The Trump administration wasted no time appealing a district judge’s Thursday night order temporarily keeping it from enforcing an executive order that would give the federal government unprecedented control over vote-by-mail.
The government appealed the order to the First Circuit Court of Appeals Friday afternoon.
The recent flurry of litigation is all heading to one place: the Supreme Court, which will make the final determination of whether the executive order — which would create citizenship lists and stands to disenfranchise thousands of voters — can go into effect. The right-wing majority previously skirted ruling on the merits, saying that the plaintiffs were not allowed to challenge the order before it was implemented. The Trump administration has since produced a final rule for at least one agency to put the order into effect (violating a lower court injunction in the process), so the challengers have accordingly filed new complaints, starting the case’s ascension up to the Supreme Court again.
Litigation is happening at a breakneck pace, as it is already unclear whether the agencies the order directs to act would have time to implement massive changes before ballots for the November elections start going out.
“Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her dissent from the Supreme Court order turning back challenges to the order as premature.
The administration’s fixation on enforcing the order reveals the extent to which it believes it could give Republicans an artificial advantage in the critical midterms — and to which it believes that the Supreme Court majority will be a loyal helpmate in that effort when push comes to shove.
