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Beware Republicans Purging Their Way to Midterm Victory
Republican secretaries of state are bragging about the millions of Americans whose right to vote they’re “purging” from the voting rolls this year. How are they getting away with it?
Oct 15, 2026
With virtually no mention or reporting in the corporate press, Republican-run states are again running the voter purge of millions that gave Donald Trump the White House in 2024.
On Wednesday morning, Reuters published a special report on the ways the Trump administration could “interfere” with the midterms, noting that a lawyer in Idaho’s Republican attorney general’s office bragged that his state had “taken a leading role in ensuring its voter registration list is purged….”
Yep, they used the word “purged.” They’re not even bothering with the polite terms anymore.
Your “right to a gun” is real but your “right to vote” is not, at least as long as corrupt Republicans control the Supreme Court and Congress.
And it’s not like the Republicans really believe the mythology they’re trying to sell the rest of us. The GOP-aligned, billionaire-funded Heritage Foundation spent over a decade doing a deep dive into every state looking for voter fraud and noncitizen voters, examining every American vote since 2000—more than a billion ballots cast nationwide—and found just 89 cases of noncitizen voters. In more than 20 years!
The libertarian Cato Institute did a similar analysis specifically on the 2020 election looking for any evidence that Trump’s claims were right that the election was “stolen” from him by “Mexicans” voting in the US election. They concluded the same thing:
There are likely many problems with America’s voting system and there is no doubt that a non-zero number of noncitizens illegally voted, but there is no good evidence that noncitizens voted illegally in large enough numbers to actually shift the outcome of elections or even change the number of electoral votes.
Nonetheless, Republicans keep promoting their lie that “illegals are voting” to justify massive purges of legal voters whose only crime is being Black, Hispanic, living in a college town, or being a big city dweller in a red state. A likely Democratic voter, in other words.
And let’s not forget that hypocrite Trump himself is all in on encouraging voter fraud; at his “midterm convention” in Dallas a few weeks ago he had thousands of people raise their hands and repeat an oath after him:
I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and cheat like hell...
And the Reuters story comes three weeks after six corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court let Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, run by former plumber Markwayne Mullin, turn an Immigration and Customs Enforcement immigration database called SAVE into a bulk voter-purging machine right in the middle of an election.
When Texas ran its registered voters through SAVE they purged thousands of people wrongly flagged as noncitizens; League of United Latin American Citizens is suing to try to get these actual citizens voting rights restored.
Which all raises a question that I’ve been asking on the air (and in my book The Hidden History of the War on Voting) for years:
Why is it that if a Republican governor wants to take away your gun he has to go to court, but if he wants to take away your vote he doesn’t even have to notify you?
You’ll recall that back in 2008 five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court declared that we all have an absolute constitutional “right” to own a gun, and if any state or city wants to violate that right they have to go before a judge and present evidence that you can contest and even appeal all the way to the Supreme Court itself.
When we have a “right” in America and our government wants to take it away, they have to provide notice, irrefutable evidence, a courtroom and neutral judge, a finding, and a right to appeal. It’s called “due process” and is established by the Fifth and 14th Amendments.
And in 1993, Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed a law establishing—without any ambiguity—that your vote is also a “right.” The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) lays it out clearly:
“[T]he right of citizens of the United States to vote is a fundamental right,” and that “it is the duty of the Federal, State, and local governments to promote the exercise of that right.”
And the phrase “right to vote” also appears five times in the Constitution itself, more than any other right that document names (guns get a single mention).
So, why is it that Republican secretaries of state are bragging about the millions of Americans whose right to vote they’re “purging” from the voting rolls this year? And how are they getting away with using junk-mail-appearing postcards to justify those purges?
In 1981, the Republican National Committee sent letters to Black and Hispanic voters in New Jersey to “verify” their voting status; they built a challenge list of 45,000 people and posted off-duty cops at polling places in predominantly Black and Democratic Newark and Trenton to check names to challenge those voters.
The Democratic Party sued against this practice, called “caging” in the direct mail industry, and won a court order blocking the Republicans from doing it. That consent decree expired in 2018, though, the same year that five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court told Ohio Secretary of State John Husted that he could resume the practice, but this time instead of the GOP paying for it the cost of mailing the postcards could be covered by Ohio taxpayers.
Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent pointed out the obvious fraud of it, noting that on average around 4% of Americans move their residence every year but:
The record shows that in 2012 Ohio identified about 1.5 million registered voters—nearly 20% of its 8 million registered voters—as likely ineligible to remain on the federal voter roll because they [allegedly] changed their residences.
Now the practice has spread to virtually every Republican-controlled state. They send out millions of postcards that look like junk mail, and if you don’t return one and skip an election, you’re officially purged. They don’t even have to notify you; you find out when you show up on election day and they either turn you away or give you a “provisional” ballot.
During and after the 2024 election, my radio and TV show’s phone lines were jammed with people—many from big cities in Ohio and Georgia—complaining that this had happened to them and they’d just discovered it when they tried to vote. None had been notified.
And, sure enough, the provisional ballots were the tell that exposes this GOP scam. The Election Assistance Commission’s (EAC) own survey of the 2024 election found that 1,736,209 Americans were shunted onto provisional ballots that year, and that the single most common reason was that the voter “did not appear on the list of eligible voters.”
Provisional ballots are often not counted at all, unless the voter shows up at the Secretary of State’s office before the final count to certify that they are, in fact, a legal citizen and voter.
Since the Husted decision by the Supreme Court allowing this bizarre practice, Republicans have put their corrupt system into hyperdrive. That same EAC federal survey found that GOP-controlled states sent out nearly 40 million “confirmation postcards” in just the two years between the 2022 and 2024 elections.
As a result, more than 21 million registered voters were stripped from the voting rolls in the months leading up to the 2024 election, and the most common justification was that they failed to return that junk-mail postcard.
Reporter and former statistics professor Greg Palast testified about this in federal court for the NAACP and, here on Hartmann Report, detailed how his team went through Georgia’s purge list person-by-person.
They found 198,351 Georgians who’d been cancelled even though they hadn’t moved and were still (mostly Black) citizens. In Wisconsin, where former Vice President Kamala Harris lost by 29,397 votes, Republicans had purged 166,433 voters from the lists. Pennsylvania had purged 360,132 people, about three times Trump’s margin of victory in that state.
His conclusion was straightforward:
Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.
And, if not for the mass purge of voters of color, if not for the mass disqualification of provisional and mail-in ballots, if not for the new mass “vigilante” challenges in swing states, Harris would have gained at least another 3,565,000 votes, topping Trump’s official popular vote tally by 1.2 million.
In other words, your “right to a gun” is real but your “right to vote” is not, at least as long as corrupt Republicans control the Supreme Court and Congress.
Imagine, for example, what would happen if your county sheriff started confiscating guns from people who failed to mail back a postcard. The right-wing press would be hysterical, and the court would strike it down in a New York minute.
So here’s where we are today. Georgia’s Brad Raffensperger (pronounced “Raff - ens - purger”) cancelled nearly 471,000 registrations last August, 6% of the entire state, the majority Democrats according to a Fair Fight analysis.
When Black Voters Matter asked for the records behind the purge, Raffensperger’s office handed over a stripped-down spreadsheet, and they had to sue him to try to get the names. Ohio’s Frank LaRose published a list of 352,389 names for cancellation just this past year, following a 2024 purge in which Ohio Democrats documented more than a thousand wrongly removed voters in Cuyahoga County alone.
Meanwhile Trump’s Justice Department has filed 31 lawsuits against states and the District of Columbia to seize their full voter files, including driver’s license and partial Social Security numbers, so the whole country can be run through his flawed SAVE purging database.
Republicans can’t win elections on their track record of taking away healthcare, gutting the Social Security Administration, and handing massive tax cuts to billionaires, so they send postcards into Black and Hispanic neighborhoods and college towns. The only thing that’s changed since Jim Crow, in other words, is the technology.
Democrats in Congress tried to fix this situation in 2022 with the Freedom to Vote: John R. Lewis Act. It passed the House and had a majority in the Senate, but every Republican in the Senate joined in a filibuster. If Sens. Kyrsen Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D- W. Va.) hadn’t stabbed us all in the back by voting with Republicans to sustain the filibuster, these crimes against our democracy would be explicitly illegal, as they already are in every other advanced nation in the world.
Fixing this—codifying our “right to vote” per the NVRA from 1993 and with new legislation—has to be right up there with overturning the other most-corrupt action to come from Republicans on the court, aka Citizens United.
But none of that will ever happen if Republicans continue to control the House and the Senate so Trump can further disintegrate our republic and turn us into his beloved Russia before the 2028 election.
So, vote!
And please share this article with your friends in red states, support independent journalism by subscribing to The Hartmann Report, and pass it on. They can’t purge all of us if we’re all watching.
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Don't Let the Billionaires and Elon Musk Buy Our Elections and Destroy Our Democracy
Not too long ago, Musk’s splurge would have been flatly illegal. A reckless Supreme Court and moribund Federal Election Commission took care of that. It should be made illegal again.
Oct 15, 2026
On a recent episode of the Bulwark podcast, journalist Ron Brownstein described the election as a contest between “the wave versus the wall.” The wave being voter anger and President Donald Trump’s plummeting popularity. The wall being structural impediments to voters’ voices, such as gerrymanders and the Republican Party’s stark spending advantage.
Now we know that much of that money comes from one man. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.
Elon Musk has contributed at least $366 million on behalf of Republicans since the last election. As The New York Times explained yesterday, “It means that when we talk about the Republicans’ considerable outside spending advantage over Democrats in this midterm, we are talking, in large part, about Musk’s personal contributions.”
Such a blatant attempt to buy the outcome of an election should be a big scandal. As is so often the case, the scandal is not what’s illegal, but what’s legal.
Not too long ago, Musk’s splurge would have been flatly illegal. A reckless Supreme Court and moribund Federal Election Commission took care of that. It should be made illegal again.
Musk’s spending is historic, and not in a good way. It is the biggest contribution during a campaign cycle by any human being in the history of American politics. (Billionaires Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer spent more in 2020, but on their own doomed presidential campaigns.)
At times, cautious donors have hedged bets, as lobbyists and PAC managers gave to lawmakers from both parties. Some years, small donors favor one side or another, evening things out in partisan terms.
But this year, big money has mobilized to defend Republican control. We have not had a major election where one party’s spending so dwarfs the other’s in at least a half century, likely since the 1972 election that brought us Watergate.
So much money sloshing around can produce odd or extravagant spending, such as expensive television commercials for a Texas Senate race running on football games and the ads boosting Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) that aired in Portland, Oregon, rather than Portland, Maine.
At this late date, more ads might yield minimal impact. That Musk’s contributions are paying for Republican get-out-the-vote operations may have a real impact in key states.
The Supreme Court led by John Roberts has told us that this is all glorious free speech, with campaign contributions “the whole point” of the First Amendment.
Elon Musk is a singular figure. We know of his destruction of foreign aid through DOGE, estimated to have cost hundreds of thousands of lives already around the world, his flamboyant celebrity, his status as the world’s first trillionaire.
Let’s not overthink it. The grubby reality is he’s a big federal contractor. According to The Washington Post, “Over the years, Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies, and tax credits, often at critical moments.”
Musk has massive investments in artificial intelligence through platforms such as Grok, just as political debate finally has erupted around that technology. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just named Musk, another billionaire, and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich to lead Project Meridian to reshape the use of technology in warfare.
Such a blatant attempt to buy the outcome of an election should be a big scandal. As is so often the case, the scandal is not what’s illegal, but what’s legal.
Once, there were limits on what could be donated to campaigns. No longer. The Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling, other court cases since then, and a Federal Election Commission that lacks even a quorum to act have deregulated money in politics. Operatives need no longer pretend these funds are “independent.” Musk’s spending is public, but this year at least $1.3 billion is dark money from undisclosed donors. (The candidates and officeholders know who they are. Just not voters.)
But candidates and lawmakers must do more than decry corruption. The aftermath of this election must lead to action, to reform that follows scandal.
The Brennan Center has proposed Nine Solutions for Political Corruption as part of our series, Solutions for a Stronger Democracy. One of them is especially relevant to the Musk news.
Statutes already purport to bar campaign gifts from federal contractors, but they are more loophole than law. In an article in Just Security published Wednesday, my colleague Eric Petry explains how an expanded and toughened contractor ban would work. It should cover, for example, not just the corporation that holds the contract but the major shareholders, parent company, and other “affiliated entities.” The ban should also extend to donations to inaugural funds, presidential libraries, and vanity projects like Trump’s White House ballroom. Above all, taxpayer money should go to the best contractors chosen under strict rules, not those who best curry favor.
The Watergate election and the scandals it produced led to major reforms, including contribution caps and public financing of presidential campaigns. That response came from lawmakers from both parties, many of them newly elected, demanding change. Ultimately it was voters who responded.
This year we’ve watched the effort to undermine the balloting, and fought back. One lesson may be: Why steal an election when you can buy it?
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Supreme Court Justices Skeptical of Big Oil Bid to 'Escape Trial for Climate Deception'
“The fossil fuel industry’s conduct has become some of the most harmful and culpable in human history," said one campaigner. "Eventually, it will be held to account.”
Oct 05, 2026
The US Supreme Court on Monday appeared skeptical of efforts by ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy to prevent a Colorado climate liability lawsuit from going to trial, with justices across the ideological spectrum questioning the fossil fuel companies’ arguments for shutting down the case before evidence of their alleged deception can be heard.
The case—Suncor Energy Inc. v. County Commissioners of Boulder County—could determine the fate of nearly 60 similar lawsuits filed by states, counties, cities, and Indigenous tribes seeking to hold fossil fuel companies financially accountable for climate-related harms.
Boulder sued ExxonMobil and Suncor in 2018, alleging that the companies knew for decades about the dangers associated with burning fossil fuels while misleading the public about those risks. The city and county seek compensation for costs associated with wildfires, drought, flooding, extreme heat, and other climate impacts.
The companies, backed by the Trump administration, argue that federal law preempts the state law claims because greenhouse gas pollution crosses state and national borders. The Colorado Supreme Court ruled 5-2 in May 2025 that the climate lawsuit against ExxonMobil and Suncor could proceed under state law.
Today at the Supreme Court, my home town of Boulder, Colorado is going head-to-head against ExxonMobil in a case that could determine the future of climate litigation and holding Big Oil accountable for the toll of its harms and lies.Boulder County residents who have lost homes and health spoke.
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— Antonia Juhasz (@antoniajuhasz.bsky.social) October 5, 2026 at 7:55 AM
Kannon Shanmugam, an attorney for the companies, contended in oral arguments Monday that climate accountability lawsuits "reflect an all-too-regrettable trend of trying to resolve political issues in court rather than in the political branches where they belong.”
However, Chief Justice John Roberts appeared unconvinced that the interstate argument means that state courts can't consider climate claims.
“There are a lot of familiar situations where conduct outside of a state has broad effects among other states,” the conservative justice said, “and yet we allow state courts in a particular state to bring litigation that affects that.”
Justice Elena Kagan, one of the court's three liberals, also pressed the companies over their claim that federalism prevents Boulder’s lawsuit from proceeding. Kagan repeatedly demanded a legal foundation for the argument, asking: “Where’s the text for that? Where’s the support for that? Where’s the precedent for that?”
Kagan also compared the case to successful lawsuits against tobacco and opioid companies, calling the fossil fuel cases “Chapter 3” in that legal history.
“This is the same kind of lawsuit against the same kind of actors for the same kind of harm,” she said. “And I guess I’m not understanding how this one would be preempted, and the other is not?”
Climate defenders rallied outside the Supreme Court Monday as the justices heard oral arguments in the case.
Corey Riday-White, legal director at the Center for Climate Integrity, said in a statement Monday that "Big Oil’s desperation to escape trial for climate deception is still in search of a legal justification. Justices across the ideological spectrum asked good, skeptical questions that poked holes in Big Oil’s attempt to stop Boulder’s case before it can go to trial."
“Boulder’s case is about holding corporations accountable for deceptive conduct, and the people of Boulder should have their day in court to present the evidence of Exxon and Suncor’s deception," he added.
Kathy Mulvey, director of the Fossil Fuel Accountability program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), said Monday that “today’s oral arguments in Suncor v. Boulder were the latest act in Big Oil’s desperate attempt to preempt state tort lawsuits and prevent evidence of the fossil fuel industry’s campaign of deception from being heard in court."
"ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy’s efforts to evade accountability hinge on misrepresenting Boulder’s lawsuit as an attempt to regulate emissions," she stressed.
“This last-ditch effort before the Supreme Court is part of a coordinated, well-resourced push to shut down fossil fuel accountability efforts across the country," Mulvey noted. "So far, Big Oil has not achieved its top federal lobbying priority—a bill to grant the industry sweeping immunity from climate laws and lawsuits such as Boulder’s."
“Communities deserve to have their day in court," she added. "The Supreme Court should let this case be heard on its merits in Colorado, and Congress must not stand in the way by gifting Big Oil a get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“Boulder’s case is about holding corporations accountable for deceptive conduct."
In August, UCS and other experts filed an amicus brief in the case "offering a historical account of ExxonMobil’s and Suncor Energy’s concealment and denial of the hazards they knew would result from the normal use of their fossil fuel products."
The brief notes that in 1965, "Frank Ikard, then president of the American Petroleum Institute, informed the organization’s member companies—including Exxon and Suncor’s predecessor Sun Oil—that then-President Lyndon Johnson’s Science Advisory Committee had concluded continued fossil fuel combustion could produce significant climatic changes by the end of the 20th century."
"Ikard warned industry leaders the report would generate significant public concern, noting that ‘there is still time to save the world’s peoples from the catastrophic consequence of pollution, but time is running out,'" the brief added.
In 1977, an Exxon senior scientist briefed company leadership that the “general scientific agreement that the most likely manner in which mankind is influencing the global climate is through carbon dioxide release from the burning of fossil fuels.”
Exxon then conducted rigorous research on the matter, and concluded in a 1982 internal document that there was “little doubt” that atmospheric carbon dioxide was rising due to fossil fuel burning and that the resulting greenhouse effect “would warm the Earth’s surface, causing changes in climate affecting atmospheric and ocean temperatures, rainfall patterns, soil moisture, and … potentially melting the polar ice caps.”
Despite this, starting in the late 1980s, Exxon—later ExxonMobil—publicly stressed uncertainties, questioned models, and supported organizations such as the Global Climate Coalition that challenged the need for climate action.
Local governments sued to hold Big Oil accountable. So on Monday, with backing from the Trump administration, fossil fuel companies like Suncor will ask the Supreme Court to let them off the hook for their lies. Why? Because giant corporations know they have an ally in the corrupt Roberts majority.
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— Demand Justice (@wedemandjustice.bsky.social) October 2, 2026 at 9:28 AM
David Arkush, director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen's Climate Program, said Monday that “this case is about whether local communities experiencing devastating climate harms should get their day in court against Big Oil companies that spread climate deception."
"The fossil fuel industry has been going to extraordinary lengths to attack these climate cases, not just asking the Supreme Court to end the lawsuits, but also pushing Congress and state legislatures to grant fossil fuel companies immunity from all climate-related liability," Arkush noted.
"The current offensive isn’t just about defeating the cases. It’s also about preventing the public from learning the extent and severity of the industry’s wrongdoing," he continued. "It’s about fossil fuel CEOs’ profound fear of sitting in front of a jury of 12 Americans and trying to defend their companies’ deceptive conduct—because they know it’s indefensible."
“Regardless of how the Supreme Court rules in Suncor, it’s hard to imagine these companies can bury the evidence and escape accountability indefinitely," Arkush added. "The fossil fuel industry’s conduct has become some of the most harmful and culpable in human history. Eventually, it will be held to account.”
The justices are expected to issue a ruling by the end of June. Far-right Justice Samuel Alito—who holds stock in fossil fuel companies facing dozens of lawsuits that could be affected by the Suncor decision—last week recused himself from the case, leaving his eight colleagues to decide it, and raising the prospect of a 4-4 split that would leave the Colorado Supreme Court’s ruling intact.
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The Supreme Court's Latest Shadow-Docket Ruling Could Help the GOP Win the Midterms
Standing alone, neither the expanded SAVE program nor the citizenship lists may be capable of changing the outcome of the midterms. But they do not stand alone.
Oct 03, 2026
Just when it seemed the Supreme Court might be prepared to stop Donald Trump from sabotaging the midterm elections, the six Republican justices who dominate the court handed the president a potentially far-reaching victory on September 25 with another ruling on its emergency “shadow” docket. The ruling in Department of Homeland Security v. League of Women Voters permits the administration and Republican-led states to use a newly expanded federal database to review state voter lists, overturning a lower-court decision that had concluded the database could not be used for the midterms because it violates federal privacy laws and the Administrative Procedure Act.
The Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements program was created in 1986 to allow federal, state, and local government agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of noncitizens applying for public benefits, relying on records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the Department of Justice (DOJ), and the Department of State. However, in March 2025, Trump promulgated Executive Order 14248 (titled “Preserving and Protecting the Integrity of American Elections”), that revamped the program to permit state and local authorities to verify the citizenship status of registered voters so they could purge noncitizens from the rolls—a purpose the SAVE program was never intended to serve. The executive order also directed the Social Security Administration (SSA) to make its records available to the DHS for that purpose. Two months later, the DHS, acting on its own, launched a modified SAVE program that allows state and local authorities to conduct unlimited bulk searches of multiple individuals at once.
In September 2025, the League of Women Voters, together with its affiliates in Texas, Louisiana, and Virginia, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center sued the federal government, claiming that the expanded SAVE program violated the Social Security Act, the federal Privacy Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. On June 22 of this year, District Court Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who sits in Washington, DC, blocked the revamped SAVE program from being used for the midterm elections. The Justice Department, led by Solicitor General D. John Sauer, took its case to the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, and, after failing to secure relief there, turned to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, where the administration has enjoyed great success.
In one Texas county alone, searches conducted under the database returned an astounding error rate of 21%. There is no reason to believe the master citizenship lists will be any more reliable.
The high court granted Sauer’s request with a seven-page unsigned “per curiam” ruling, holding that the plaintiffs’ claims about the expanded database lacked merit, and that “the Federal Government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.” In their dissent, the court’s three Democrats argued that the use of the database will result in voter disenfranchisement.
On its face, as some commentators have noted, the court’s ruling appears limited in scope because the National Voter Registration Act (NRVA) of 1993 prohibits states from conducting “systematic” purges of registered voters in the 90-day “quiet period” prior to elections. If the terms of the NRVA are faithfully and literally applied, this means that states can utilize the expanded SAVE program to conduct only “individualized” (one at a time) citizenship checks of prospective voters in the weeks remaining before the midterms. Use of the SAVE program is also voluntary, as states are not compelled but only urged to use the system.
The problem is that neither the NRVA nor the Supreme Court’s shadow docket ruling defines what is meant by “systematic” purges, and that individual purges can easily be aggregated to have a mass impact. In a post for Democracy Docket, reporter Yunior Rivas explained the problem this way:
Now, a crucial voter protection [under the NRVA] could hinge on whether the Supreme Court [in subsequent cases that will surely come its way before the midterms] wants to narrow the definition of “systematic” as applied to purges. And there’s reason to fear that it does [ … by allowing states to] run thousands of voters through SAVE and then evade the NVRA’s quiet period by treating each resulting citizenship challenge as an “individualized” inquiry.
Rivas also observed that the Supreme Court’s shadow docket decision does not prevent the Trump administration from preparing master citizenship lists for each state, which GOP-led states could use to purge unlimited numbers of individual voters without even using the SAVE program.
In fact, those citizenship lists are being compiled pursuant to Executive Order 14399, which directs the DHS, SSA, and State Department to create lists of all “confirmed” citizens residing in every state who are entitled to vote. Once again, states are not required by the order to use the lists to purge their voting rolls, but the order stipulates that election officials in states that permit noncitizens to vote will be referred to the DOJ for possible criminal prosecution.
On September 14, the Supreme Court handed Trump a rare shadow-docket defeat, preventing the US Postal Service from interfering with mail-in balloting. But that decision did not address the legality of the citizenship lists. The legality of the lists is currently pending in litigation brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the public-interest groups Protect Democracy and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, but no decision has been rendered.
Meanwhile, the clock is ticking.
According to the DOJ, 27 states, including Texas, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, and Indiana, have agreed to use the expanded SAVE database, which in practice has proven to be plagued by serious mistakes. In one Texas county alone, searches conducted under the database returned an astounding error rate of 21%. There is no reason to believe the master citizenship lists will be any more reliable.
Standing alone, neither the expanded SAVE program nor the citizenship lists may be capable of changing the outcome of the midterms. But they do not stand alone. They are part and parcel of a multifaceted plan to sabotage the elections, engineered by a president with dictatorial aspirations and a core of committed quislings determined to keep him and the MAGA movement in power through the midterms and beyond.
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Big Oil Fears the Evidence of Its Climate Lies
Fossil fuel companies are desperate to escape trial in climate deception lawsuits. The Supreme Court should not shield them from accountability.
Oct 02, 2026
No one knows how the US Supreme Court will rule in Suncor v. Boulder, the case that will kick off the court’s fall term next week and will likely decide whether the city and county of Boulder, Colorado, will be able to put oil giants ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy on trial for deceiving the public for decades about the climate harms of fossil fuels.
But one thing that can be said with certainty is that Big Oil and the fossil fuel industry are absolutely terrified of facing cases like Boulder’s at trial, where state and local governments will be able to present evidence of Big Oil’s decades-long climate deception to a jury. Big Oil’s own lawyers have admitted that the companies face “massive monetary liability” from the dozens of climate deception cases against them, and that stopping communities from having their day in court is a “big priority… for the entire industry.”
That’s because the evidence of Big Oil’s climate lies is overwhelming—and the discovery process in climate deception lawsuits could produce even more damaging proof that companies like Exxon have knowingly fueled climate chaos for decades while concealing the harm, undermining the science, and obstructing every effort to address the problem. As the Supreme Court prepares to hear Exxon’s pleas to escape trial in just one of the dozens of climate deception lawsuits, the Center for Climate Integrity has released a newly updated collection of 101 internal industry documents and other pieces of evidence that the fossil fuel industry is desperate to stop a jury of Americans from seeing.
All Boulder and other communities are asking Big Oil to do is to stop lying and pay for the harm their lies have caused. It speaks volumes about Big Oil companies that they’re going to such lengths to avoid telling the truth and paying to clean up the mess they’ve made.
Climate Fraud 101: Big Oil's Climate Deception Explained in 101 Documents, 1957-2026 shows how fossil fuel companies helped shape the emerging field of climate science beginning in the 1950s. By the late 1970s and early 80s, Exxon scientists were warning of “catastrophic” climate impacts if the world did not shift away from fossil fuels. Over the course of the 1980s, the oil giant and others came to understand that climate change posed two profound existential risks: one to “civilisation” itself, and the second to their business model, because the only way to “avoid the problem” was by “sharply curtailing the use of fossil fuels.”
Big Oil then chose their own interests over humanity’s and launched the most consequential corporate deception campaign in history to “emphasize the uncertainty” in climate science before measurable impacts became detectable and undeniable. By the 1990s, the oil and gas majors responded to increased public awareness of climate change by publicly contradicting what their own scientists had been telling them for decades, casting doubt on well-established climate science and obstructing efforts to mitigate the impacts of global warming. Then, once the problem became undeniable, Big Oil and the fossil fuel industry shifted to lie about the solutions—undermining the urgently needed transition to renewables while claiming they could make dirty fossil fuels more climate friendly through false solutions like natural gas and carbon capture and storage (CCS).
Throughout these decades, the impacts of the climate crisis became worse and worse for communities across the globe, with wildfires, floods, droughts, extreme heat, and other climate damages becoming more deadly and destructive as a result of the industry’s obstruction.
On October 5, Exxon and Suncor will beg the Supreme Court to shield them from having to face the evidence of their wrongdoing in a Colorado court. But the fossil fuel industry’s quest to escape accountability is much larger. They’re desperately lobbying Congress and state legislatures to give them outright immunity from climate lawsuits and place them above the law entirely. They’re attacking climate science and efforts to educate judges through a vast network of fossil-funded front groups. They’re enlisting the Trump administration to sue states that dare bring legal action against oil companies. And they’re flooding right-wing echo chambers with ridiculous fear mongering arguments that it's not our continued reliance on fossil fuels but climate deception lawsuits—which have not even gone to trial yet—that are blame for high gas prices and threats to our national security.
All Boulder and other communities are asking Big Oil to do is to stop lying and pay for the harm their lies have caused. It speaks volumes about Big Oil companies that they’re going to such lengths to avoid telling the truth and paying to clean up the mess they’ve made. Conservative and progressive legal scholars alike have explained why Exxon and Suncor’s arguments to escape Boulder’s lawsuit at this early stage should fail.
The Supreme Court should not shield these companies from having to face the evidence of their wrongdoing. We should all agree that we are still a nation of laws—of, by, and for the people—not a nation beholden to the interests of oil executives.
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If the Voice of Voters Is Muffled This Year, Blame the Roberts Court
Daunting structural obstacles will make it harder for voters to be heard during the upcoming midterms, and we can trace many of these back to the Supreme Court and its destructive rulings on democracy over the past two decades.
Oct 01, 2026
Will this be a “wave” election, sweeping new people into power? In some ways, it already is.
Due to retirements and primary defeats in safe districts, there will be 99 new members of Congress next year—and that’s before accounting for any seats that change party hands. A powerful anti-incumbent fervor pervades both parties.
Throughout history, there have been times when voters spoke loudly. The 1974 Watergate election, in which Democrats won 49 new seats. The 1994 “Republican Revolution” that made Newt Gingrich speaker after gaining 54 seats. The 2018 election, the first time voters rejected Donald Trump’s chaos. Polls do not suggest a swing of that magnitude. Democrats are lagging in popularity, even as voters recoil from Trump’s Republicans. But voter sentiment is not the only reason less may change than before.
Even if the Supreme Court does no further damage, it will have designed a dystopian political system where competition is scarce, billionaires dominate spending, and voters of color have little protection against abuse.
Daunting structural obstacles will make it harder for voters to be heard. We can trace many of these back to the Supreme Court and its destructive rulings on democracy over the past two decades. If the voice of voters is muffled this year, blame the Roberts Court.
To start, there are far too few competitive congressional districts. In 2019, in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Roberts Court refused to police gerrymandering. Then Louisiana v. Callais earlier this year finally demolished the Voting Rights Act and let Southern states eliminate seats held by Black lawmakers.
Political scientist Peter Miller of the Brennan Center for Justice explained it this way: “About 1 in 10 Americans are in a new US House district this year. Mid-decade redistricting in nine states ahead of the elections in November has scrambled the House elections (an 11th-hour attempt to redraw the map in Missouri was rejected by the US Supreme Court for the third and hopefully final time just last week). All of this effort to gerrymander the maps, however, may come to nothing as it is becoming clear that the two parties have fought the redistricting wars to a draw.”
But even amid electoral upheaval, nearly all seats are reliably Democratic or Republican. Political scientist Larry Sabato calculates there are only 21 competitive seats this year. The Cook Political Report counts 22 toss-up seats.
The Supreme Court has also demolished the laws that curbed big money in politics. Today big donors wield greater power than in memory. The top 20 donors have already spent $1.2 billion this year—all but two of them helping Republicans—and that figure is from before the start of the general election campaign. Elon Musk alone has already spent over $90 million. And while donors like Musk can be identified, much of this funding consists of “dark money,” where the identity of the donor is obscured.
It can all blur. But until 2010’s Citizens United and the cases that followed in lower courts, all this spending would have been flatly, explicitly illegal.
Then there are laws, big and small, by which states restrict the right to vote. The Supreme Court has not reversed a state voter suppression law this century. Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 first gutted the Voting Rights Act. Since then, our research shows, the turnout gap between white and nonwhite voters has grown all over the country. And it has grown at twice the rate in the places once covered by preclearance under the Voting Rights Act. That means hundreds of thousands fewer votes are expected this year than might have been the case otherwise.
Generally, the court has refrained from injecting itself into election contests. In 2020, after all, the justices refused to countenance Trump’s bid to overturn the election.
This year, the court’s record is mixed. Encouragingly, two weeks ago the justices upheld a ruling that blocked a Postal Service rule on mail voting. A different decision would have been a disaster, since 1 in 3 Americans votes with a mail ballot.
But on Friday, the justices let the administration use the “SAVE program.” This is a notoriously inaccurate and incomplete tool to verify citizenship status, which the Trump administration wants to use as a prod to purge voter rolls. The ruling will likely not affect this election. But this all augurs continued legal battles over voting in years to come, especially as the next presidential contest looms.
We want the justices, mostly, to stay out, and let state and local election officials do their work of protecting voters. At the same time, if politicians try to steal the election, crying “fraud” and “rigged,” we may need the Supreme Court to step up. Let’s hope it never faces that test.
The court’s term begins next Monday. It will hear major cases on the public funding of private religious schools, environmental laws, and more. Much of the most important work of the term has been done already with the emergency rulings on the “shadow docket” policing the elections.
But even if the Supreme Court does no further damage, it will have designed a dystopian political system where competition is scarce, billionaires dominate spending, and voters of color have little protection against abuse.
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'Inhumane, Barbaric, Torturous': Christa Pike Survives Twice-Botched Execution in Tennessee
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.”
Oct 01, 2026
The botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee on Wednesday night was met with disgust and outrage by death penalty opponents who have long argued that not only is murder by the state morally wrong, but the government's inability to carry out such punishments humanely has been shown time and time again to result in horrific human rights violations and barbaric scenes of cruelty inside the nation's prison walls.
Pike, sentenced to death in Tennessee over the 1995 murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer, survived two otherwise lethal injections of pentobarbital on Wednesday while strapped to a gurney by prison officials at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville.
"Tonight the State of Tennessee once again failed to carry out a lawful execution," said Pike's attorneys—Randy Spivey and Kelly Gleason from the TN Office of the Post Conviction Defender, and Stephen Ferrell and Luke Ihnen from Federal Defender Services of Eastern Tennessee—in a statement late Wednesday.
"We take no pleasure in being right," her lawyer's continued, "but the concerns raised by Ms. Pike proved to be true: difficult vein access, blown veins, degraded pentobarbital, no emergency medical care available when things inevitably go wrong, all under a protocol that remains veiled in secrecy. Christa is being treated at a nearby hospital. We have not been informed as to her condition."
Pike's legal team said she remained alive after two rounds of the lethal injection, with witnesses reporting confusion after the first dose resulted in Pike raising her head to speak to those who administered the drug and falling into a deep sleep, but audibly snoring and still alive, after the second.
“This event is the worst we’ve seen and unlike any other botched execution in the modern era,” said Robin Maher, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. “There is no precedent.”
It was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, reports The New York Times. According to the newspaper:
The apparent failure came after dueling court rulings delayed the execution of [Pike] by about nine hours. The state had raced to go ahead with the execution before the day ended and to avoid having to reschedule.
In a pair of emergency legal filings, Ms. Pike’s lawyers said that while two syringes of pentobarbital, the lethal drug, had been administered, Ms. Pike had not lost consciousness. She still had a heartbeat, they said, and was audibly snoring.
The execution of Pike, who court records show was subject to pervasive abuse throughout her childhood and was only 18 years old when she carried out the brutal crime, had been put on hold earlier Wednesday only to be reinstated by the US Supreme Court later in the day.
Amnesty International USA condemned the treatment of Pike and called for an end to all capital punishment in the United States.
"Tennessee’s botched attempt to execute Christa Pike, as witnessed by her attorneys, demonstrates why the death penalty truly is the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment," the group said. "All execution methods are inhumane and unacceptable. The death penalty must be abolished, everywhere."
Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee announced after the botched execution that the state’s other remaining execution for 2026 would be put on hold and ordered “a comprehensive, third-party review to determine exactly what occurred” in the attempted killing of Pike.
Pike, said human rights advocate Evad HaAm, "survived a completed lethal-injection attempt. That is not a stay. It is a botched execution."
While Pike's current medical status and chance for survival remain unknown, further attempts by the state to kill her, he argued, "would violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment."
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Federal Appellate Court Halts Tennessee's Planned Execution of Christa Pike
"So much of Ms. Pike's experience reflects widespread and systemic failures that surface in death penalty cases," said an Amnesty International USA researcher, urging an end to capital punishment "in Tennessee and beyond."
Sep 30, 2026
A federal appellate court on Wednesday morning temporarily blocked Tennessee from executing Christa Pike, as witnesses had already gathered at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville for the state's first execution of a woman in centuries.
A panel from the US Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ruled 2-1 to halt the state-sanctioned killing, after Republican Gov. Bill Lee and the US Supreme Court declined to do so. The 50-year-old, found guilty of murdering Colleen Slemmer in 1995, when Pike was 18, could still be executed on Wednesday if the nation's top court allows it.
Republican state Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti's office said: "We will continue to advocate for the lawfully imposed sentence as the courts work through this technical issue. It is common in capital cases for the defense to raise last-minute objections following decades of litigation in numerous courts. We are asking the Supreme Court of the United States to lift the stay."
Judges Jane Stranch and Karen Moore, both appointees of Democratic presidents, concluded early Wednesday that "a short stay of execution" is in order due to arguments related to the sexual abuse Pike suffered as a child—which clinical psychologist Dr. Bethany Brand described as "truly extreme," writing in 2023 that "the level of trauma she was subjected to as a preschooler through her 18th year, when she was arrested, is almost impossible to grasp because it is so severe."
As the 6th Circuit's order details, Pike points out "that the state recently reversed its litigation position that she is a liar who fabricated sexual abuse. Pike contends that the state's concession of her history of child sexual abuse and rape 'erodes the foundation' of her state court proceedings. Pike ties this erosion to defects in the federal court proceedings because... the district court was required to give strong deference to the state court's findings of facts."
"Pike also cites scholarly authority supporting her argument that the state's representations about her history of sexual abuse tainted the state court proceedings and the subsequent federal ones by introducing damaging stereotypes of survivors of sexual assault," the filing says.
Pike was "subjected to drugs and alcohol while she was still in her mother's womb" and "first sexually abused by her grandmother's boyfriend, who would orally rape her before she was in kindergarten," the Nashville Banner's Steven Hale recently reported, citing Brand's findings. "After living through periods of physical and emotional torment by extended family members and one of her mother's husbands, Pike was later raped by a known predatory neighbor."
"She was hospitalized at the age of 12 after overdosing on pills during a suicide attempt," then sexually assaulted by one of her mother's boyfriends, who had "moved into the family's home and brought with him violence and depravity," Hale continued, noting that the perpetrators who abused Pike often faced limited consequences. "When she was 17 in January 1994, Pike was sexually assaulted again, by a man who saw her walking to the store in Carrboro, North Carolina."
Hale was among the journalists at the prison in Nashville on Wednesday morning. He said on social media that "I'm told the state has until midnight to carry out the execution. Still unclear what happens next, but prison officials are bringing those of us witnessing the execution inside now to be ready."
The journalist added just after noon Central Time that "prison officials have brought us back outside now while we continue to wait for news from the Supreme Court."
Following the 6th Circuit's decision, the ACLU—whose Capital Punishment Project works to repeal the death penalty in the United States—took to social media, urging the public to "tell Gov. Lee to respect the court's decision and call off her execution NOW."
"Gov. Lee's 615-741-2001 mailbox is full—contacting him through this form is the quickest way to reach his office," the legal group explained, sharing a link to the relevant page on the state government's website.
Lee had said Monday that "after deliberate consideration of Christa Gail Pike's request for clemency, and after a thorough review of the case, I am upholding the sentence of the state of Tennessee and do not plan to intervene."
Attorneys for Pike—Stephen Ferrell, Kelly Gleason, and Randy Spivey—responded that they were "deeply saddened and heartbroken by Gov. Lee's decision to deny clemency," emphasizing that "throughout her childhood, Christa was failed by people and institutions that should have shown her care and meaningful intervention."
"The 18-year-old girl suffering from severe mental illness and near-debilitating trauma no longer exists," the lawyers said. "Christa is a 50-year-old remorseful woman who understands her actions, receives proper treatment for her mental illness, and provides for and guides fellow incarcerated women."
"With this decision, the state of Tennessee is ignoring what both science and our legal system have decided: An 18-year-old brain is not an adult brain, and 18 is too young to face execution. This decision also leaves unanswered vital questions about Tennessee’s execution protocol," they added. "We will continue to support Christa through every remaining avenue and advocate for a system that is transparent for the people of Tennessee."
Among the organizations that have pressured Lee to block the execution is Amnesty International USA, whose deputy director of research, Justin Mazzola, recently said that "so much of Ms. Pike's experience reflects widespread and systemic failures that surface in death penalty cases."
"She endured profound abuse and trauma as a child and had serious mental disabilities that were never adequately addressed nor treated," he highlighted. "Due to inadequate legal representation, these issues were not fully presented to the jury. Knowing all that, it is unthinkable that Gov. Lee would even consider moving forward with this execution."
Mazzola—whose group opposes capital punishment under all circumstances—also stressed that "this issue is about more than one person. Amnesty International members are speaking out because the use of the death penalty remains a human rights failure. As its use continues to decline globally, the United States remains an outlier. It is well past time to abolish the death penalty once and for all, in Tennessee and beyond."
The US National Domestic Violence Hotline can be reached at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), by texting "START" to 88788, or through chat at thehotline.org. RAINN's National Sexual Assault Hotline can be reached at 1-800-656-HOPE (4673) or by texting "HOPE" to 64673. Both offer 24/7, free, and confidential support. DomesticShelters.org has a list of global and national resources.
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Supreme Court OKs Third-Country Deportations—For Now—Despite 'Cascade of Human Rights Violations'
“The harms caused by this US government scheme are no longer hypothetical,” UN experts stressed. “For migrants in situations of particular vulnerability, the consequences can be deadly.”
Sep 29, 2026
The US Supreme Court on Tuesday temporarily cleared the way for the Trump administration to resume rapidly deporting immigrants to countries other than their own, even as United Nations experts warned that the policy is putting deportees at heightened risk of human rights violations.
In a one-page order, the justices—who did not rule on the legality of the policy—stayed a lower court ruling that required the administration to give people facing a so-called third-country deportation notice wan opportunity to raise concerns that they could face persecution or torture in the destination country. The court agreed to hear the administration's appeal, with oral arguments scheduled for December.
The high court said it will consider whether the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts has jurisdiction over the case, whether it had authority to issue classwide relief, and whether the Trump administration's policy violates federal immigration law, the Constitution's due process clause, the Foreign Affairs Reform and Restructuring Act, or the Convention Against Torture.
The court's three liberal justices—Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—said they would have rejected the administration's request to lift the lower-court order.
NEW: The Supreme Court, over the objections of the 3 liberal justices, grants a stay in the D.V.D. litigation, authorizing the Trump admin to resume third country removals without any notice to people being sent to countries they've never been to.The Court also agrees to hear the case in December.
[image or embed]
— Aaron Reichlin-Melnick (@reichlinmelnick.bsky.social) September 29, 2026 at 12:16 PM
US Attorney General Todd Blanch responded to the order on social media, posting, "Now for the second time, SCOTUS just granted our stay in conducting all third-country removals of illegal aliens."
"Again, this is entirely lawful and a critical tool for immigration enforcement," he added. "Unlike the lower court, SCOTUS waited to hear from both sides before making the decision."
Tuesday's ruling came one day after two dozen United Nations human rights experts urged the United States and 35 countries that have entered deportation agreements with the Trump administration to halt the practice, which is "triggering [a] cascade of human rights violations including torture."
“These migrants are being transferred to countries or territories with which they have no ties, which can be a traumatizing and isolating experience that compounds harms already suffered,” the experts said, warning that they face “further violence or discrimination based on gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or human rights advocacy.”
“The harms caused by this US government scheme are no longer hypothetical,” the experts stressed. “For migrants in situations of particular vulnerability, the consequences can be deadly.”
The UN experts' warning followed an urgent appeal issued earlier this month by Amnesty International that two men deported to Equatorial Guinea under a secret deal—one of them Egyptian and the other Eritrean—were at risk of being tortured in detention in the African nation, which has an abysmal human rights record. Amnesty said that the men had already been beaten and violently arrested by police after arriving in the country.
The Trump administration has deported roughly 25,000 people to more than two dozen countries under often secret agreements and at a cost to taxpayers of tens of millions of dollars. Most have been sent to Mexico, while others have been transported to countries including Liberia, Guyana, and Equatorial Guinea.
The Supreme Court has already intervened in a related case involving eight men whom the administration sought to deport to war-torn South Sudan, although only one was originally from that country. In that case, Sotomayor warned that the policy exposed “thousands to the risk of torture or death.”
The justices' latest order will remain in effect until the court issues its judgment in the case. Until then, the administration can resume the expedited removals that the lower court had sought to restrict.
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Alito Recusal in Landmark Climate Case Called 'Bare Minimum' Given Big Oil Tactics
Oil companies warned Alito that if the Supreme Court didn't exempt them from state climate lawsuits, it could adversely affect his personal investments.
Sep 29, 2026
Following years of pressure from critics who called out his severe conflicts of interest, the right-wing Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito has recused himself from a major climate case on Monday, just days before the lawsuit was scheduled to be heard.
Next week, the court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a case nearly a decade in the making that could determine whether oil giants can face billions of dollars worth of lawsuits for climate-related damages and misleading the public about the planet-heating effects of fossil fuels.
A coalition of environmental groups and anti-corruption watchdogs has pushed for Alito to recuse himself from the case because the justice personally holds stock in ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66—companies that face around two dozen climate lawsuits that could be directly affected by his ruling.
As Hannah Story Brown, the deputy research director on climate and governance issues at the Revolving Door Project, explained back in 2023, the Suncor case was promoted strategically by oil companies to allow Alito to get around his oil investments.
"While most of the lawsuits were brought against a dozen or so different fossil fuel companies, the Colorado municipalities are only suing ExxonMobil and Suncor Energy—the stocks of which Alito does not own," she wrote for The American Prospect. "This presents an opportunity to get around Alito’s likely recusal from considering the other four petitions to which ConocoPhillips and Phillips 66 are parties."
In May, a Supreme Court spokesperson said Alito had declined to recuse because he had no financial interest in either company that is a party to the Boulder case and had been advised by court counsel that recusal was not required.
However, in September, just weeks before oral arguments, the group Consumer Watchdog found that shareholders, including Alito, had received warnings from the two companies that climate lawsuits could adversely impact their businesses and, in turn, his investments. Oil industry groups, meanwhile, told the court in briefs that a ruling in the Suncor case could make those lawsuits go away.
“Justice Alito has a direct and documented financial stake in the outcome of Suncor v. Boulder," explained Alexandra Nagy, Organizing Director of Consumer Watchdog. "Under the Supreme Court’s own Code of Conduct, Alito should recuse.”
Federal law expressly states that judges—including Supreme Court justices—must disqualify themselves from cases where their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned." However, there has historically been a lack of enforcement for Supreme Court justices, because there is no higher court to rule on whether those ethics rules have been violated.
In 2023, following revelations about Justice Clarence Thomas' receipt of gifts and travel from billionaire donor Harlan Crow, the Supreme Court adopted its own nonbinding ethics code.
Also informing that ethics policy were revelations about Alito, who was found to have taken a luxury fishing vacation with GOP billionaire investor Paul Singer, whose hedge fund has invested billions of dollars in Suncor. Singer’s hedge fund had business before the court at least 10 times, during which Alito did not recuse himself.
The justices ultimately still determine whether to disqualify themselves from cases, and critics have derided the ethics code as a “PR stunt.”
On Monday, however, the clerk of the Supreme Court sent a single-sentence notice to the parties in Suncor v. Boulder that "Justice Alito has determined that he will not continue to participate in this case." It provided no further explanation for the justice's decision.
In a post on social media, the Revolving Door Project called it “bad news for Exxon, and a win for the power of public pressure calling out the blatant corruption" of the court led by Chief Justice John Roberts, adding that the group had been “calling for [Alito’s] recusal for YEARS.”
Kathy Mulvey, director of the Fossil Fuel Accountability Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), also celebrated the decision but emphasized that it should never have taken this long to come to fruition.
“Justice Alito’s recusal in this case should’ve been a foregone conclusion," Mulvey said. "While we welcome today's announcement as a step toward a fairer, more impartial process for all parties involved, Justice Alito's decision is the bare minimum we should expect from a justice on our nation’s highest court."
UCS filed an amicus curiae brief before the court last month documenting what it described as ExxonMobil and Suncor’s “concealment and denial of the hazards they knew would result from the normal use of their fossil fuel products.”
“Internal corporate documents and other evidence now in the public domain show that the fossil fuel industry employed many of the same deceptive strategies used by the tobacco and lead industries, which have been the subject of extensive litigation," Mulvey explained. "In those cases, courts addressed claims that manufacturers possessed substantial internal knowledge regarding the dangers of their products while simultaneously conducting coordinated public campaigns to minimize, obscure, or cast doubt upon those dangers."
She added that "communities like Boulder deserve their day in court, through a process protected from financial conflicts of interest and from an industry hell-bent on securing immunity from liability.”
Alito's recusal could have major ramifications for the case's outcome. With only eight justices participating, a 4-4 split would leave intact a Colorado Supreme Court ruling allowing Boulder’s climate lawsuit to proceed, while producing no nationwide precedent that could shut down similar cases elsewhere.
The question of whether states and municipalities can sue fossil fuel companies takes on new urgency as the Trump administration halts federal action on the climate crisis and states and municipalities are left to fend for themselves.
An analysis commissioned in 2018 projected that the area around Boulder County would require between $96 million and $157 million to make only some of the necessary adaptations to climate change through 2050.
"What [Boulder] was saying was: 'We want damages for this because we’re spending a ton of money dealing with climate change," explained Sam Sankar, senior vice president at Earthjustice, in an interview with Slate. "'We’re having to reinforce roads to deal with extreme heat or extreme precipitation. We’ve got to rebuild infrastructure to deal with hundred-year floods that are happening every other year now. We’re dealing with heat stress and heat stroke and all the things that the people in our town are being affected by. We’ve never had wildfire seasons like this in the past. It’s very hard for us to deal with, and we’re spending a ton of money to upgrade systems, to fight the fires, or even to deal with the aftermath of these things."'
"What Suncor and Exxon are trying to do right now is stop the case from going forward," Sankar said. "What they’re saying is that this kind of case shouldn’t even get off the ground. There shouldn’t be a trial; there shouldn’t be any kind of judgment. They should be let off the hook before the trial begins."
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