I’m guessing most of my readers have already voted, some of them a month or more ago, so we’re all just waiting anxiously to see if there really is a blue wave, and how consequential it will be.
Our anxiety is, of course, well founded, and is being cynically manipulated by the mainstream press.
Just to be clear, the midterms are still on track to come off pretty much as planned, just as they have for the last few centuries. But if you read the headlines in the mainstream press, you’d think Trump had already stolen every congressional seat, and that our only recourse is to cower in a corner and wait to be slaughtered.
We need to understand that the system, while under severe stress, is holding. Yes, post-election skullduggery will be rife throughout the land, and DOJ will be leading the charge. They’ll be bending the law when possible, and ignoring it when necessary.
And yet, it is quite the irony that, even with the most corrupt administration in our history being enabled by an equally corrupt Supreme Court, the clearest way out of this nightmare rests with, yes, the court system.
The electorate will indeed have its say today, but depending on what it says, the coming winter will treat us to a blizzard of rogue lawsuits aimed at what? Confusing us? Intimidating us? Stealing our ballots? Or are they making it up as they go along? As long as Trump demands lawsuits, DOJ will supply them. They don’t have to make sense.
The judges who hear these suits are uniformly shooting them down, often with prejudice, often with opinions dripping with contempt at both the audacity and the ham-handedness of the DOJ attorneys appearing before them. Evidently, the lawsuits are signed mostly by higher-level DOJ officials, and there is speculation that the lower-level attorneys — whose careers can do without the Trump stink — may be refusing to sign such unconstitutional slop.
Yet DOJ keeps coming, unencumbered by either competence or coherent legal theories, leveraging the power of our federal government to spew a steady stream of baseless yet noisy litigation.
The noise is, of course, classic Trump. When in doubt, sue. At minimum, you force your enemies to spend time and money defending themselves. But you can also get your lawless lie out to the public, where Fox can amplify it. Plus, you can lay the groundwork for legal challenges when the midterms are over. Plus, you get to delay any consequences for as long as the legal system takes to resolve the issue.
The legal system is no longer taking this lying down. The courts are consistently pushing back, with judges in many jurisdictions acting quickly to sweep the lawsuits aside. At least nine federal judges appointed by Trump have ruled against his DOJ.
And why wouldn’t they? A first-year law student could tear apart these lawsuits. A judge could be appointed by Trump, blessed by Leonard Leo, promoted by the Federalist Society, extolled by the Heritage Foundation, and still not be able to abide the inept legal arguments being brought before them. Besides, these judges have their own legacies to attend to, and would prefer not to be remembered as a Trump stooge.
Still, it seems every headline begins with DOJ suing someone, usually a state, over possible election fraud. Their legal theories are mostly centered around the wildly disingenuous notion that there are millions of noncitizens out there casting illegal ballots. Which has never been remotely true.
Voter fraud is spectacularly rare. Instances of noncitizen voting are rarer still, and usually inadvertent. Actual fraud — where there’s an arrest, trial, and conviction for election tampering — is the rarest, and is almost exclusively committed by Republicans.
So there is no basis, either in the facts or the law, to back up claims of noncitizen voting. Which every judge, with no exceptions, has been quick to point out.
You wouldn’t know this from the mainstream press. There has been no end of doomsday headlines over the latest shoddy lawsuit pressuring states to surrender their voter rolls, or sequester 20,000 ballots, or threaten election workers with prison time.
When you click through from these headline to their articles, you’ll need to scroll down a few paragraphs to find out how bogus the suit is, or how poor its chances are in court, or the evident desperation driving Trump and his pet DOJ to bring them in the first place. The articles are there, not to inform, but to scare.
Sometimes they’re even there to sabotage. How else to explain the New York Times’ hit job on Mary Peltola last week, blindsiding her senatorial campaign in Alaska, and playing right into DOJ’s hands.
I won’t tell the story here, but the upshot is that Peltola’s campaign was caught by the Times in a classic dirty trick: recruiting and promoting a “spoiler” candidate — the now-famous “Other Dan Sullivan,” who might siphon off votes from her opponent.
This trick, while refreshingly underhanded for Democrats, was neither uncommon nor illegal, but you’d have to be deep into the Times article to get that.
The whole “scandal” is little more than routine political shenanigans, the kind of thing only worth noticing when Democrats do it, and I don’t know a single Democrat who doesn’t applaud the effort. The fact that the Times launched a six-month investigation, then dropped a “bombshell exposé” exactly one week before the midterms feels far dirtier than the dirty trick itself.
Because right on cue, Trump howled with rage, Alaska’s governor obediently announced an investigation, and suddenly this is the biggest story in the country.
It overlaps with the other “Two Dan Sullivans” story, which is DOJ’s bogus lawsuit aimed at non-certification of the Alaska results. The two stories are intertwined, but really have no bearing on each other.
Yet between a state investigation and another dozen lawsuits from DOJ, this could just delay certification of the Alaskan Senate race. Which is, of course, the point. What they’re doing, and not just in Alaska, is laying the groundwork for their post-election strategy: challenging the winners in close races.
So even if there’s a blue tsunami, we can expect these court fights to continue. Some might make it to SCOTUS, but the cases are so transparently corrupt, so obviously without legal merit, it’s hard to see anyone but Alito and Thomas taking them seriously. Yes, I’ve been wrong before.
But again, winning the lawsuits isn’t the point. Again, it’s classic Trump: delay, sue, delay some more, and before you know it Alaska — and the Democratic caucus — has gone six months without a sitting senator. This assumes, of course, that Peltola wins, which is not a sure thing. If the Republican wins, the whole issue vanishes down the memory hole.
But by far the most galling part of it is the Times’ role, deliberately putting its thumb on the scale, in effect doing DOJ’s bidding. If they would put even a fraction of that journalistic firepower into the hundreds of Trump-related outrages, they could have actually helped us all out of this ongoing nightmare. Instead, they went for the easy “both sides do it” narrative. Shame on them.
I don’t know what’s going to happen today, but I do know the anxiety level is cranked up to eleven. On Sunday, we heard of the stunning betrayal of Haley Stevens, throwing her support to the enemy, Mike Rogers, and lighting her career on fire.
I choose to think these things don’t matter, that this election is already settled, and that last-minute surprises won’t change any minds. I don’t know if I’m fooling myself.
If there really is a blue wave, let’s ride it and enjoy it. But let’s not get too happy. Whatever happens tonight, the world will look very different tomorrow morning. The only thing I know for sure is that it will still be demanding my attention.
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