ALL lie.  You will never know the true story.

UPDATE 02/06/2026: