Not like TFG’s administration gives a shit what the courts say.
Bravo to Julia Le for being so open about it.
“The system sucks. This job sucks,” Julie Le, an attorney representing the US attorney’s office in Minnesota, said in response to a federal judge’s questions on why ICE has repeatedly failed to comply with court orders.
“I wish you would hold me in contempt so I would have a full 24 hours sleep,” she added in comments that quickly went viral.
US district judge Jerry Blackwell had ordered Le, as well as assistant US attorney Ana Voss, to appear in his St Paul courtroom on Tuesday to explain why the DHS missed multiple deadlines to release five detainees who the judge said never should have been arrested in the first place.
“A court order is not advisory, and it is not conditional,” Blackwell said. “It is not something that any agency can treat as optional as it decides how or whether to comply.”
During the hearing, Le acknowledged that many at the DHS did not understand the seriousness of an order from a federal judge.
The last post, linking to Bluesky Social, is highly practical.
In much of Pennsylvania, there are elections for Judge of Elections and Inspector of Elections, for every precinct, with both a Democrat and Republican for each (may vary a little depending if you live in a borough, township, city, etc.). And a lot of the time there is no one who runs, due to some combination for there being few local Democrats and low overall town population. If you join your local Democratic Party organization (could be at the county level depending on population), it might be pretty easy to become an unpaid elected official.
How early will it have to be though? SCOTUS gave them an easy way to get around state law in BOST v. ILLINOIS STATE BOARD OF ELECTIONS and toss a LOT of mail in ballots.
It seems to me no matter how early people mail ballots it is likely to be challenged and tossed out if it isn’t received by Election Day. Fucking up mail delivery in the right areas could impact results.
Same in Orange County, CA. In '24 we had several volunteers patrolling the perimeter. Our supervisor had a few interactions with loiterers, though they weren’t cops, and probably not armed. I suppose if a thug wants to shoot someone, there’s no stopping them, but barring that, polling centers are well attended and it would be harder than one might think to get away with stirring up shit. I think it’s an excellent idea for as many people as possible to volunteer.
Also, we have to somehow get the message to Pigpen Steve Bannon that there will be a lot of ‘we, the people’, around, filming everything and prepared to defend.
I hope it’s not too off topic to ask how Steve Bannon thinks he has the power to sic ICE, or anyone else, on polling centers. The obvious answer is, of course, that he is a filthy, delusional, degenerate who talks out of his arse. But, does he still have Dotard’s ear? I don’t recall reading their names in the same sentence in quite a while.
It’s a pretty sad commentary on where we’ve gotten to that you’d even write this. The government openly defying court orders isn’t something that’s supposed to happen, ever without there being serious consequences. Having an attorney for the DHS openly acknowledge in court that many in DHS don’t understand the seriousness of an order from a federal judge is frankly insane and scary. If you or I were to decide to not take orders from a federal judge seriously and just ignore them and miss multiple deadlines, we wouldn’t get the chance to be asking the judge to hold us in contempt. We’d be sitting in a jail cell for contempt.
Some of this voter suppression has already been tried out.
In South Dakota, Native American Reservation voters tend to lean Democratic . And many reservations are rather isolated, with only one main road to get from the reservation to the polling place. On election day, State Patrol officers were along these roads, said to be running plates & looking for unpaid fines, traffic tickets, expired plates, warrants, etc. as reasons to stop people and take them into custody. This was alleged to have discouraged voter turnout from these areas.
Note that the Governor at the time, in control of the State Patrol, was puppy-killer Kristy Noem, now Trump’s head of Homeland Security, parent agency of ICE.
I’m going to point out for the millionth time that there’s no “Constitution police” running around handing out red cards when ICE or whoever does the wrong thing. The closest thing would be the DoJ and SCOTUS, and guess who they work for now.
All they have to do is take action to cloud the legitimacy of certain polling locations to spin it into a reason to throw those votes out. Provoking unrest, anything to create an air of uncertainty long enough to exclude those votes to win the election. Do it in Broward, Bexar, Fulton. 11 thousand votes here, 11 thousand votes there, after just a few times you’ve stolen an election.
Do I think it’s a guaranteed plan? No. Is it wise to assume there’s an invisible electric fence called “the Constitution” that will automatically zap evildoers wherever they overstep their authority? Also no, very obviously.
Try putting your question into the AI of your choice.
There are a true examples with good links. Sometimes judges have thrown out all the absentee ballots because they were too marked by fraud to be used.
The open question in my mind is whether American history is still the place to look for precedents. Why not look at strongman regimes outside the U.S.?
Admittedly, there still could be enough of the old United States spirit left to block the GOP from doing what they will try to pull. We still could tip either way, either back to representative democracy or to full dictatorship. That’s why dopers should check with their local Democratic Party organization to see if election day help is needed. I probably should add that I’m not doing it myself, thinking my town is well-covered, but each can contribute in their own way.