Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Ron DeSantis’s repulsive Martha’s Vineyard stunt is made for Fox News
When Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed voting restrictions last year, he gave exclusive access to this glorious spectacle to Fox News. It was a twofer for the national right-wing audience, flaunting his relish of voter suppression while sticking it to mainstream Fake News outlets in the process.
Now DeSantis has produced another made-for-Fox moment: He is taking credit for delivering two planeloads of migrants to Martha’s Vineyard, where locals are scrambling to meet their needs. DeSantis’s staff apparently supplied exclusive video of these heroics to Fox: It shows the migrants, some children, disembarking from planes, and then walking along a street, all in quiet, orderly fashion.
Harry Litman/LA Times:
The Mar-a-Lago judge’s latest opinion is as atrocious as legal experts say it is
Thursday’s 10-page opinion by U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon denying the government’s motion for a stay in the Mar-a-Lago documents case is being savaged by commentators in terms normally reserved for grotesque transgressions of justice like the infamous Dred Scott Supreme Court decision.
Respected and generally sober legal analysts have called it an atrocity, “legally and practically incoherent,” “dangerous garbage,” and declared Cannon “a partisan hack.” “No honest and competent legal analyst could have ruled as she did,” tweeted Harvard Law’s Laurence Tribe.
Could the opinion really be that bad?
In a word, yes.
Jamelle Bouie/New York Times:
A Rail Strike Averted Reminds Us That There Is Power in a Union
The short story behind the now-averted railroad strike is this: The largest freight railroad carriers in the country were willing to cripple the transportation infrastructure of the United States rather than allow their workers to take the occasional day off to see a doctor or attend to their families.
Here’s the longer story. Earlier this week, unions representing tens of thousands of railway workers were poised to strike in protest of poor working conditions and low wages. Their complaints were straightforward. The two largest freight railroad carriers — Union Pacific and BNSF Railway — were using attendance policies that punished workers for taking time off from the job. “Engineers and conductors face penalties for taking any time off,” The Washington Post explained in its report on the labor dispute, “including weekends, outside of holidays and preplanned vacation, even in the case of emergencies.
Nate Silver/FiveThirtyEight:
Will The Polls Overestimate Democrats Again?
Our historical database of polls shows that there’s not much in the way of consistent polling bias. Two cycles of a pro-Republican bias in 1998 and 2000 were followed by a Democratic bias in 2002. A fairly sharp Republican bias in 2012 reversed itself, and the polls were biased toward Democrats in both 2014 and 2016.
Tl;dr? The answer is maybe not, and/but state lean and other fundamentals matter. Maybe.
Josh Barro:
Lindsey Graham's Abortion 'Compromise' Can't Win the Middle
On a related note, Sen. Lindsey Graham introduced a bill yesterday that would impose a national ban on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy. Graham’s bill does include an exception for rape and incest, subject to certain reporting requirements, but unlike the theoretical proposal WSJ asked about in March, it includes a medical exception only for later abortions necessary to save the life of the mother. Republicans tend to talk about bills that set a deadline for abortion around the end of the first trimester as being similar to laws that prevail in Western Europe, but by not offering a broader health exception, Graham’s bill would impose a significantly tighter restriction. His bill also wouldn’t stop states from setting their own more restrictive laws — it would be a ceiling, not a floor, on abortion rights.
...
I think there’s an emerging dynamic here that isn’t too different from the politics of gun control. Republicans trying to pivot to more moderate positions on abortion are even echoing Democrats’ language about gun control — Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters says he is for “common sense” restrictions on abortion. But gun control rarely works out as well for Democrats as a policy issue as the polls say it ought to, right? You can take your pile of polls about specific gun control policies that achieve 80% support, but the politics of guns is more about gut-level trust: Who will protect my right to own a gun? Do I trust that the ultimate goal of this politician isn’t really to impose much more restrictive rules than the ones he or she is running on?
Kyle Whitmire/AL.com:
Alabama GOP chair refused to show license to vote. That became a problem for poll workers.
Their conflict was over a bread-and-butter issue of Republican Party politics — voter ID.
Martin insisted Wahl and his extended family show photo IDs like everybody else when they voted.
And as a result, Martin isn’t a poll worker anymore.
Most of the facts of this story are not in dispute. Martin and Wahl give similar accounts, as do others. The differences turn on motivations.
To figure out what happened, I’ve requested documents over the last two months from the Alabama Secretary of State, the Alabama Department of Finance, the Limestone County Probate Court and the Limestone County License Commissioner, including emails and text messages among public officials.
Just an interesting story about American life and religious sects, and local pressure.
Ben Jacobs/Vox:
Trump found the holes in our election laws. Congress is trying to patch them.
How a few election law fixes could protect democracy in 2024.
The Electoral Count Reform Act currently before the Senate is an effort to do that, fitting into a long history of legislative action following a breakdown in the existing laws. It’s not a bold reinvention of the American electoral system, but a series of bureaucratic reforms, requiring careful legal craftwork, intended to patch frays and holes in the United States Code. To do that, it updates antiquated language, clarifies contested issues, and streamlines the process to follow if a once-in-a-century political crisis occurs.
The new legislation is not intended as a foolproof fix to avoid future issues — after all, who could have predicted that a mob featuring a man in a Viking costume would storm the Capitol chanting “hang Mike Pence”? But it does eliminate many of the ambiguities exploited by Trump and his allies in the 2020 election and ensures that anyone intent on trying to reverse a presidential election in the future will have to rely on their own ingenuity, and not the road map of 2020.
Jennifer Rubin/Washington Post:
Elena Kagan to her colleagues: You’re why the Supreme Court has lost legitimacy
If Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has chosen to close his eyes to the Supreme Court’s role in its own legitimacy crisis and defend his radical colleagues, Justice Elena Kagan has chosen to be a clear-eyed truth-teller.
On Monday, she let loose a burst of refreshing clarity during a talk at Temple Emanu-El in New York. “Judges create legitimacy problems for themselves … when they instead stray into places where it looks like they’re an extension of the political process or when they’re imposing their own personal preferences,” she said. She added that the public has a right to expect that “changes in personnel don’t send the entire legal system up for grabs.”
That’s as clear an indictment of the six right-wing justices as you are going to hear. Indeed, Kagan made a few irrefutable points while eviscerating Roberts’s feigned cluelessness.
Reuters:
Abortion gives Democrats a shot at flipping a Senate seat in Wisconsin
Evidence is building that a wave of women voters might be the difference-maker if Democrats are to keep their Senate majority and stem their expected losses in the House of Representatives in the Nov. 8 midterm elections.
Wisconsin is one of several states where voter registrations among women have surged since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June. That decision gutted national protections for abortion and left an 1849 law outlawing most abortions in Wisconsin on the books, prompting the state's four abortion clinics to end the procedure.
As to that cartoon at the top?