RSN: Andy Borowitz | Trump Furious at Herschel Walker: "Only a Loser Pays His Bills"
05 October 22
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Andy Borowitz | Trump Furious at Herschel Walker: "Only a Loser Pays His Bills"
Andy Borowitz, The New Yorker
Borowitz writes: "Donald J. Trump has angrily withdrawn his support from the U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker because, in the former President's words, 'only a loser pays his bills.'"
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The U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case involving the Voting Rights Act. (photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)
At issue in Tuesday's case was Alabama's congressional redistricting plan, adopted by the Republican state legislature after the 2020 Census. More than a quarter of the state's population is African American, but in only 1 of 7 districts do minority voters have a realistic chance of electing the candidate of their choice. In January, a three-judge federal court panel that included two Trump appointees ruled unanimously that under the Voting Rights Act, Alabama should create not just one, but two compact congressional districts with a majority or close to a majority of Black voters.
The state appealed to the Supreme Court, where on Tuesday Alabama Solicitor General Edmund LaCour Jr. contended that unless there is evidence of intentional race discrimination, congressional districts must be drawn without considerations of race.
'What's left?'
Justice Elena Kagan interrupted this line of argument, observing, "We once long ago said that intent was required ... and Congress immediately slapped us down and said no, we didn't mean that."
Indeed Congress amended the Voting Rights Act in 1982 to make clear that the voting rights law was aimed at eliminating discriminatory results, whether or not there was intentional discrimination. In short, for example, the law is aimed at preventing practices that have the effect of diluting the political power of minority voters by lumping them into a single district with a super-majority of Black voters and then spreading the remaining minority voters out over the other districts. It's known as packing and cracking, and it is what the lower court found had occurred in Alabama.
Kagan noted that Tuesday's case is the third in a trilogy of cases in which the conservative court majority has all but gutted the Voting Rights Act. The Alabama redistricting plan, she said, is a "classic voter dilution claim," and, she told Alabama's lawyer, "You're asking us essentially to cut back substantially on our 40 years of precedent and to make this too extremely difficult to prevail on. So, what's left?"
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed to the history of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments enacted after the Civil War to guarantee political power to formerly enslaved people. "When I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the Equal Protection Clause ... in a race conscious way," she said. "I don't think that the historical record establishes that the founders believed that race neutrality or race blindness was required."
But Alabama's LaCour stuck to his guns, arguing that the lower court decision requiring the creation of a second majority black district is unconstitutional because race was the predominant factor in its creation. In contrast, he argued, the state legislature's original map, with only one majority black district, is "race-neutral."
The rebuttal
Rebutting that argument was Deuel Ross, senior counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who cited the factual findings of the lower court.
"There is nothing race-neutral about Alabama's map," he said. "The Black Belt is a historic and extremely poor community of substantial significance. Yet Alabama's map cracks that community and allows white block voting to deny Black voters the opportunity to elect representation responsive to their needs."
Where Alabama's LaCour argued that the creation of the second district would break up the Gulf Coast part of the state into two dissimilar districts, the NAACP's lawyer countered that the legislature had no difficulty in simultaneously creating essentially the same two districts for the state school board.
For the most part, the court's three liberals dominated Tuesday's argument. The six conservatives didn't tip their hands, though they likely do have a hand to play. They probably won't adopt the state's relatively extreme position that provisions of the Voting Rights Act require racial neutrality — provisions which, after all, were written to ensure greater political power for long-suppressed racial minorities. But as election expert Rick Hasen observes, Alabama may well get something "almost as good." Namely, "a new legal framework that makes it much harder for minority plaintiffs to get full representation in congressional and other legislative districts."
A decision in the case is expected later in the term.
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Former president Donald Trump has once again brought a fight over documents to the nation's highest court, though his record on such appeals is spotty at best. (photo: USA TODAY)
Former President Donald Trump has once again brought a fight over documents to the nation's highest court, though his record on such appeals is spotty at best.
What did Trump file at the Supreme Court?
Former President Donald Trump filed what's known as an emergency application challenging part of a Sept. 21 ruling from the Atlanta-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. That ruling allowed the Justice Department to continue reviewing classified documents seized at Trump's Florida estate and blocked a lower court's ruling requiring the government to submit the documents to an independent arbiter, or special master, for review. Trump's appeal challenges the second part of that ruling and if he wins then the special master, U.S. District Judge Raymond Dearie, would review the documents.
Why did Trump file a Supreme Court appeal?
The 47-page document is pretty technical and it raises questions about whether the 11th Circuit had jurisdiction to rule the way it did. Trump's ostensible argument is about having an independent entity review the documents, not just the Justice Department. The appeal is sprinkled with references to the "unprecedented circumstances" of the seizure, "an investigation of the Forty-Fifth President of the United States by the administration of his political rival and successor." Any limit on a transparent review of the documents, Trump's lawyers told the Supreme Court, "erodes public confidence in our system of justice."
What is Trump's record at the Supreme Court?
Trump's record at the nation's highest court is not great. In January, for instance, the Supreme Court refused to block the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack from getting Trump's administration documents. In 2020, the court ruled that Trump could not keep his tax returns and financial records away from a New York City prosecutor who was pursuing possible hush-money payments during the 2016 White House race. That prosecutor did not seek reelection and two of his deputies who had been leading a criminal probe departed the Manhattan District Attorney's Office in February.
How soon could the Supreme Court act in Trump's case?
The emergency application docket – known colloquially as the "shadow docket" – can move quite quickly. It is often used, for instance, to handle last-minute appeals for people on death row and facing execution in a matter of hours. However, the court seemed to pump the brakes on the case hours after Trump's filing. Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, who handles such emergency appeals rising from the 11th Circuit, gave the federal government until Tuesday to respond. That's fast by Supreme Court standards, but it's not as speedy as these cases sometimes can move.
Who's the special master in Trump's case?
On Sept. 15, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon appointed a semi-retired federal judge in Brooklyn, Raymond Dearie, to review the thousands of documents seized at Trump’s Florida estate. Dearie, 78, was agreed to by both Trump and the Department of Justice. Dearie is reviewing some of the documents FBI agents seized Aug. 8 at Mar-a-Lago for personal records and documents that potentially are protected by attorney-client privilege or executive privilege.
What are experts saying about Trump's Supreme Court appeal?
Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, noted on Twitter that Trump's "track record in the Supreme Court in cases involving him personally (as opposed to his official actions as president) has been abysmal." On Thomas' week-out deadline for the government to respond, Vladeck wrote that "this delay doesn’t help Trump. At all. It’s a pretty big sign from Thomas that even *he* isn’t in a hurry, which does not bode well for Trump’s chances of getting the full court to side with him."
Renato Mariotti, a former federal prosecutor, agreed. "It means that he doesn’t view this as the 'emergency' that Trump claims it is," Mariotti posted on Twitter. "This narrow move for Supreme Court review sure looks like an effort by Trump’s attorneys to find an excuse to litigate something to placate their client, even though 'winning' would not achieve anything substantial."
Ann White of Roswell holds protest signs at the Georgia state capitol building, March 25, 2021. (photo: Alyssa Pointer/TNS)
Georgia in focus: Since Biden carried the state with the support of Black voters, thousands of people’s eligibility has been disputed
In early September, the group, which has since grown to 80 people and does not have a formal name, challenged the eligibility of tens of thousands of people. The challenges were filed with the backing of VoterGA, whose founder has questioned the raised questions about the 2020 election results. The group has received backing from The America Project, which was founded by Michael Flynn and Patrick Byrne, who have promoted serial misinformation about the 2020 election.
A few weeks later, McWhorter, 68, showed up to speak at a routine election board meeting and urged officials to act. He was particularly disturbed about those who appeared to be registered at addresses that didn’t exist. “Who put these phantoms on the voter rolls?” he said.
Sitting just a few rows behind McWhorter that evening, Helen Butler was concerned. One of the leading voting rights activists in the state, she had seen similar challenges filed throughout Georgia in recent months. She knew that workers sometimes make typos when they enter addresses on the rolls, and that Georgia’s voter registration form allows people to draw a map to describe where they live if they lack an address. She also knew that a new law, passed by Republicans, allows any voter in Georgia to bring an unlimited number of voter challenges and requires election officials to promptly investigate them.
“[I] want to make sure that we’re not removing the people just for the sake of clerical errors and without giving them due process,” she said. “I take it that you will really carefully consider all of these challenges and do the right thing.”
The voter challenges in Gwinnett, and across Georgia (there have been 64,000 according to one voting rights group) are one example of how groups are undermining confidence in US elections after the 2020 vote. These conservative groups seed a public perception that there is something amiss with the voter rolls, and suck away resources, increasing the possibility of mistakes and chaos, which Republicans could wield to question the results of elections. Groups have filed similar challenges to voter eligibility in Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
But Georgia faces a unique battle. After a large grassroots effort increased turnout among Black and other non-white voters and helped Democrats win upset victories in the 2020 presidential and US Senate races, Republicans responded and passed a 98-page measure, SB 202. The law placed sweeping new restrictions on voting, even after the state affirmed repeatedly that there was no evidence of fraud.
Now voting rights activists say SB 202 is a thinly veiled effort to make it harder for non-white voters to cast a ballot, exacerbating a major battle over voting access that looms over Georgia as the state hurdles toward highly competitive midterm elections next month. Even if a small number of voters are disenfranchised, it could make a huge difference: Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Georgia by 11,779 votes in 2020 – just a fraction of the number of voters challenged in Gwinnett county alone.
“There’s no doubt that the senate bill 202 push, much like the January 6 insurrection, was a response to the sort of multiracial rising American electorate. Full stop,” said Nsé Ufot, chief executive of the New Georgia Project Action Fund, a group that works to mobilize Black voters. “I see a straight line between those two dots. No curve.”
The threat of a stolen election lingers acutely in Georgia. After the 2020 election, Brad Raffensperger, a Republican serving as the state’s top election official, and governor Brian Kemp refused Donald Trump’s request to overturn the election. High-stakes fights over voting access have become a centerpiece of politics in the state.
But the issue preceded 2020. In 2018, Stacey Abrams, who had spent years mobilizing Black voters in the state, made voting rights a central part of her gubernatorial bid against Kemp, then serving as the state’s top election official. After the supreme court freed it from federal supervision under the Voting Rights Act, the state closed large numbers of polling places, contributing to long lines at the polls in recent years in non-white neighborhoods.
Georgia also faced scrutiny for the way it aggressively removed people from the voting rolls, and there was outcry in the fall of 2018, just before the governor’s race, when 53,000 voter registrations, the vast majority of them from Black voters, were flagged because the information on the voter registration form didn’t exactly match existing Georgia databases. Abrams eventually lost to Kemp by about 55,000 votes in a race she said was marred by voter suppression.
Two years later, Black voters helped Biden carry Georgia, with increased turnout in the Atlanta suburbs, some of the most diverse in the state. In January 2021, Black voters also helped Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, both Democrats, win stunning upsets in their US Senate races.
“ Democrats are still the underdog, but Republicans can’t expect to coast to victory. The numbers just aren’t there any more,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University.
For a brief moment in 2021, even Georgia’s business community looked like it might be on the verge of taking a stand against voting restrictions. Major League Baseball withdrew the All Star Game from Atlanta over SB 202. Last April, the CEO of Delta Air Lines, based in Georgia, said “the entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true.” The CEO of Coca-Cola called the bill “unacceptable”.
Since then, the new law has gone into effect and the business community has gone quiet. And voting rights groups are concerned election offices are getting overwhelmed going into elections and have redoubled their efforts to encourage people to vote and ensure that they understand the new restrictions.
“Death by a thousand cuts is how I’m thinking about it now,” Ufot said. “This is really like playing Whac-a-Mole at a time where we don’t have the resources to fight back this kind of voter suppression,” Ufot said.
Under SB 202, counties are required to look into the challenges, forcing them to reallocate resources that would otherwise go towards preparing for the election. But voter challenges are causing considerable alarm just weeks before the election.
“It is not gonna be a fast process. It’s gonna take us some time. It’s definitely a resource issue. It definitely pulls resources from other things that we’re definitely starting to ramp up for the upcoming elections,” Zach Manifold, the elections supervisor in Gwinnett county, said in an interview.
Debbie Merck, 60, who was also involved with the challenges, was skeptical that the county didn’t have the resources to address their investigation.
“We did all this for free. And they get paid. And yet, it’s too much work for them,” she said. “I know they’ve got a lot of other stuff to do. But to me it’s so important that you have to make time. You have to pull people off other stuff and do it. But they don’t think it’s real, so it’s kind of discouraging.”
As the county worked through the challenges in late September, it appeared that many of them were frivolous. Between 15,000 and 20,000 of them were complaints that Gwinnett county issued a ballot to someone who requested it too early. Manifold said the county had investigated a sample of hundreds of those complaints and all involved a voter who was 65+, disabled, or met the conditions to request an automatic mail-in ballot.
The county also investigated nearly 9,000 challenges involving people who had filed a change of address with the post office. About 5,700 of those voters were already in the process of being removed from the voter rolls, and another 2,074 had cancelled their voter registration. In the end, there were just 937 people who still remained active voters at the challenged address.
There were also several thousand remaining challenges to voters who appeared to have invalid addresses, the kind of voters McWhorter was concerned about. But when the county investigated more than 100 similar challenges this spring, it found that the majority were data entry errors, Manifold said.
Earlier this week, the board voted to dismiss 22,000 remaining challenges, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.
“We shouldn’t be here,” Butler said after the meeting in Gwinnett county. “They should just go about doing the election like it should be done. Recruiting people. They said [there are] hundreds of poll worker shortages already. That’s the priority. This is junk.”
McWhorter, who helped file the challenges, said there was no intent to disenfranchise anyone. “There’s no suppression involved. It’s a matter of trying to validate is it the correct person at the right address that either can vote or will vote.”
In addition to the challenges, much of SB 202 takes aim at mail-in voting, which Georgia voters used in record numbers in 2020 amid the pandemic. It significantly shortened the window in which voters could request a mail-in ballot. Voters can no longer apply for an absentee ballot application online and must now provide a physical “wet signature” with their application in addition to information from their driver’s license or another form of ID. The law severely limits the availability of ballot drop boxes, causing the number in the Metro-Atlanta area, home to a sizable chunk of the state’s non-white voters, to drop from 107 to 25, according to one analysis.
“Prior to 2020, those who voted by absentee ballot were not Black. So what happened is, when Blacks went out and voted absentee ballot, and by ballot drop boxes, all of a sudden there’s something wrong with that,” said Bishop Reginald Thomas Jackson, the presiding prelate of the sixth district of the AME church.
SB 202 will affect people like Austin Dixon, an 18-year-old student who is registered to vote in Fulton county, but is going to school at Mercer University in Macon, about an hour and a half away. Instead of requesting an absentee ballot this fall, he plans to travel back to Fulton county and cast his vote early in person.
“I would like to request a mail-in ballot, [but] the system is so challenging now, I’d rather not,” he said after seeing Stacey Abrams, the Democratic gubernatorial candidate speak, at a park in Macon one evening in September. “The process has become more complicated and I don’t want to have to be in a situation where it gets challenged.”
Robert Majors, a 72-year-old retiree in Macon who is supporting Abrams, said he planned to vote early in person, like he usually does. “I don’t understand a lot of the changes,” he said. “The Republicans, they want to be in control.”
Republicans insist that the new voting law isn’t suppressing anyone’s vote. “Abrams and President Biden lied to the people of Georgia and the country for political gain,” the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, told the Washington Post in May as the state saw record early voting turnout in their primary.
But voting activists say that is misleading and overlooks the increased work that goes on behind the scenes to make sure people can vote. It overlooks people like Dixon, who doesn’t trust absentee balloting enough to cast one, as well as all of the resources groups have to allocate towards just making sure people understand the law. Georgia dropped from 25th to 29th in a ranking of the cost of voting in each US state.
Butler, who leads a group called the Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda, said her organization had recently bought printers and scanners to bring to events to assist people if they want to request mail-in ballots.
“We have to be more creative in terms of what we’re trying to do,” she said one afternoon as she sat at a table in a train station in downtown Atlanta registering voters (the group got 17 voter registrations after several hours at the station).
Leaders in the Black church are also planning their largest effort ever to get people to vote, said Jackson. They expect to have 1,000 churches across the state get out the vote this fall, and are offering a playbook with messaging to encourage people to vote. They are also encouraging people to vote as early as possible to limit their chances of having any issues at the polls, said Taos Wynn, a minister in Atlanta involved with Faith Works, the coalition working on the efforts.
Their work will include not just educating people about the changes, but also persuading people that the new barriers to voting can be overcome.
“ This isn’t going to stop you from voting. We still need you to go out and vote. We’ve overcome obstacles before and Georgia has proved that, so now we just got to do it again,” he said.
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