In another blow to President Donald Trump's executive order targeting mail-in voting ahead of the midterm elections, a federal appeals court has refused — for now — to let the U.S. Postal Service carry out "unprecedented levels of involvement by federal officials" in nearly two dozen states.

The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, in a 2-1 decision over the weekend favoring blue states led by California, left in place a lower court order blocking the implementation of Trump's late-March executive order 14399, "Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections."

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A federal judge tossed out the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit to access West Virginia’s unredacted voter rolls, which marks 13 straight court losses for the department’s floundering effort to seize sensitive voter data from every state.

U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston, who was appointed by former president George W. Bush, granted West Virginia’s motion to dismiss DOJ’s lawsuit Monday. In a scathing order, Johnston found the department failed to make a sufficient legal argument for its demand of sensitive voter data.

President Donald Trump’s DOJ is on an impressive losing streak in its voter roll lawsuits. On Friday, a federal judge tossed DOJ’s lawsuit seeking New York’s unredacted voter roll for the same reasons that Johnston dismissed the West Virginia lawsuit. Last month, DOJ scored its first appeals court loss when a three-judge panel for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of the DOJ’s Michigan lawsuit. But Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, seemingly unfazed from losing, asked for a rehearing before the full Sixth Circuit.

Opinion

These facts lead to the inexorable conclusion that the “settlement” terms, the individuals who signed the "settlement” as well as the putative beneficiaries of the “settlement,” demonstrate a shared, unitary interest.

This action was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute. The nature of the suit itself and the conduct of the Parties and counsel from its filing make plain that this was an attempt to use the Court to provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law. The President may be the functional “dominus litus” of the Executive Branch, but as a party to a civil suit, he, as well as all the parties and lawyers before a court, are bound by the rules.

In sum, the facts before this Court demonstrate there was never adverseness between the Parties; there was never a case or controversy; and there was never a question as to who would prevail.

The Justice Department can’t access New York’s unredacted voter roll, a judge said in handing the federal government yet another loss in court in its quest to obtain the lists from all 50 states.

DOJ’s demand to state elections officials didn’t state a proper “basis” and “purpose” required by federal law to obtain the voter registration records it seeks, Judge Mae A. D’Agostino of the US District Court for the Northern District of New York said July 10 as she dismissed the lawsuit.

However, the federal government’s claim under the Civil Rights Act of 1960 “fails at the outset for an even more fundamental reason” because it “is simply not entitled” to the state roll complete with sensitive voter infomration, wrote D’Agostino, an appointee of President Barack Obama.

Florida’s “anti-woke” restrictions on the way university professors teach about race and gender violate the professors’ First Amendment rights, a panel of Eleventh Circuit judges decided.

The ruling affirms a federal district court judge’s finding that the law was impermissible under the Constitution. A divided 2-1 panel for the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit said state lawmakers can set the curriculum for state-run universities but don’t have unlimited authority to restrict viewpoints the lawmakers find offensive.

Opinion

A federal judge in Ohio ruled against the Trump administration Monday, citing bigoted comments President Trump and Vice President JD Vance made about immigrants.

U.S. District Judge Algenon Marbley ordered the White House to unfreeze immigrants’ benefit applications, citing Trump and Vance’s “outright hostility towards immigrants, both before and after the 2024 presidential elections.” These applications include filings for work authorization and green cards from people in the U.S. from countries including Burma, Canada, Iran, Nigeria, Syria, Tanzania, and Venezuela.

“Their ire appears focused on immigrants from countries in the Caribbean, South America, Africa, and Asia,” Marbley, nominated to the federal bench by President Clinton in 1997, wrote.

journalist Peter Canellos discusses “his new book Revenge for the Sixties: Sam Alito and the Triumph of the Conservative Legal Movement. a complete portrait not only of Alito as a person and a jurist, but of the reactionary conservative legal revolution which helped get him to the Supreme Court. who Alito really is, how his early life shaped his view of the world, and why so many people who knew him before his nomination now say that they don't recognize who he became after it.”