Courts, laws and Trump

Via Annie

Boing Boing -   Trump officials just destroyed the federal government's voting rights watchdog. By transferring all senior managers in the Department of Justice's voting section to a backwater office and halting every active investigation, the administration has effectively shut down the unit tasked with protecting voter access nationwide, as reported in The Guardian.

Last week, voting section chief Tamar Hagler and five veteran managers got reassigned to process employee complaints—far from their previous role overseeing 30 attorneys investigating voter discrimination. "It is extremely clear that the intent is to get absolutely nothing done. And the effect will be that absolutely nothing gets done," told The Guardian.

The staff was ordered to terminate all ongoing voting rights cases including inquiries into election practices in Pennsylvania and Georgia.

The move came shortly after Trump ally Harmeet Dhillon took command of the civil rights division. "In an unusual move,; reported The Guardian, "Dhillon sent out new 'mission statements to the department's sections that made it clear the civil rights division was shifting its focus from protecting the civil rights of marginalized people to supporting Trump's priorities."

Electronic Frontier Foundation -    In an unprecedented move, the U.S. Department of Treasury and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently reached an agreement allowing the IRS to share with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) taxpayer information of certain immigrants. The redacted 15-page memorandum of understanding (MOU) was exposed in a court case, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos v. Bessent, which seeks to prevent the IRS from unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information for immigration enforcement purposes. Weaponizing government data vital to the functioning and funding of public goods and services by repurposing it for law enforcement and surveillance is an affront to a democratic society. In addition to the human rights abuses this data-sharing agreement empowers, this move threatens to erode trust in public institutions in ways that could bear consequences for decades.

Roll Call - A federal judge in Washington, D.C., paused on Thursday a portion of President Donald Trump’s executive order to overhaul elections nationwide that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote.  In lawsuits brought by Democrats and voting rights groups, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia found that having the Election Assistance Commission change federal voter registration application forms to require proof of citizenship likely violated the Constitution.

“Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States — not the President — with the authority to regulate federal elections,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in the opinion.

Roll Call -    The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to pause a lower court ruling that blocks its effort to ban transgender service members from the military while a legal challenge plays out.

The application asked the justices to pause a nationwide injunction from a federal district court in Washington that stopped the Trump administration from taking negative action against transgender service members.

The lawsuit was brought by a group of transgender service members seeking to stop their discharges. The injunction was entered in March and upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.