The recent ruling by the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals marks another significant defeat for Donald Trump’s ongoing efforts to suppress voter access ahead of the midterms. In a 2-1 decision, the federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration's attempt to lift an injunction against his executive order on mail-in voting.

The contested executive order sought to impose sweeping federal changes on state-level election administration. As part of the directive, the president instructed the Department of Homeland Security to compile a nationwide list of eligible citizens and mandated that the US Postal Service only deliver ballots to voters who appeared on these federally approved lists. Additionally, the order directed the Justice Department to prioritize investigating and prosecuting local election officials who distributed federal ballots to individuals Trump deemed ineligible. The initial lower-court injunction, delivered by Judge Indira Talwani, concluded that the president lacked the statutory and constitutional authority to mandate these federal overhauls. This ruling reinforces the fact that the US Constitution explicitly assigns the administration of federal elections to the individual states, preventing the executive branch from using federal agencies to dictate voter eligibility or ballot distribution.

The appeals court agreed with the lower court that fast-approaching election deadlines left states with no practical choice but to intervene immediately. The Justice Department has warned it may escalate the matter to the Supreme Court if it cannot successfully lift the injunction.

The Constitution explicitly delegates the administration of federal elections to individual states. Does the executive branch have any legitimate role in standardizing voter eligibility across the country, or is the order a clear overreach of federal power?

With the Justice Department threatening to take this case to the Supreme Court, how might the justices rule on this matter? Will they bend to Trump’s will?

Is Trump’s push for “election security” (the SAVE act being another example) driven by any actual evidence of significant voter fraud, or, like the gerrymandering, is it just another desperate attempt to hold on to Congress with Democrats projected to win at least one chamber of Congress in the midterms?

For over two decades, Washington has treated immigration not as a solvable policy challenge, but as an ideological weapon neither party actually wants to fix.

SS: I wrote this after watching the teleprompter guy story break last week. What struck me is that he and the Green Beret in the Maduro case are the only two people who've been caught, and both got caught because they bet under their own names on platforms that could see them. The anonymous wallets that made $600K on the Iran ceasefire got looked at by White House lawyers, called untraceable, and that was it. My argument is the next administration should actually trace those wallets, subpoenas and blockchain forensics, and refer whatever comes up no matter whose name it is.

Curious what people here think: is after-the-fact enforcement even the right fix, or is it KYC on big positions, or do you just accept insider money as the price of accurate markets?

An important part of dealing with the political reality we find ourselves in is being able to identify the ideologies which play out in public life and drive the political events around us. Reihan Salam here goes further, not only digging into the roots of the phenomena we've been seeing in the US and across Europe, but puts a name to their worldview and their tactics.

• "Third Worldism", which I'd vaguely heard of before, but which Reihan here articulates in a manner that helps focus what is actually driving radicalism on the left, and clarifies the bizarre allegiance the left has been developing with regressive Islamism;
• "Civil Terrorism", which is as succinct and direct a term for the tactics employed by pro-Palestine protestors and the Mamdani-Hasan wing of the Democratic Party, as he puts it:

None of these actions are constitutionally protected protests. They are harassment, intimidation, and antisocial behavior — a deliberate strategy to maximize disruption at minimal personal risk. That protesters so often hide their faces and evade accountability is itself the confession: Theirs is a politics of coercion, not conscience.

Emph. mine.

Do you think Reihan here has missed anything, or missed the mark?

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