Wingnuts Supremely Pissed At Amy Coney Barrett For Not Helping Trump Rig Elections
Sam Alito has come unstuck in time.
Rightwing nuts are very very mad at Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, because she committed treason against Donald Trump’s crusade to rig the midterm elections. Barrett wrote the majority opinion in Monday’s 5-4 decision upholding state laws allowing a grace period for mail-in ballots that are delivered in the days after Election Day, as long as they’re postmarked by Election Day. Barrett’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and the three sane women on the Court, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
The case, Watson v. RNC, involved Mississippi’s law allowing mail-in ballots postmarked by Election Day to be counted as long as they arrive at elections offices within five business days of an election. The Republican National Committee, the Mississippi Republican Party, and some disgruntled individual weirdos who pretended they were harmed by counting legal ballots sued, claiming that federal laws setting the day of national elections also require all votes be received on Election Day to count. The rightwingers on the Fifth Circuit agreed in 2024, setting the stage for Monday’s decision.
Barrett, in an astonishing win for precedent and common sense, noticed that the plain language of federal laws only defines Election Day as the day when voting happens, leaving the counting and certification of votes up to the states.
“The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received,” Barrett wrote, adding, “Election-day statutes say nothing about ballot receipt, and we cannot add to the words Congress chose.”
Barrett also pointed out that the federal law governing voting by military members and US citizens living overseas explicitly separates the act of voting from the act of counting the votes, confirming that “while federal law dictates when ballots must be cast, state law dictates when they must be received.”
Nonetheless, Trumpers around the country are calling Barrett a wild-eyed liberal who wants to allow “fraud,” even though not even the plaintiffs in the case could find any evidence that grace periods for mailed ballots have resulted in any fraud at all.
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In a dissent joined by the Court’s other three Trumphumping democracy foes, Samuel Alito contended that linear time doesn’t exist. In some very fanciful jiggery-pokery, Alito pretended to agree that sure, an election is “the expression of the electorate’s choice,” but that the timing of that choice is magically changed if you count ballots received after Election Day.
We really don’t know how to read this except as magical thinking: Alito insists that even if voters make their choices by Election Day, the actual time of their choice is altered if the ballots indicating those choices arrive a day or more later:
If ballots received after election day are added to the set of ballots that dictate the election’s outcome, the electorate’s choice does not occur on election day, and the federal election-day statutes are violated.
As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern points out, it sure looks like the dissenters’ brains have been “pickled” by Fox News into believing that “all late-arriving ballots are fraudulent, and that the act of counting them somehow taints the result of the election.”
Alito cited Justice Brett Kegstand’s worries that “thousands of absentee ballots flow in after election day and potentially flip the result of an election,” which is again complete nonsense. Late-arriving ballots cast before Election Day don’t “flip” a goddamned thing, because the election isn’t over until all the valid votes are counted.
Listen: Sam Alito has come unstuck in time.
Donald Trump soiled himself raging at the decision, of course, insisting that counting votes mailed by Election Day can only be supported by people who want “CHEATING,” without explaining how that’s cheating at all. IT JUST IS.
Other rightwingers, like wingnut Federalist contributor Hans Mahncke, who never met an election conspiracy theory he didn’t like, complained on social media that
Barrett is the biggest conservative judicial disaster since Souter. The difference is that few conservatives expected much from Souter whereas Barrett was supposed to be the future of the Court. The worst part is that she’ll be there pushing leftist policies for another 40 years.
Leftist policies like allowing votes to be counted. The horror the horror.
Wingnuts don’t seem to be quite as upset at Roberts, as many of them have written him off as a lost cause. But Barrett was appointed by Trump, and is therefore a heretic to The Cause even if she did the far Right such nice favors by voting to ban abortion, ending affirmative action, and granting Donald Trump complete immunity to do as much crime in office as he wants.
As the Brennan Center points out, 30 states, plus the District of Columbia and three US territories, allow some grace period for late-arriving votes postmarked by Election Day. Fourteen allow them for all mail-in votes, and another 16 extend the voting deadline for military and overseas voters. Contrary to rightwing claims, grace periods for mailed votes aren’t a newfangled election-stealing invention at all; they go back as far as the Civil War. And yet again, there’s never been any proof that they enable fraud or cheating, except among wingnuts who have trouble understanding how linear time works.
So hooray, the Court has at least protected part of voting by mail, for at least the time being, even though the vote should have been a one-page 9-0 decision as soon as the case came to it.
[Decision in Watson v. RNC / NBC News / NYT / Slate / Daily Beast / New Republic (copy at Yahoo News]
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There are no good men on the Supreme Court. Sit with that thought for a minute.
OT: that missing R congressman, Tom Kean Jr. has turned up. Apparently he was hospitalized for depression. My sympathy. But, holy shit, going inpatient for 4 months for depression is kind of a really big fucking deal!
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/30/tom-kean-jr-house-absence-returns?CMP=share_btn_url