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Supreme Court Appears Poised to Allow ‘Brazen Republican Effort to Disenfranchise Millions’ Ahead of Midterms
Mail-in voting "is relied upon by nearly one million Americans serving in the military abroad and nearly 50 million Americans living in the US," noted one expert.
Mar 23, 2026
The US Supreme Court heard oral arguments Monday in a case in which Republicans are trying to ban states from accepting mail-in ballots after Election Day—a development that opponents warned could disenfranchise many of the roughly 50 million Americans who voted by mail in 2024.
Watson v. Republican National Committee challenges Mississippi's grace period for accepting mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day. While most states require mailed ballots to arrive by that date, 14 states provide extra time ranging from days to weeks. Such grace periods allow the votes of people including US troops stationed overseas, Americans living abroad, disabled people, and others to be counted.
The case is partly driven by President Donald Trump's unfounded assertion that mail-in voting is riddled with fraud. Following Trump's 2020 election loss, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency—created by the president in 2018—called the contest “the most secure in American history.” Trump promptly fired the head of the agency before leaving office.
The U.S. Supreme Court will consider a GOP effort to dramatically restrict mail-in voting Monday, when it hears oral arguments in Watson v. Republican National Committee. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
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— Marc Elias (@marcelias.bsky.social) March 22, 2026 at 8:31 AM
Legal experts observing Monday's oral arguments said that some of the six Republican-appointed justices appeared sympathetic to arguments for restricting mail-in voting.
University of Michigan Law School professor Leah Litman said on Bluesky that Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas "sound like complete MAGA-pilled 'absentee voting/mail in voting is fraudulent' brains" who are "open to invalidating state laws allowing vote counting after Election Day—and perhaps more voting forms."
"They are doing what they often do in these cases with unhinged theories—invent far fetched hypos (could a state allow you to retract your vote, or say your vote is cast when you give your brother a ballot) to distract from what the case is about (is mail-in absentee voting going to be banned)," Litman added.
Slate senior writer Mark Joseph Stern said on Bluesky that Justice Samuel Alito "strongly implied that vote-by-mail, as practiced in most of the country today, is highly susceptible to fraud," adding that Gorsuch and Thomas "leaned in that direction as well," while Justices Amy Coney Barrett and John Roberts "are harder to read."
"SO many questions from the Republican-appointed justices so far having little or nothing to do with the law—they're venting their evident frustrations about modern election laws that broadly authorize mail voting and fretting that they're spoiling elections with distrust and fraud," Stern continued. "Really bad!"
"It's also pretty clear that the Republican-appointed justices do not understand a great deal about how elections are actually administered," he added. "Their questions (and especially hypotheticals) are built on weird, paranoid fantasies that do not align with reality."
Others warned of the high likelihood of voter disenfranchisement should the justices limit mailed ballots.
“Watson v. RNC is a brazen Republican effort to disenfranchise millions of Americans seeking to vote in the midterm elections," said Court Accountability co-founder Lisa Graves. "Mail-in voting has been part of the American election system since the Civil War, and this method of voting is relied upon by nearly one million Americans serving in the military abroad and nearly 50 million Americans living in the US."
“Of course, the hyper-partisan Roberts Court is considering using the power of the nation’s highest court–again–to put its thumb on the scale of justice in ways sought by the Republican Party," Graves continued. "Three Trump appointees on the Supreme Court are poised to join three other Republican appointees to side with the radical ruling of a trio of operatives Trump appointed to the Fifth Circuit."
Last November, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans struck down a Mississippi law that allowed mailed ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrive within five business days, setting up the Supreme Court showdown.
“Vote-by-mail is a secure and widely used way to participate in our elections," Stand Up America executive director Christina Harvey said Monday. "It’s a lifeline for military and overseas voters, voters with disabilities, elderly voters, and rural voters living far from their polling places. Nearly one-third of the votes cast in the 2024 election were cast by mail, proving just how essential this option has become."
“Watson v. RNC is part of a broader effort to dismantle voting options ahead of this year’s midterms," Harvey continued. "After pushing congressional Republicans to eliminate vote-by-mail and adopting [United States Postal Service] policy changes that could disqualify ballots sent on time, Donald Trump and his allies are asking the Supreme Court to finish the job."
"If the court rules in their favor, they’ll be making it easier for politicians to hold onto power without answering to voters," she added.
Critics allege that disenfranchisement is the point of policies like limiting mail-in voting or requiring voter ID. Republicans have implied—and even admitted outright—that these policies help Republicans win elections. During a 2020 interview, Trump said he opposed expanding mail-in voting, saying such a move would mean the country would "never have a Republican elected... again."
Last year, Trump signed the Orwellian-named “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections” executive order, which critics argued would do just the opposite by making it more difficult for millions of voters to cast their ballots. Among other things, the decree pushes states to require proof of citizenship when voting—a policy that opponents warn disproportionately disenfranchises lower-income individuals, elderly, and adopted people without easy access to their birth certificates and those born at home in rural areas whose birth records were never officially filed.
Congressional Republicans are also pushing the SAVE Act and Make Elections Great Again (MEGA) Act, the latter of which was described by one analyst as the “most dangerous attack on voting rights ever" proposed in Congress. The SAVE Act—which would require anyone registering to vote in federal elections to provide documentary proof of US citizenship—passed in the House last month.
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The Rich and Their Right-Wing Allies Have Poisoned America; We Hold the Antidote
This year will feature, more than any time since the Civil War, an unprecedented referendum on democracy. Time is short, and both the danger of fascism and the opportunity to renew America are at our doorsteps.
Mar 22, 2026
President Donald Trump lied us into a war with Iran that now threatens to ignite the globe. He’s been accused of raping 13-year-old girls. He made a shocking joke in the White House on Thursday, speaking with the prime minister of Japan, about Pearl Harbor, provoking an international incident. He attacked Venezuela and is now threatening Cuba. And whatever Russian President Vladimir Putin wants, Trump gives him.
The man is poison. But it sure as hell didn’t begin with him.
Our country has been poisoned for decades now, and if we don’t remove the poison and start using the antidote, America may soon be completely unrecognizable as a “free” nation. It’s taken around 50 years, but we’re now at the point of maximum crisis.
First came the poison of big money corrupting politics.
Literally, no other developed country in the world allows this democracy-killing corruption that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized.
Back in 1971, Lewis Powell thought he saw a communist threat in Ralph Nader. Literally: he named him in his infamous manifesto, the Powell Memo, arguing that calls to regulate auto safety with seat belts and soft dash boards (Nader’s book Unsafe At Any Speed) were simply the first steps toward a socialist takeover of America.
“Perhaps the single most effective antagonist of American business,” Powell wrote, “is Ralph Nader, who—thanks largely to the media—has become a legend in his own time and an idol of millions of Americans.”
Nader (who wrote the Foreword to my book The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream) and people like Rachel Carson, with the environmental movement her book Silent Spring had inspired, threatened, Powell believed, the core of America’s free enterprise system.
Regulation, Powell (a tobacco lawyer) asserted, was just step one to a total Stalinist takeover of America.
“The overriding first need,” Powell wrote, “is for businessmen to recognize that the ultimate issue may be survival—survival of what we call the free enterprise system, and all that this means for the strength and prosperity of America and the freedom of our people.”
The following year Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he personally authored the 1978 Boston v Bellotti decision that claimed billionaire and corporate money in politics wasn’t bribery or corruption (as it had been under the law since the founding of the republic) but merely an exercise of First Amendment-protected free speech. Money wasn’t money: It was speech.
That decision greased the path for the later doubling down with Citizens United, and produced a tsunami of corporate money that flooded into the GOP in 1980 (at the time the Democrats were largely funded by labor unions; their embrace of corporate money would come in 1992 with Bill Clinton’s “New Democrats”), floating Ronald Reagan and his neoliberal Reagan Revolution into power.
Since then, big business and billionaires have discovered that the investment of a few million dollars into buying politicians can produce billions or even trillions in returns. When morbidly rich hedge fund guys poured a million or so dollars into Kyrsten Sinema’s coffers, for example, she demanded changes to the Inflation Reduction Act that saved them $14 billion.
That’s one hell of a return on investment, and similar deals are made every day now: The entire GOP and the “corporate problem solver” Democrats are all in on the scam.
Whether it’s money from fossil fuel, big pharma, big chemical, big banking, big airlines, big telcom, big tech, or any other billion-dollar industry in America, the entire GOP and a handful of those “problem solver” Democrats in the House and Senate have their hands out. Literally, no other developed country in the world allows this democracy-killing corruption that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court legalized.
Next came poisonous memes designed to turn working people against each other.
As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.
The morbidly rich, and the corporations that made them that way, hate labor unions, aka “democracy in the workplace.” Unions reduce their profits and inhibit their ability to maximally exploit their workers; unionized workers also demand accountability, a word anathema to corporations.
Reagan promoted the idea that “union bosses” were exploiting union members for their own advantage and, even though the argument made no sense (unions don’t have stock or bonus systems like corporations, so “union bosses” get a salary just like everybody else), it was picked up by the media that was, itself, run by corporations unhappy about being unionized.
TV shows in the 1980s and 1990s routinely featured corrupt or mobbed-up “union bosses” as parts of their plots, while state after state adopted “Right To Work For Less” legislation, authorized by a Republican Congress over Harry Truman’s veto in 1947, that makes it difficult for unions to survive.
Right-wing radio and Fox “News” echoed the message, and, since Reagan’s election, we’ve seen union representation go from about a third of all Americans to around 10% in the private workplace today.
Along with the poisoning death of our unions came the destruction of the American middle class. When Reagan came into office some estimates put the middle class—a single family’s wage earner being able to buy a home, a car, take a vacation, put kids through school, and save for retirement or have a pension—at around 60-65% of American families. Today it’s under 45%.
Conservatives then set about poisoning American race relations.
This is not to say everything was hunky dory, but in the 1960s and 1970s we were making real progress. Politicians from both parties—with the broad support of the American people—passed Voting and Civil Rights laws; we made good faith efforts to integrate schools and workplaces; and even television shows in the 1990s, led by Norman Lear’s genius, brought positive portrayals of non-white and queer people to straight white people’s TV screens in a big way for the first time.
First came Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” openly welcoming Southern white racists into the GOP. Next, tragically, in 1988 George H. W. Bush proved that appealing to white racism could still win elections with his notorious Willie Horton ads, setting the stage for two generations of race-baiting Republican politics that reached its zenith with Donald Trump’s racist declaration about “Mexican rapists” when he announced his candidacy in 2015.
The GOP continues this strategy today, promoting racial and religious fear and hate with Muslim bans and Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids, generating hysteria about brown refugees and fighting to block any true portrayals of American racial history in our schools.
Hustlers, with help from the GOP, poisoned Christianity next.
Reagan’s campaign hired born-again alcoholic George W. Bush to work out a deal to integrate the evangelical movement—which prior to 1980 was non-political and even supported abortion rights—into the GOP. Jerry Falwell became the face of this church-and-state merger, spewing his own brand of poison.
The week after 9/11, Falwell and Pat Robertson solemnly agreed on TV that the attack on the Twin Towers was merely their god’s punishment for America tolerating “sin.”
"What we saw on Tuesday,” Falwell said on Pat Robertson’s TV show, “as terrible as it is, could be minuscule if, in fact, God continues to lift the curtain and allow the enemies of America to give us probably what we deserve.”
Robertson replied:
Jerry, that's my feeling. I think we've just seen the antechamber to terror. We haven't even begun to see what they can do to the major population.
Falwell then doubled down:
The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad.
I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say, "You helped this happen.”
Robertson, nodding vigorously, added:
I totally concur, and the problem is we have adopted that agenda at the highest levels of our government.
And now we have evangelists like the newly reinvented Mike Flynn—a convicted and pardoned secret foreign agent who spied on us from within the White House—traveling the country today calling, essentially, for replacing our democracy with an authoritarian “Christian” government like in Russia and Hungary (and Germany and Italy in the past).
“If we are going to have one nation under God,” Flynn tells audiences repeatedly, “which we must, we have to have one religion. One nation under God, and one religion under God, right?”
Forget about the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount and the Parable of the Goats and Sheep in Matthew 25; get yourself an AR-15 like Flynn recently strutted with on stage. And let’s do something about all those Jews and Muslims, like Nick Fuentes recommends!
The National Rifle Association (NRA) and weapons manufacturers then poured the poison of guns across our land.
Using the money Republicans on the Supreme Court authorized with the Bellotti and Citizens United decisions, combined with Justice Antonin Scalia’s twisted Heller decision, the Supreme Court and the NRA have unleashed an epidemic of gun violence in America.
The average of all countries in the world is 9.86 guns per 100 civilians. The United States is highest in the world at 120.5 guns per 100 people. Yemen, which is in the middle of a war with Saudi Arabia and dealing with an internal insurgency, comes in second at 52.8.
No other nation is even close; even Afghanistan and Iraq average around 20 deadly weapons in the hands of every hundred people. European and Asian countries range from 10 to as low as 1 gun per hundred people.
Over on Fox “News,” one brilliant idea to deal with the slaughter of our children in our schools was to issue “Ballistic Blankets” to every school. This is how sick and twisted the Republicans taking money from the gun industry and their allies have become.
Twenty years ago, car accidents were the leading killer of children and youth: Today it’s guns. This year, almost 11 out of every 100,000 children died from guns while only 8 per 100K died from car crashes. Nothing in America kills more of our children than the 400,000,000+ guns in which our country is awash (and that have made billions for the weapons industry).
White Supremacists are doing their best to poison our police and military.
There’s an active movement among white supremacist groups to spread the poison of fascism, racism, and hate to the government employees who carry the authority to legally kill people. As ABC News reported last March:
Based on investigations between 2016 and 2020, agents and analysts with the FBI's division in San Antonio concluded that white supremacists and other right-wing extremists would "very likely seek affiliation with military and law enforcement entities in furtherance of" their ideologies, according to a confidential intelligence assessment issued late last month."
And the epicenter for this appears to be Stephen Miller’s ICE.
“Semi-Fascist” MAGA Republicans are poisoning our system of governance.
Former President Joe Biden rightly called out the MAGA faction of the Republican Party; they are actively working to undermine our republic and replace it with their beloved autocratic strongman models of Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, and Putin’s Russia. They’re even promoting Hungary and Orbán on Fox “News,” doing fawning specials live from Budapest featuring the Big Man himself.
In multiple Republican-controlled states, legislators have made it harder to vote—particularly for low-income people, minorities, and college students—while openly working to terrorize Black voters. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis paraded a group of mostly Black “illegal voters” in Florida, while Texas politicians have promoted far and wide their arrests of Black “felon voters.”
It’s all about trying to terrify Black people away from the polls, if less severe efforts like outlawing “Souls to the Polls” by ending Sunday voting aren’t enough to swing elections to the GOP.
The Brennan Center documents how:
As of January 14, legislators in at least 27 states have introduced, pre-filed, or carried over 250 bills with restrictive [voting] provisions.
Dozens are now law, and next is their SAVE America Act, which they don’t expect will pass but they will point to when Democrats win this coming November, claiming those victories were the result of fraud.
Meanwhile, Republican appointees on the Supreme Court let Republican secretaries of state cancel the voter registrations of over 20 million Americans in the last dozen years with their Ohio decision.
The Supreme Court has also allowed Republican secretaries of state to reduce the number of voting machines and voting locations, particularly in Black, Hispanic, and college town neighborhoods, to force people wanting to vote into long, discouraging lines.
And they’re poisoning our social and news media.
In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, “write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?”
Vice President Wallace’s answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan:
“The really dangerous American fascists,” Wallace wrote, “are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.”
As if he had a time machine and could see the “conservative” media landscape today, Wallace continued:
“The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money and more power.
Today CNN is about to be taken over by a hard-right nepo-baby billionaire just like CBS and TikTok (which has banned my show). There’s a network of “nearly 1,300” websites purporting to be those of local newspapers but that are really right-wing propaganda operations, and dozens of actual right-wing “local” newspapers that are often stuck for free in people’s mailboxes.
Putin, Trump, Orbán, Xi Jinping, and other autocrats and right-wing billionaires are trying to poison democracies worldwide.
Donald Trump famously embraced autocrats, dictators, sheiks, and killers while snubbing leaders of democracies and working to destroy NATO and the United Nations. His family has taken in billions from the Middle East as he pursues a war against Iran that Netanyahu, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE have lobbied American presidents to undertake for over a generation.
Meanwhile, Russian and Chinese intelligence services run disinformation campaigns that fill social media with lies and information designed to tear democracies apart; they’re having considerable success in their efforts, including putting Trump in the White House in 2016 and 2024, and pushing through Brexit.
Forty-plus years of Reaganism... is best remedied by purging right-wing poisoners from political power and then taking active steps to rebuild our nation.
Republicans in Congress are even openly opposing Ukraine in that nation’s valiant battle against Russia’s terror campaign: Most recently it was 11 Republican Senators and 57 Republican members of the House who proudly voted with Putin over America and Ukraine.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who secretly carried a stash of documents (from Mar-a-Lago’s bathroom?) to Russia on behalf of Donald Trump to hand deliver to Putin’s intelligence service, even argued that we should end the Espionage Act, while his Republican colleagues were demanding Congress defund the FBI.
This November we can deliver the antidote to all this GOP poison.
This isn’t the first time “conservative” racists and fascists have poisoned America.
The oligarchs of the Confederacy did it in the first half of the 19th century, and progressive President Abraham Lincoln defeated them in the Civil War.
And the first third of the 20th century was haunted by the rise of the Klan and the Republican Great Depression, until progressive President Franklin Roosevelt declared political war on them, saying, “[T]hey hate me, and I welcome their hatred!”
As FDR and his Vice President Henry Wallace showed us, the most effective way to reverse the effects of fascist poison in the bloodstream of our body politic is for progressives to take power and put both the nation and the middle class back together.
FDR, Truman, and Dwight D. Eisenhower—two Democrats and a Republican—renewed the faith of the American people in the government our Founders created and many died to give us.
They taught us that civic engagement—voting and participating in our political system—is the best antidote to fascist poison.
Forty-plus years of Reaganism, as I lay out in my book The Hidden History of Neoliberalism: How Reaganism Gutted America, is best remedied by purging right-wing poisoners from political power and then taking active steps to rebuild our nation.
Steps that Republicans and a handful of sellout Democrats have fought tooth and nail in their service to spreading the fascist poison of giant monopolies and the morbidly rich. They profit from keeping working peoples’ wages and benefits low, exploiting student debt, and forcing our public schools into crisis with bizarre anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion laws and book bans.
This year will feature, more than any time since the Civil War, an unprecedented referendum on democracy. Fully 60% of Americans will have an “election denier” Trump-humping Republican on the ballot this November.
Time is short, and both the danger of fascism and the opportunity to renew America are at our doorsteps.
Double-check your voter registrations (they can be challenged by Republicans even in blue states) and do everything you can to wake up friends and neighbors to this very real danger to our republic. And get out on the streets on the 28th for No Kings Day!
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Supreme Court to Hear Arguments on Trump Stripping of Protections From Haitian and Syrian Migrants Fleeing War
UN experts say both countries are still in the midst of extreme violence and that those with protected status would face dangers if forced to return.
Mar 16, 2026
The US Supreme Court will hear arguments next month over whether the Trump administration can strip legal status from migrants from Haiti and Syria who have been given temporary protection after fleeing war.
The court said on Monday that it would not grant the Trump administration emergency requests demanding that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for migrants from the two countries be immediately lifted.
For the time being, this means that more than 350,000 people from these two countries can continue to live and work legally in the United States until a ruling is reached. The order set oral arguments in the case to take place in the last week of April.
The court has previously sided with the Trump administration in its bid to strip similar protections from around 600,000 Venezuelan nationals, putting them at risk of deportation.
But Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that there is "one notable distinction" between the case surrounding Venezuelan migrants and those from Syria and Haiti.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is required to make its determinations about terminating TPS based on whether conditions in a specific country have improved enough that they would be safe to return. This includes consulting with other government departments, such as the State Department.
Unlike in the Venezuela case, Reichlin-Melnick said there is a "factual record showing that the Trump administration completely failed to do what is required by the law; actually consider the country conditions" in the case of Haiti or Syria.
He highlighted the opinion from US District Judge Ana C. Reyes, who last month ruled that the Trump administration's attempt to strip Haitians of their status was invalid because they'd "ignored Congress' requirement" to consult with other agencies to determine the conditions in the country, which has in recent years been ravaged by a gang war that killed more than 8,000 people in 2025 and has resulted in widespread instability and displacement in the country.
She noted that the only "consultation" conducted by the Trump administration was with a DHS staffer who emailed a State Department staffer, asking him to advise DHS on the matter on the same day a court first allowed them to re-review the status of Haitians.
The State staffer responded in less than an hour, stating definitively that "State believes that there would be no foreign policy concerns with respect to a change in the TPS statue [sic.] of Haiti." An attorney for the government later confirmed that "no other agency was consulted about the decision."
Moreover, the judge pointed to a social media post from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem three days after Haitians had their TPS status formally stripped, referring to them and other immigrants as "killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies," as well as "foreign invaders." This, the judge said, suggested the decision was made in part based on "racial animus."
Following a 10-day trip to Haiti, William O'Neill, the United Nations-designated expert on human rights in the country, said on Monday that the humanitarian situation there is "dire and catastrophic" and is probably worse now than when Haitians were initially granted TPS in the US back in 2010 following a devastating earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people and inflicted widespread destruction and disease.
If the roughly 300,000 Haitians currently living under TPS were suddenly deported, he said, many would have nowhere safe to go in the war-ravaged country.
"Where would they go?" he asked. "The Haitians who are currently internally displaced can barely survive now.”
In November, another federal judge blocked DHS from stripping Syrians of status for failing to adequately evaluate the conditions in that country, where President Bashar al-Assad had been overthrown less than a year prior, igniting further instability after more than a decade of chaotic civil war.
A report from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic on Friday described ongoing sectarian violence in the country, as well as arbitrary detentions, torture, and extrajudicial killings.
According to a September report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 10,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by fighting and extrajudicial executions since Assad's ouster in December 2024.
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