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Oped: Tucker's treason is out of control. It's time to take him down, lock him up with no bail and interrogate him Dick Cheney style for a few years before he's executed. Either way, somebody is probably going to take the law in their own hand and kill Tucker Carlson. If I were on that person's jury I would vote not guilty and but the patriot on my Christmas card list.
Fox News’ official position – IN FEDERAL COURT – is that Tucker Carlson lies on air and his viewers know it. https://t.co/QU4rj5MpRD — Brian Tyler Cohen (@briantylercohen) June 17, 2020 Under New...
A federal judge on Thursday dismissed a defamation case against self-styled Fox News instigator Tucker Carlson. The case was brought by former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who alleged she had a...
Tucker Carlson appears to be made of Teflon. Fox News' top-rated host has been repeatedly accused of anti-immigrant and racist comments, which have cost his political opinion show many of its major...
Liar Tucker Carlson Spreads Coronavirus Lies and Cried Censorship When Facebook Labels Them Lies What’s that I hear? It’s the high-pitched whining of a man who was caught spreading dangerous lies.
Fox News hostTucker Carlsontold his viewers that he had some very important papers related to his conspiracy theory surroundingHunter Biden, son of Democratic presidential candidateJoe Biden.
But the papers were lost ― and so Carlson concocted yet another conspiracy theory to explain their disappearance.
Carlson claimed a “source” gave the Fox News show “damning” documents about Biden on Monday. Carlson’s producer shipped the documents across the country via a “brand-name company,” but they never arrived.
Instead, the shipping company said the package had been opened and the documents were missing.
The shipping company launched a search and called in security to interview everyone who touched the documents, Carlson said.
“They went far and beyond, but they found nothing,” he said. “Those documents had vanished.”
He said the unnamed company’s executives are “baffled and deeply bothered by this, and so are we.”
Carlson did not explain why they shipped the only copy of “damning” documents.
A right-wing militia prepared to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer.
Who else was behind this violent plot? Donald Trump … and Facebook.
Trump regularly broadcasts dangerous lies and instigates racist and sexist violence online. He spewed racist slurs directed at Senator Kamala Harris, after she called out his failures when she was on the vice presidential debate stage. He encouraged attacks on Gov. Whitmer for her work to protect people from COVID-19 — and his supporters turned to Facebook to recruit others and plan their violent plot.1
Right-wing extremists used Facebook to plot this attack on Gov. Whitmer.2 They may have been stopped, but other violent extremist groups are still using Facebook to recruit, peddle racist conspiracy theories, and harass women leaders online.
Representatives Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other women of color leaders have been reporting death threats and online abuse for years.
Instead of protecting women leaders, Facebook amplifies right-wing disinformation and harassment. A company executive just admitted that racist and sexist conspiracies actually have an advantage on Facebook's algorithms.3 That's how right-wing extremist groups recruit new members, spread malicious lies, and plan attacks so effectively on the platform.
Facebook cashes in on racist and sexist clicks. The company leaves women of color leaders in real danger. Hateful disinformation can ruin their election chances. Others are scared away from politics altogether.4
And yet brave women still push forward to fight for all of us. Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is carrying on with her head held high. For the first time in history, a Black woman is our vice-presidential candidate.
Up and down the ballot, more women are courageously running for office to take back power. They're going up against Trump, Facebook, and growing right-wing hate groups and trolls — but they can't do it alone.
Election Day is very close, and the stakes are higher than ever for women, especially for Black, Indigenous, and women of color. Our lives and bodies are on the line. Robyn, it's up to us to protect our candidates and our democracy from Facebook, and we don't have much time.
Twenty former U.S. attorneys ― all appointed by GOP presidents ― gave 2020 Democratic nomineeJoe Bidentheir “strongest endorsement”in an open letterslamming PresidentDonald Trump’s politicization of the Justice Department.
Trump “has clearly conveyed that he expects his Justice Department appointees and prosecutors to serve his personal and political interests in the handling of certain cases – such as the investigations into foreign election interference and the prosecution of his political associates – and has taken action against those who have stood up for the interests of justice,” says the letter signed by ex-prosecutors who served in Republican administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush.
Biden, the attorneys wrote, has “devoted his career to supporting law enforcement, protecting the independence of the Justice Department, and working to ensure that the federal government exercises its law enforcement powers fairly and impartially and in the interests of all Americans.”
The former attorneys who signed an open letter condemning President Donald Trump served in Republican administrations from Dwight Eisenhower to George W. Bush, pictured. (Photo: ASSOCIATED PRESS)
They also hailed Biden for appearing to understand “that unity — and not division — is the key to meeting the challenges that our country is facing.”
Biden would “make every effort to unite law enforcement and the nation in the pursuit of justice – to defend the rule of law, to serve and protect all Americans, and to build a criminal justice system that provides equal justice under the law,” they added.
The letter adds to Biden’s backing from figures or groups that would traditionally be expected to endorse the GOP candidate.
'Safer than your local grocery store': How the Pentagon kept the virus at bay as the White House struggled
The COVID-19 outbreak sweeping through the White House, most recently among the staff of Vice President Mike Pence, has underlined the fact that in Washington’s halls of power there has been a tale of two pandemics.
The contrast between the chaos the pandemic has wreaked on the White House and the limited impact it has had on the health of the 25,000-strong Pentagon workforce, which has rigorously followed CDC guidelines, could not be more pronounced. President Trump has continually downplayed the severity of the virus and mocked those who took steps to protect themselves from it.
Trump at the White House on Tuesday. (Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
By Sunday, at least five people linked to Pence, including his chief of staff, Marc Short, had tested positive for COVID-19. They are only the most recent victims of the disease that seems to have been circulating at the White House since at least early May, when one of Trump’s personal valets tested positive. More recently in the White House complex, where the workforce numbers in the hundreds, rather than the thousands at the Pentagon, an outbreak that blossomed in late September hospitalized the president, sickened the first lady and forced several of Trump’s most senior advisers to quarantine at home after they tested positive.
Meanwhile, three miles away in the Pentagon, one of the world’s largest office buildings, life went on.
The Defense Department does not release the numbers of COVID-19 cases at individual installations, but the Pentagon’s numbers are “significantly statistically lower” than those in the surrounding northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C., said Tom Muir, director of the Defense Department’s Washington Headquarters Services.
In an interview with Yahoo news, Muir, whose job makes him the unofficial mayor of the Pentagon, listed several factors behind the Pentagon’s success, including an embrace of telework and a disciplined workforce willing to follow orders based on CDC guidance.
From the start, the Defense Department in general, and the Pentagon in particular, took the threat of COVID-19 seriously. On March 15, about two weeks after Trump had predicted that “like a miracle” the virus would “disappear,” Defense Secretary Mark Esper raised the health protection condition for the Pentagon Reservation from “Alpha” to “Bravo,” reflecting an increased spread of the coronavirus in the surrounding community. (The Pentagon Reservation consists of about 80 buildings in the greater Washington area and has a work force of 75,000, roughly a third of whom work in the Pentagon building itself.) Eight days later, Esper raised it again, to “Charlie,” signifying a sustained COVID-19 transmission in the wider community.
Secretary of Defense Mark Esper. (Greg Nash/Pool/Getty Images)
Each change brought with it a series of actions in the Pentagon, including a reduction in the number of building entrances and increased cleaning and disinfecting of both public spaces and offices. “Our guidance is aligned with what the CDC believes to be the best science available,” Muir said.
But the most notable difference was an increased reliance on telework.
With the shift to health protection condition (HPCON) Charlie, the number of people coming to work in the Pentagon dropped by about 85 percent, to about 3,750. The remainder worked from home.
What happened next surprised Pentagon managers: Despite the challenges inherent with a workforce that uses a lot of classified material, the productivity of the teleworkers exceeded expectations. “Many employees and their supervisors have found that they’re extremely productive outside of the current workspace,” Muir said. “They’re actually more productive working from home sometimes.”
Many supervisors in the building now rotate their staffs, with individuals coming into the office every other day, according to Muir.
The high number of people working from home freed up large swathes of the Pentagon’s usually jam-packed 67 acres of parking lot, which can fit 8,770 cars. In what Muir acknowledged was “a huge logistics challenge,” he and his staff made the newly empty spaces available to employees who were still coming to work, but who carpooled or used public transport to commute (both of which carry a much higher risk of transmission than driving alone).
Even though masks are required on Washington-area mass transit, “we still find that many feel much more comfortable driving themselves, whereas prior to COVID they were exclusively using mass transit to get to the office,” Muir said, adding that he is not aware of anyone who wants to drive to the Pentagon being denied a parking space.
Even before they get in their cars, however, Pentagon employees are expected to take their temperatures at home. An elevated temperature means a worker should stay at home and inform their boss, according to Muir. “We ask them to not come to work if they’re sick or if they’ve been exposed to someone with COVID-19,” he said.
A driver takes a thermal scanning test. (Getty Images)
When the employees arrive at one of the Pentagon’s many entrances, 10-15 percent of them (down from 25 percent at the height of the pandemic) are selected at random to receive no-touch temperature checks and asked a series of questions about any symptoms they might have and whether anyone in their household has been diagnosed with, or might have, COVID-19. “If the answer to any of those questions is yes, we refer them to secondary screening,” while contacting the employee’s supervisor who directs him or her to return home immediately and to see a doctor, Muir said. “We do not allow them entrance to the Pentagon.”
Inside the building, things have also changed significantly. No more than two people are allowed in an elevator at one time, and people must stand at least 6 feet apart on the building’s 19 escalators, with no passing allowed, according to Muir.
Throughout the building’s 17.5 miles of corridors, signs tell readers to maintain social distancing, wear their masks and wash their hands. That behavior “is engrained now in our daily work activity,” Muir said. There are hand sanitizer stations at every entrance, as well as at most offices and conference rooms, he said.
Visitors from the White House complex adhere to the same standards as Defense Department employees, according to Muir, who at no time compared the steps the Pentagon has taken to those the White House has or has not chosen to adopt. Because so many White House personnel are tested frequently, “there’s not a requirement for them to get tested before they come here,” he said. However, “we do test many of our senior leaders prior to them visiting the White House,” he added.
President Trump during a news conference in the Oval Office on Friday. (Leigh Vogel/UPI/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Throughout the Pentagon, crews have been installing plexiglass shields, first for workers whose jobs require them to deal face to face with people, and then for other workspaces, Muir said. In addition, cleaning crews are routinely disinfecting surfaces, as opposed to their previous practice of just dusting them, according to Muir. “We’ve increased our cleaning of bathrooms, common areas, elevator buttons, escalator rails,” and have also equipped offices with their own cleaning supplies, he said.
The steps the Pentagon has taken have all contributed to what Muir termed a “very effective” effort to prevent any significant outbreaks. “The numbers of COVID-positive cases in the Pentagon have been significantly less than right outside in local counties,” he said. “Evidence has shown that the wearing of masks, the washing of hands and the maintaining of social distance ... are very effective to stop community spread, either in the installation or while people are doing their commute.” As a result, Muir said, the Pentagon is now “safer than your local grocery store.”
But no plan is 100 percent foolproof. “There’s no secret bubble around the Pentagon that keeps us immune from COVID,” Muir said. “We have had cases in the Pentagon.”
Muir declined to give exact numbers but said that while “scores” of the Pentagon’s 26,000-member workforce had tested positive since March, between a third and a half of those were cases in which someone caught the disease in their home community while teleworking and did not bring it to the Pentagon. In “a couple of instances,” confirmed cases in the Pentagon involved multiple people from the same office, according to Muir. “Either they share a car together or they share a workspace together,” he said, adding that in those cases, all the workers from the office are told to telework.
Whether it’s a single individual who tests positive or a mini outbreak, each COVID-19 case in the Pentagon itself prompts a “very aggressive action” in response, according to Muir. As soon as someone who works in a Pentagon office tests positive, that office is immediately notified and temporarily shut down so that it can be deep cleaned while the contact tracers go to work, he said.
“We’ve got a very robust contact-tracing program” that operates out of the Pentagon’s on-site medical clinic, Muir said. Led by the clinic’s medical staff, the “eight or nine” full-time contact tracers have a 24-hour standard for reaching out to everyone who has been in close proximity with someone who is suspected or confirmed to have COVID-19, he added.
The contact tracers are helped by the fact that everyone who works in the building uses a Defense Department common access card that unlocks both doors and work computers. “We know when you come into the Pentagon entrance, we know when you badge into your office, we know when you log onto your computer, we know when you leave your office, we know when you badge out” of the building, Muir said. “We’ve got a pretty good read on where you’ve been during the time period that you may have been positive.”
Gen. Mark Miller, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the Capitol. (Erin Schaff/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
The most high-profile Pentagon personnel to be forced to work from home have been members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, most of whom went into quarantine earlier this month after attending meetings with a Coast Guard admiral who had tested positive. The irony, however, was that circumstantial evidence suggested that the admiral had contracted the disease while visiting the White House.
Unlike their Pentagon counterparts, officials at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue are reluctant to discuss the details of their efforts to prevent spread of the coronavirus. The press office, which was hard hit by the outbreak, declined even to say how many people worked at the White House complex, let alone how many were teleworking, referring questions on such matters to the Office of Personnel Management, which did not respond to requests for comment.
“President Trump’s top priority has been the health and safety of the American people, which is why we have incorporated current CDC guidance and best practices for limiting COVID-19 exposure to the greatest extent possible, including staying home if you are positive or have symptoms, social distancing, good hygiene, regular deep cleaning of all work spaces and face coverings,” deputy White House press secretary Judd Deere said in a statement to Yahoo News.
Deere said the “White House Medical Unit leads a robust contact tracing program with CDC personnel and guidance to stop ongoing transmission,” and added that anyone expected to come in contact with the president is tested beforehand.
As at the Pentagon, not everyone who enters the White House complex is tested or has their temperature checked. But Pence’s recent behavior has been in marked contrast to that of the Joint Chiefs following their meetings with the Coast Guard admiral. Choosing not to self-isolate, despite having exposure to Short, his chief of staff who tested positive, the vice president instead immediately returned to the campaign trail.
The White House insists it is hewing closely to the CDC’s guidelines, but Pence’s refusal to quarantine is just the latest in a long line of White House actions that seem to contradict CDC guidelines.
Vice President Mike Pence in Greensboro, N.C., on Tuesday. (Grant Baldwin/AFP via Getty Images)
For example, Trump returned to his office from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center within days of testing positive. The vice president’s rally in Minnesota on Monday, like many Trump campaign events, violated local social distancing regulations. According to the press pool, masks were distributed at the event and temperatures were checked, but it also featured a packed crowd of “more than 650 people,” well over the cap of 250 allowed by state guidelines. Back in Washington, there have been multiple large events in the White House at which staff and visitors have gone unmasked, including some after the recent outbreak. Testing, while likely more widespread than in the Pentagon, given the smaller staff and higher priority, is not universal.
Deere noted many White House staffers are considered essential workers, who the CDC says “may be permitted to continue work following potential exposure to COVID-19.” However, the CDC adds that this should only be allowed “provided they remain asymptomatic and additional precautions are implemented to protect them and the community.”
One of the most striking differences between the Pentagon and White House may be in the use of masks. While Pentagon employees are required to wear masks in public spaces and whenever they are unable to maintain 6 feet of separation in workspaces, at the White House, the staff is often seen without face coverings.
Deere indicated the sporadic mask use was in line with best practices. “The White House follows CDC guidance for face coverings — recommended but not required,” he said. However, the CDC, which does not have the authority to require people to wear masks, only to recommend that they do, in fact recommends that Americans wear masks “anywhere they will be around other people.”
The White House, like the Pentagon, refuses to say how many staffers have tested positive for COVID-19. But according to an Oct. 7 ABC News report, a Federal Emergency Management Agency memo said that “34 White House staffers and other contacts” were infected. That number presumably does not include the Pence staffers who have tested positive more recently.
The Pentagon, one of the world's largest office buildings. (Bill Clark/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)
The Pentagon, meanwhile, is looking ahead to a future that likely involves a much higher percentage of the workforce telecommuting than was the case before the pandemic. Defense Secretary Esper’s decision to revert to HPCON Bravo on June 29 was expected to result in about 80 percent of employees working in the building. But so far, that number is steady at 60 percent, meaning that roughly 10,000 Pentagon workers are still telecommuting, according to Muir.
In some cases, these are workers who are either in vulnerable populations themselves due to underlying health conditions or who have such a person in their immediate family. The Defense Department wants those people to stay home for now, according to Muir, who predicted that the pandemic will have a lasting impact on the Pentagon in much the same way that the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, forever changed life in the building.
“We all long for the day when we can go back to the way things were,” Muir said. “But I don’t think we’ll ever be there.”
Hundreds of Trump supporters stuck on freezing cold Omaha airfield after rally, 7 taken to hospitals
Hundreds of President Donald Trump's supporters were left in the freezing cold for hours after a rally at an airfield in Omaha, Nebraska, on Tuesday night, with some walking around 3 miles to waiting buses and others being taken away in ambulances.
Seven people were taken to area hospitals, suffering from a variety of conditions, and there were a total of 30 "contacted" for medical reasons, the Omaha Police Department said in a statement. The Omaha Airport Authority had a slightly different figure of the number taken to hospitals — it said six were "throughout the duration of the event" and added that it could not confirm that the people were taken to hospitals because of the cold.
The temperature in the area was in the mid-30s at the time, but as low as 27 degrees with wind chill.
Image: President Donald Trump looks out at supporters at a campaign rally in Omaha on Tuesday. (Jonathan Ernst / Reuters)
Many of those at the rally at the Eppley Airfield faced hours in long lines to get in and clogged parking lots and busy crowds to get out, hours after Air Force One departed around 9 p.m. The police said the last person was loaded onto a bus at the rally site at 11:50 p.m. — about three hours after the event had ended.
On Wednesday, Joe Biden said the incident was emblematic of "Trump's whole approach."
"Just look what happened last night in Omaha, after the Trump rally ended, hundreds of people, including older Americans and children were stranded in sub-zero freezing temperatures for hours," Biden told reporters during a brief speech in Wilmington, Delaware. "Several folks ended up in the hospital...It's an image that captured President Trump's whole approach in this crisis...he makes a lot of big pronouncements, but they don't hold up."
The police department said 25,000 people had been taken to the rally site by 40 buses running from 10:00 a.m. until the rally began at 8:00 p.m.
According to dispatches from the department, recorded by the radio communications platform Broadcastify, at least 30 people including the elderly, an electric wheelchair user and a family with small children were among those requiring medical attention after hours of waiting in the cold.
The Supreme Court decision Monday effectively barring the counting of mail-in ballots in Wisconsin that arrive after Election Day was not a surprise for many Democrats, who had pressed for it but expected to lose.
But a concurring opinion by Justice Brett Kavanaugh set off alarms among civil rights and Democratic Party lawyers, who viewed it as giving public support to President Donald Trump’s arguments that any results counted after Nov. 3 could be riddled with fraudulent votes — an assertion unsupported by the history of elections in the United States.
The decision also unnerved Democrats and local election officials in Pennsylvania, where Republicans are asking the Supreme Court to weigh in again on whether the state can accept ballots received up to three days after Election Day. While Democrats in Wisconsin had been appealing for an extension, the current rules in Pennsylvania allow for ballots to arrive three days after the election. Any change could threaten the more than 1.4 million absentee ballots not yet returned.
In his opinion, attached to the 5-3 ruling against the deadline extension in Wisconsin, Kavanaugh wrote that Election Day mail-in deadlines were devised “to avoid the chaos and suspicions of impropriety that can ensue if thousands of absentee ballots flow in after Election Day and potentially flip the results of an election.”
He added, “Those states also want to be able to definitively announce the results of the election on election night, or as soon as possible thereafter.”
Kavanaugh’s statement mirrored in some ways Trump’s efforts to suggest that only ballots counted by Election Day should decide the result, and more generally to push unfounded claims about widespread voter fraud.
Earlier Monday, the president had posted on Twitter that election officials “must have final total on November 3rd,” alleging without evidence that there are “big problems” with mail-in ballots. Twitter labeled the tweet “misleading.”
The Wisconsin ruling was the latest in a series of court decisions setting the rules for how voters in different states can cast their ballots during the coronavirus pandemic and when the cutoff is for receiving them.
The Wisconsin ruling revealed a stark divide among the justices in their understanding of the role of the courts in protecting the right to vote during a pandemic and left voting rights activists concerned about how the court’s conservative majority would rule in any postelection fights.
With Trump indicating that he plans to challenge a loss, Democrats have kept a particularly wary eye on the Supreme Court.
It was the court that rendered the final decision in the Florida recount of 2000, effectively delivering the state to George W. Bush over Al Gore by just 537 votes and, with it, the presidency. In rushing to name a successor to Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg upon her death last month, Trump indicated that he believed the Supreme Court might again determine the winner, saying, “I think this will end up in the Supreme Court, and I think it’s very important that we have nine justices.”
He suggested that he expected the court to weigh in on his charges of election fraud, saying: “The scam will be before the United States Supreme Court. And I think having a 4-4 situation is not a good situation.”
The concept expressed by Kavanaugh that counting late-arriving ballots could “flip the results” misconstrues the voting process, where official results often are not fully tabulated for days or even weeks after an election.
And, this year, both sides expect that Democrats will vote by mail in greater numbers than Republicans will, and that Republicans will vote in person in greater numbers than Democrats will — leading to a potential scenario in which initial results could appear to favor Trump, only to move in the direction of Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, as the counts of mailed ballots are made public.
Because of a surge in mail-in ballots due to the pandemic, as well as delays at the Postal Service, civil rights groups and Democrats have been pressing for the suspension of certain rules regarding mail-in balloting to ensure that as many ballots as possible arrive on time and so that states and counties will have more time to count them.
Republicans have been pressing to keep the more restrictive rules in place.
Kavanaugh’s concurrence was met by a dissent from Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote that “there are no results to ‘flip’ until all valid votes are counted.”
Kagan wrote that nothing could be more suspicious or improper “than refusing to tally votes once the clock strikes 12 on election night.”
“To suggest otherwise,” she added, “especially in these fractious times, is to disserve the electoral process.”
Kagan chastised the majority for disregarding the overriding effects of the pandemic, adding, “What will undermine the ‘integrity’ of that process is not the counting but instead the discarding of timely cast ballots that, because of pandemic conditions, arrive a bit after Election Day.”
Democrats have openly worried that Trump’s attacks would create the false impression that fraud is a serious threat to the integrity of the election and use that as a basis for a challenge to the mail-in vote. To Democrats, Kavanaugh’s opinion appeared to reward the approach, treating voters’ perceptions of fraud — which Trump is trying so hard to influence — as potentially pivotal.
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Wisconsin case came in response to an emergency petition, and therefore it lacked the weight of a case that had been fully argued before it. But it took on added importance for both sides coming ahead of an election many expect to be contested, and because it came on a day that Trump secured a sixth conservative vote on the court with the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Richard L. Hasen, a professor of law and political science at the University of California, Irvine, said Kavanaugh’s reference to “suspicions of impropriety” revealed a “Trumpian mindset.” More substantively, Hasen said, his opinion augured a harder climb for civil rights groups and Democrats in election-year cases that go before the Supreme Court.
The president’s success in placing his nominees throughout the federal judiciary has led to a rightward shift in the ideological balance of several important federal appellate circuits as well as cemented the conservative majority on the Supreme Court.
They have joined with the other conservatives to stay several lower court rulings that had been in favor of expanding access to voting during the pandemic, including in Wisconsin, where a District Court judge, William M. Conley, had decided for Democrats by extending the deadline for counting ballots.
This was the second time the Supreme Court intervened in a decision by Conley this election year. In the spring, it stayed his decision granting an extension for mail ballots on the eve of the primary election, which included races for the Democratic nomination and an important race for state Supreme Court justice. In that case, however, the court did allow election officials to continue counting ballots for several days after Election Day as long as ballots were postmarked on or before Election Day.
Kavanaugh took a prominent role in both cases and showed himself to be in line with the other conservatives on voting rights cases, deferring to state legislatures and their rights to enact strict measures to institute safeguards against the potential for voter fraud, even though it remains exceedingly rare.
The opinions offered by Kavanaugh have unsettled voting rights groups.
“Even without the reasoning, it’s very clear that what the court has done throughout this election season has made it clear that federal courts are not going to be significant sources of voting rights protection in the lead-up to elections,” said Wendy R. Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
“It’s the unique constitutional role of the courts to protect individual rights like voting rights and they’re treating it like policy decisions,” Weiser added.
Democrats had anticipated the court’s ruling in the Wisconsin case, and on Tuesday they focused on efforts to persuade voters not to wait until the last minute and risk not having their mail ballots arrive on time to be counted.
The opinion by Kavanaugh also further worried voting rights groups in Pennsylvania.
Previously, the court had deadlocked 4-4 on a challenge to a similar ballot deadline extension in the state, though it was Republicans who were appealing a state Supreme Court decision, rather than a federal court decision.
The deadlocked decision meant that the state Supreme Court decision held, and that ballots postmarked by Election Day could be counted as long as they arrived within three days afterward.
Republicans in the state, however, immediately returned to the federal court in the Western District of Pennsylvania, with a nearly identical argument against the ballot extension. Their apparent plan was a return appearance before the Supreme Court with newly installed Justice Barrett, who they hoped would side with the other conservative members and undo the extension.
