It’s often hard — nay, impossible — to determine precisely when a great nation jumps the shark, but years from now, when historians try to assess what happened to the late great United States of America, they might well point to the moment when a federal judge named Sparkle singlehandedly blocked a duly elected presidential administration’s efforts to keep noncitizens from voting in federal elections.
On Friday, the Supreme Court lifted a June ruling by Trinidadian and Tobagonian-born U.S. District Court Judge Sparkle Sooknanan, which blocked the Trump administration’s use of a Department of Homeland Security database to verify the American citizenship of voters on the rolls across the 50 states.
Better too late than never, I suppose.
The 43-year-old Sooknanan is, I’m shocked — SHOCKED — to say, an Autopen appointee who, in 2021, resigned in protest as a partner at her law firm because the firm had deigned to represent the Trump administration in its efforts to — you guessed it — clean up the voter rolls.
In her ruling on the current case, Sooknanan claimed that the administration’s use of the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements database “violated Americans’ privacy rights and could result in voters being wrongly removed from the rolls.”
Privacy? What privacy? Where in our Constitution does it say that the government’s efforts to verify voters’ citizenship violate their privacy?
As for the tired claim that any effort to purge our nation’s voter rolls of the untold thousands of dead, duplicate, and otherwise ineligible voters would also inadvertently sweep up some eligible voters, that’s a hardy Blackstonian perennial of the pro-fraud Left. Better to let a thousand illegals vote than to potentially deprive a single eligible voter his ballot, they always say.
The Supreme Court’s ruling was 6-3, with the usual suspects — Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — dissenting. As the Appropriated Press reports, “The emergency order allows states, for now, to use the Trump administration’s revamped version of a Department of Homeland Security program ... in their efforts to verify the eligibility of voters on their rolls.”
Picking up on the Left’s talking points, the AP adds, “It’s a program that has drawn scrutiny for its use of voters’ sensitive personal data and its tendency to wrongly flag some eligible voters as noncitizens.”
Before we pop any champagne corks, though, a reality check is appropriate. “States’ use of the SAVE program is voluntary,” the AP continues, “limiting the ruling’s impact on the midterm elections. Existing law also blocks most states from systematically purging voters from their rolls within 90 days of an election, said David Becker, an election law expert who leads the Center for Election Innovation and Research.”
If the name David Becker sounds familiar to you, I’m duly impressed. For it was Becker who, in 2012, along with the left-leaning Pew Charitable Trusts, created ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, which was sold to the 50 states as a quick-and-easy way to update their voter rolls, but in reality has been used by Democrat operatives to drive Democrat voter turnout.
Leave it to the AP to cite a rabid electioneer and pawn him off as a disinterested “election law expert.”
Thus, the Democrats can breathe easy in knowing that the Trump administration won’t be able to conduct a wholesale purge of noncitizen voters. And thus, the Supreme Court continues its unhelpful on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand dithering when it comes to elucidating and lending clarity to our nation’s election laws.
Recall that just over a week ago, the Supremes allowed the Democrats to run out the clock by slow-walking a separate but related Trump administration voting-integrity measure, that one to reduce bulk-mail ballot fraud.
Is this any way to run a Republic? Answer: No.
