Voting by Mail

Mail-in voting ruling: Yesterday, the Supreme Court said the Trump administration could go ahead with its efforts to cut back some mail-in voting in advance of the midterms. “In an emergency opinion, the justices said President Trump could proceed with implementing an executive order he had signed, which directed the U.S. Postal Service to help decide which voters should receive mail-in ballots. Under the executive order, the Department of Homeland Security will also create lists of U.S. citizens that the administration believes could be used to monitor voter rolls for noncitizens,” reports The New York Times. “The decision means the administration can move ahead with planning for restricting the use of mail ballots even as a lower court continues to weigh the legality of Mr. Trump’s executive order.” The idea is that making such lists would help to cut back on fraud, which Trump alleges is widespread.

“The Supreme Court’s conservative majority didn’t decide the legality of Trump’s order, instead ruling that states who sued did not have the legal right to challenge it,” reports the Associated Press. The 6–3 ruling lifted a lower-court injunction that was blocking certain parts of President Donald Trump’s executive order in 23 states and Washington, D.C.

The ruling “will permit the Department of Homeland Security to compile a federal citizenship list and share it with states, allow the Attorney General to prioritize prosecution of state officials who may issue ballots to ineligible voters, and green-light U.S. Postal Service (USPS) rulemaking for state mail ballot designs,” reports ABC News. “The ruling did not address what is arguably the most controversial portion of the order: requiring the USPS to verify voting eligibility of each person receiving a mail ballot and withhold ballots from anyone not on a government list. That provision remains blocked in a different legal case.”

Cue apocalypticism from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who wrote that this ruling “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.” This isn’t an especially substantial win for the Trump administration: The justices made clear that the order should not be taken as a final decision about whether the president’s executive order “will necessarily be lawful” once completed. “On that score, time will tell,” wrote the majority.

Scenes from New York: In New York City, 911 was offline for SEVEN hours last week. This “was caused by a glitch with a software update performed by Motorola, a vendor that provides technology to operate the system,” reported The New York Times, per a statement by the mayor. “The glitch led to nearly 1,700 calls failing to reach a 911 call center in the Bronx, one of two public safety answering centers in the city.” What’s the death toll, I wonder? How many people could have been saved with faster emergency response, who weren’t?

QUICK HITS

• “Governments defending prices against fundamentals always lose,” writes Stanley F. Druckenmiller for The Wall Street Journal. “The only variable is how much they spend before conceding. The U.S. shouldn’t put itself on the wrong side of that trade, not with the most important price in the world, and not when that price is trying to say the one thing Washington most needs to hear: Let the bond market speak.”
• Alpha is “trying to minimize time spent on core instruction while maximizing performance,” writes Kelsey Piper for The Argument. “This is simply not something that most schools—especially not most fancy private schools that serve the kinds of kids who can afford Alpha—are trying to do. Most schools will tell you that they are trying to build holistic thinkers and citizens or foster a love of learning. Alpha is trying to get school out of the way as fast as possible.”
• “A U.S. Navy sailor serving aboard the troubled USS Abraham Lincoln learned over the weekend that his father had been detained by federal immigration authorities in Key West as the sailor completed an extended deployment in the Middle East,” reports Above the Fold. “Joshua Aviles Castillo, a U.S. citizen who was recently recognized as Sailor of the Week, said his father, Luis Manuel Aviles Roa, was detained Saturday near a Searstown Publix shopping center.”
• “Art thieves in Europe are committing more violent robberies focusing on gold and jewels, and specialist gangs have been replaced by ad-hoc ​opportunists recruited through social media, Europol said on Monday,” per Reuters. “The heist at ‌the Louvre Museum in Paris in October last year was a prime example of these shifts, Europol said, as the thieves threatened guards and visitors, and stole €88 million worth of jewels such ​as Empress Eugenie’s tiara.”
• “Something is going wrong along the U.S. Atlantic coast, and it is visible from the air, from the water and at the docks,” writes Mark Robichaux for The Washington Post. “In the Chesapeake Bay, osprey chicks are dying in their nests at rates not seen since the DDT era. Scientists say a key reason for their deaths could be that there are not enough fish for the birds to eat. In Maine, lobstermen have seen their bait supply tighten, leaving them to fill traps with pig hides and frozen fish, whatever will hold on a hook. And all along the Eastern Seaboard, as striped bass fishermen head out in the middle of the season, charter captains are finding what their customers already notice: fewer baitfish. The thread that appears to connect all of it is a small, oily, unglamorous fish that most Americans have never heard of. Atlantic menhaden—called bunker in New York and pogies in New England—are the engine of the East Coast food web. Stripers, bluefish, bluefin tuna, humpback whales and osprey eat them. They underpin billions of dollars in fishing economies from the Carolinas to Canada. When menhaden disappear from an area, everything above them in the food chain feels it.”