President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice may be angling for a quiet victory at the Supreme Court with its latest bombshell move, according to one expert.
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Elie Honig, CNN’s senior legal analyst and a former federal prosecutor, sounded the alarm on Monday’s broadcast of “The Lead” after the DOJ appealed a lower court order blocking the administration’s efforts to severely limit mail-in ballots with less than 100 days to go before the midterms.
“First of all, the courts have made clear time and again that you are not supposed to mess with the rules around elections if we get too close to elections, and now we are really close to elections,” Honig said.
Honig noted that even though the Supreme Court is out of session, there is still a backdoor available to the Trump administration.
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“So, the Supreme Court is out of session now, but they are still considering cases on what we sometimes call the emergency docket or the shadow docket,” Honig said. “It takes five of the nine justices to intervene in a case off of the emergency docket; no matter what the Supreme Court does, they’re going to be involved because if they turn this case down, then the lower court, the Court of Appeals ruling stands, which blocks this executive order. That’s option one.”
“Option two, if the court decides to get involved, then they might agree that this is causing chaos and [is] against the Constitution, or they might overturn it,” Honig said before positing another worrisome possibility.
“They might say, ‘Go ahead. You can try to move forward with this.’ But if that’s the case, then we’re going to have chaos,” Honig said.
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