A federal judge tossed out the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) lawsuit to access West Virginia’s unredacted voter rolls, which marks 13 straight court losses for the department’s floundering effort to seize sensitive voter data from every state.
U.S. District Judge Thomas E. Johnston, who was appointed by former president George W. Bush, granted West Virginia’s motion to dismiss DOJ’s lawsuit Monday. In a scathing order, Johnston found the department failed to make a sufficient legal argument for its demand of sensitive voter data.
President Donald Trump’s DOJ is on an impressive losing streak in its voter roll lawsuits. On Friday, a federal judge tossed DOJ’s lawsuit seeking New York’s unredacted voter roll for the same reasons that Johnston dismissed the West Virginia lawsuit. Last month, DOJ scored its first appeals court loss when a three-judge panel for the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of the DOJ’s Michigan lawsuit. But Civil Rights Division chief Harmeet Dhillon, seemingly unfazed from losing, asked for a rehearing before the full Sixth Circuit.
Noting that the judge was appointed by George Dubya, this in some way probably helped. It’s so strange to say, but when you compare standards and ethics of then vs now, there is a lot of “this is total horseshit” coming from the old Republicans.
You guys need a lot more of that “a common enemy” thing going on and put aside differences to work the US back to a place where you have the luxury of squabbling about differences again.