Folks, I almost spilled my coffee reading this one. A federal judge, Sparkle Sooknanan, has accused the Justice Department of trying to subvert civil rights laws with a voter roll audit plan. The plan would have allowed the department to obtain non-public data and audit nearly every state’s voter rolls, which is a major part of President Donald Trump’s effort to insert the federal government into election administration. I mean, can you imagine? It’s like they want to know everything about us.
The judge’s ruling is a big deal, as it halts the department’s project and is a major legal setback for Trump’s plans. Sooknanan’s 78-page opinion is a stinging rebuke of how the administration has shifted the priorities of the Justice Department, specifically its Civil Rights Division. She described the division as historically standing at the forefront of the federal government’s efforts to protect Americans’ right to vote.
When Trump returned to the White House last year, the DOJ abandoned several high-profile voting rights cases, and political appointees pushed out career staff from the division. For the last year, much of the public work of the voting section has been focused on obtaining state voter rolls in a hunt for non-citizen voters, which has long been a fixation of Trump’s mass election fraud beliefs. Bless their hearts, they really think they can just go around collecting all this data without anyone noticing.
Sooknanan wrote that “Generations of Civil Rights Division attorneys and staff have worked to protect that right – a sacred right that gives our citizenry a say in its government and secures all other individual rights against government interference.” She also said that the administration’s actions would “subvert” the text of the Civil Rights Act, which gave the attorney general certain investigatory powers to respond to Jim Crow-era voter restrictions.
The judge concluded that the Trump administration violated federal laws in how it demanded that states produce non-public voter data, for the purposes of finding alleged non-citizens on the rolls and then instructing states to remove them. She also said that the administration’s arguments about the law would “turn these voter-protection laws on their head” and that Congress did not give the administration the power to direct state voter roll purges.
In the end, Sooknanan’s ruling blocks the Justice Department’s voter list review program, which is a big win for voter advocacy groups like Common Cause. The group’s president, Virginia Kase Solomón, said it was “victory for voters and yet another loss for the Department of Justice.” I guess you could say the Trump administration got a big fat “F” on this one. And that’s a wrap, folks!
Armchair patriot. Believes in the free market, cold beer, and that there’s always a guy named George behind every CNN segment.
Former remote-throwing champion turned #1 couch commentator on liberal panic in the media. Born in Texas (or so his mug says), he earned a degree in Fake Newsology & Beer Philosophy from YouTube University.
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