Supreme Court Kills Republican Effort to Demolish Mail-In Voting

The Supreme Court has demolished Republicans’ efforts to delegitimize mail-in ballots, upholding a Mississippi law that allows a grace period to count ballots received after Election Day.

In a 5-4 decision Monday split across ideological lines, the court ruled that ballots are valid up to five days after Election Day, so long as they were postmarked before it. Justice Amy Comey Barrett and Chief Justice Roberts were the two conservatives who sided with the liberal justices, and Barrett authored the majority opinion.

Eighteen states and territories, including Mississippi, currently allow for mail-in ballots to be received after Election Day. That includes big Democratic states like California, Illinois, and New York. The ruling also protects states and territories that allow a grace period for ballots returning from overseas, such as for military service members.

“The Constitution’s Elections Clause empowers state legislatures to ‘prescrib[e]’ the ‘Times, Places and Manner of holding’ congressional elections. Congress may ‘override’ most of these choices,” Barrett wrote for the majority. “By ‘default,’ however, ‘responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections’ belongs to States. As Alexander Hamilton put it, the Constitution lodges power over congressional elections in state legislatures ‘primarily’ and in Congress ‘ultimately.’”

Mail-in voting is a very basic, safe tactic that Trump himself has even used, despite crusading against it as fraudulent. By upholding it, the court has protected voting rights for thousands of Americans voting at home and abroad.

This story has been updated.

President Donald Trump and his family continue to dominate the field when it comes to corruption, with two new scandals exposed just within the last 24 hours.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that the Trump family stands to reap the financial benefits of a deal that gives the U.S. access to one of the earth’s largest reserves of tungsten, a metal needed to make fighter jets, computer chips, and missile warheads.

American company Kaz Resources was awarded $1.6 billion in federal financing to mine tungsten in Kazakhstan. Just weeks after the deal was made, a firm partly owned by Trump’s sons joined up with other partners to take a 20 percent stake in a “corporate entity related to the Kazakhstan project,” the Times reported.

And it’s not just the Trumps—the sons of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who was also involved in the deal, raised capital for one of the project’s investors, a move that is expected to net them millions of dollars.

Between the Trumps and the Lutnicks, one or both families have ties to at least 14 companies that are working with the federal government on mining deals, the Times reported.

And on Monday, CNBC reported that the president bought up to $5 million in shares of Axon Enterprise, a company that makes tasers, body cameras, and other policing software, just two weeks before ICE sought a $220 million contract that only a company like Axon could fill.

Though the ICE notice doesn’t name Axon specifically, the company makes 90 percent of all U.S. tasers, and experts told CNBC that the weapons called for in the notice would only match Axon products. If ICE buys the roughly 17,800 tasers it seeks, it would quadruple its total tasers.

According to a White House spokesperson, there are “no conflicts of interest.” The White House has said that Trump’s investments are managed by independent, third-party firms, and that his children control his assets—as if his children aren’t routinely profiting off of government deals.

The amount which the Trump family has personally profited off of the presidency is unprecedented.

Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg and his family were the victims of a false child protective services report, he wrote on his Substack Friday.

“Many times over the years, I have been denounced, yelled at, protested, threatened, and heckled. I’ve been through political attacks in office, death threats in public life, and rocket attacks in war. But this is the ugliest thing that has happened to me since my career in service began,” Buttigieg wrote.

Buttigieg said that earlier this week, a police officer and CPS worker showed up at his Traverse City, Michigan, home, where he lives with his husband, Chasten, and their twins, Joseph August and Penelope Rose. They told Buttigieg that a serious allegation had been made against him regarding his children, and that he couldn’t be alone with them until they received a forensic interview the next day, without him or any relatives present. Then they would discuss the allegations with the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor.

The officer and social worker wished to see the two 4-year-olds, so Buttigieg told them to wait until Chasten would be returning with the children from summer camp. When they arrived, the kids were fascinated by the police officer’s car, and the adults agreed that the children would stay with their grandparents overnight before their interview the next day.

“The twenty-four hours until they returned are among the darkest hours of my life. I tried to get my head around the idea that I had been accused of something so serious that I couldn’t be alone around my own children, and had consented to have them interviewed by strangers, without my knowing where the accusation had come from or even what it contained,” wrote Buttigieg.

After the children were interviewed, they went to stay with their grandparents, Buttigieg wrote, and then the police officer and CPS worker met him at his home for an interview. The officer said that an anonymous woman had contacted CPS, saying that she had met Buttigieg years ago at a conference in Alabama, who allegedly told her that he had committed “unspeakable violent crimes, and the caller believed my children were still at risk.”

The police officer asked if Buttigieg had been to a certain town in Alabama, to which he replied no, as well as “a couple of obvious questions.” After that, the officer said that he believed the accusation was politically motivated and that it would not be referred to a prosecutor. The CPS worker also said the allegation could not be substantiated, although her process would take longer to complete.

But Buttigieg was allowed to be alone with his children again, and Chasten was told the same information from the officer and CPS worker, and the two were able to pick up their children.

“For twenty-four deeply distressing hours, we had no idea what I was accused of or what was about to happen. We could not understand someone abusing the system like this in order to hurt me and my family with an absurd and easily refuted allegation of a horrific crime,” Buttigieg wrote.

“We’re used to nasty, hateful, and sometimes violent things being said about us and even about our family. But this is the first time someone managed to invade our lives like this—and drag our children into it,” Buttigieg added.

Buttigieg has been targeted by the right for his same-sex marriage and position within the Biden administration, facing false allegations of sexual assault in 2019 and, bizarrely, receiving mockery and criticism for taking paternity leave as a Cabinet secretary during the Biden administration. Making a false allegation and targeting a politician’s children is an egregious crime, and should be roundly condemned across the political spectrum. Let’s see if conservatives actually do the right thing.

After successfully prosecuting anti-ICE protesters in Texas and giving them long prison sentences, the Trump administration has its next free speech targets.

The government is looking to prosecute protesters against the Cop City project in Atlanta, The Guardian reports. The $109 million police training center in Georgia has faced heavy opposition from activists against police militarization and the clearing of a forest to build the facility. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice indicted two protesters for allegedly attacking a contractor for the facility and two of its employees.

The federal indictments come despite the fact that Georgia authorities have tried and failed to bring cases against protesters. In August 2023, the state attorney general tried to bring a RICO indictment against three protesters in Fulton County, only for that case to be dismissed more than two years later in December. In April, state prosecutors tried again in neighboring Cobb County, only for a judge to dismiss that case on Monday.

The DOJ may be emboldened by the March guilty verdicts from its Texas case, referred to as Prarieland, against protesters who were demonstrating against an ICE detention facility. On Tuesday, Texas activists received prison sentences of more than 50 years in prison based on terrorism charges, with the Trump administration claiming they were part of an “antifa cell.”

Just like in Texas, the Cop City protesters set off fireworks, giving the Trump administration the same justifications to invoke terrorism charges.

“The Cobb county protest matches the narrative of what they’re looking for. It’s similar to what they did with Prairieland—they’re crafting a certain narrative on protests and trying to indict based on the narrative,” Xavier de Janon, an attorney for one of the Georgia protesters, told The Guardian.

“Fireworks become explosives. Communities become ‘antifa cells.’ The power of language is going to become central to everything the government is doing moving forward,” said filmmaker and author Will Potter, who researches government responses to protests, to the publication.

Trump’s Department of Justice’s inspector general has handed Senate Republicans highly sensitive interview transcripts concerning its report on the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.

In response to mounting pressure from Republican Senators Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, the DOJ’s inspector general in March began releasing transcripts regarding the FBI’s Crossfire Hurricane investigation, Bloomberg Law reported Friday.

The DOJ’s inspector general office warned senators about the “potential for a chilling effect on whistleblowing, and on the cooperation of witnesses,” should the contents of the interviews become public, but has no power to actually prevent the release of sensitive information.

The shocking disclosure comes as the Trump administration and its allies have made clear their interest in uncovering improprieties of the FBI’s original investigation into collusion.

In 2019, the DOJ’s inspector general found that the FBI’s investigation was dysfunctional and marred by serious errors—but was in no way a biased plot against Trump. Now Republicans are hoping to pore over the raw interviews in the hopes of cherry-picking pieces to malign attorneys and agents, possibly in order to get paid from a future “anti-weaponization” slush fund.

This latest move indicates the DOJ watchdog’s startling lack of independence in the face of the Trump administration’s political objectives. It also will likely discourage government employees and whistleblowers—who can be sure that their government is not committed to safeguarding their disclosures—from participating in future investigations.