Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows removed Donald Trump from the state's 2024 ballot. A superior court judge stopped her. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the legal theory behind her move unanimously, all nine justices, including the three liberal members. Now Bellows is running for governor and treating that rejected action as a campaign credential.
That is the state of Democratic politics in 2025: an official whose signature constitutional gambit failed at every level of judicial review is selling it as proof of her courage.
The former ACLU executive director in Maine has posted videos referencing her decision to bar Trump from the primary ballot. In one, she claimed she attempted to instruct Trump on the Constitution and quipped that "the president clearly didn't get the copy of the Constitution I sent him." In another, she declared, "There are no kings in America... We have a democracy." She has described the January 6 events as "an unlawful attempt to overthrow the results of a free and fair election" and framed her ballot-removal effort as an act of "bravery."
Bellows' effort did not survive contact with the judiciary. A superior court judge in Maine enjoined her decision. She then repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to get the matter before a higher court, according to legal commentator Jonathan Turley.
The Supreme Court, meanwhile, addressed the same legal theory in the Colorado case, and dismantled it. The justices ruled 9-0 that individual states could not unilaterally remove a presidential candidate from the ballot under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment without congressional authorization. The Court's language was pointed.
"Nothing in the Constitution requires that we endure such chaos."
That was the Court's assessment of the legal framework Bellows and like-minded officials tried to invoke. Not a close call. Not a split decision. Nine to zero. Every liberal justice joined the majority.
Even within her own party, the move drew criticism. Maine Democratic Rep. Jared Golden denounced Bellows' decision to bar Trump from the primary. When a member of your own caucus calls out the overreach, the "bravery" framing starts to look less like principle and more like political positioning.
Bellows is not alone. Turley, a law professor and author, has described a broader pattern among Democratic candidates who are running on pledges to circumvent or stretch constitutional limits in the name of opposing Trump. He characterizes the approach as a "by any means necessary" posture toward constitutional governance.
George Conway, now a New York congressional candidate, has pledged to ease impeachment rules to secure the removal of both President Trump and Vice President JD Vance. That pledge treats the Constitution's most serious accountability mechanism, impeachment, as a tool to be loosened for partisan convenience. The administration, for its part, has moved in the opposite direction, with Vance tapped to lead a government-wide fraud investigation aimed at restoring accountability inside federal agencies.
The common thread is an eagerness to treat extraordinary constitutional powers as ordinary political weapons, then to campaign on having wielded them, regardless of whether courts upheld the action.
Bellows' messaging rests on a familiar contradiction. She claims to be defending democracy. But her specific act, removing a major-party candidate from the ballot before voters could weigh in, was the opposite of letting democracy work. A secretary of state, an appointed or elected administrative officer, decided which presidential candidates the people of Maine were permitted to choose. The courts said no. The voters ultimately chose Trump anyway; he won the election.
The question voters in Maine's gubernatorial race will have to answer is whether an official who lost unanimously at the Supreme Court, and who now treats that loss as a badge of honor, can be trusted to respect the boundaries of executive authority as governor. The track record suggests she views those boundaries as suggestions.
Election integrity has become a flashpoint nationally. Concerns about who belongs on the ballot, who is eligible to vote, and how elections are administered are not abstract. They play out in real cases, from illegal immigrants charged with voting in multiple presidential elections to state officials making unilateral decisions about ballot access.
The constitutional order depends on officials who accept the limits of their own power, even when they believe the cause is righteous. Bellows did not accept those limits. She pushed past them, got stopped by a judge, tried again at a higher level, and got stopped by the entire Supreme Court. Now she wants a promotion.
President Trump has made election security a priority, pressing Congress on measures like voter ID requirements. He has vowed to pursue voter ID for future elections by executive order if legislators fail to act, an approach that works through the political process rather than around it.
Bellows' gubernatorial pitch amounts to this: I defied the courts, lost at every level, and I'd do it again. She frames it as standing up for democracy. But democracy already had a mechanism for dealing with candidates voters didn't want. It's called an election.
The Supreme Court, including justices appointed by Democratic presidents, concluded that what Bellows and her Colorado counterparts attempted would produce constitutional chaos. That is not a partisan talking point. It is the holding of the nation's highest court, stated in plain English.
Democrats who attempt to manipulate ballot access are not the only ones testing the system's limits. Courts have also refused to rescue a Democrat who tried to get onto Ohio's Republican ballot through procedural maneuvering. The pattern is consistent: when officials or candidates try to game the process, courts push back.
What makes the Bellows case distinctive is not the legal defeat, plenty of officials lose in court. It is the decision to campaign on the defeat as though it were a victory. She is asking Maine voters to reward her for an act that nine Supreme Court justices, across the ideological spectrum, said the Constitution does not permit.
Meanwhile, legislative efforts to shore up election integrity continue at the federal level. The push for the SAVE America Act reflects a growing demand that election rules be set through lawful channels, not improvised by state officials acting on their own authority.
Turley, in his recent book "Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution," has examined the broader tendency to abandon constitutional constraints under the pressure of political passions. Bellows' campaign fits that pattern neatly. The passion was real. The constitutional authority was not.
A secretary of state who removes a presidential frontrunner from the ballot, gets overruled by every court that reviews the action, and then runs for higher office on the strength of that overruled decision is not defending the system. She is advertising her willingness to override it.
Maine deserves a governor who reads the Constitution and follows it, not one who mails a copy to her political opponents and ignores it herself.
Rep. Eric Swalwell, a Democratic frontrunner in the California governor's race, faces fresh accusations that he violated federal immigration and employment law by keeping an illegal immigrant from Brazil on his household payroll, and paying her with donor money during a two-year stretch when she had no valid work authorization, according to a pair of complaints reported by the New York Post.
The allegations land at the worst possible moment for Swalwell, whose gubernatorial campaign was already unraveling Friday after four women came forward with sexual-assault and misconduct claims he denies. Together, the nanny complaints and the misconduct accusations have turned what was supposed to be a triumphant statewide bid into a rolling catalog of liability, with a June 2 open primary fast approaching.
A complaint filed Tuesday with the Department of Labor claims that Eric and Brittany Swalwell lied to federal authorities to keep 33-year-old Amanda Barbosa, their live-in Brazilian nanny, working for them after her temporary work authorization was about to expire in 2022. A separate complaint filed with the Department of Homeland Security in February, dated Feb. 16, accuses Swalwell of paying Barbosa under the table with campaign funds for roughly two years while she lacked legal permission to work.
Federal Election Commission records paint a clear financial picture. The Post reported that Barbosa received $3,914 in campaign funds in 2021, the year Swalwell first hired her to look after his three children. In 2022, that figure ballooned to $46,930. An additional $52,262 in campaign expenses labeled "childcare" were written off to Swalwell himself.
Then the on-the-books payments stopped, right around the time Barbosa's au pair visa expired in December 2022. They did not resume until 2025, when she received $38,905 in campaign funds. The gap matters. Breitbart reported that social-media photos from 2023 and 2024 were cited in the complaints as evidence Barbosa continued performing childcare duties during the very period she allegedly lacked lawful work authorization.
The DHS complaint spells it out:
"Barbosa appears in numerous social media photos with the Swalwell family throughout 2023 and 2024, indicating continued close association and ongoing childcare responsibilities despite the absence of known lawful work authorization."
Those photos, pulled from Barbosa's since-deleted Facebook account, reportedly showed her caring for the Swalwell children at family events, including the annual White House picnic in both 2023 and 2024. In one, she held the youngest child. Another, from Halloween 2024, showed Barbosa taking the kids trick-or-treating while wearing a Brazil soccer shirt.
With Barbosa's au pair visa winding down in December 2022, Swalwell began the process of sponsoring her for a green card, the Post reported, citing a permanent labor certification application the outlet reviewed. The Department of Labor told the Post that the certification was approved in 2024.
But approval of a labor certification does not retroactively authorize employment during the years the application was pending. The complaint's core charge is that Barbosa kept working, and kept getting paid, off the books, throughout 2023 and 2024 while her immigration status left her without valid work authorization. Her LinkedIn page, according to a screenshot included in the complaints, said she worked as a private childcare provider continuously from 2021 to the present.
Swalwell's entanglement with questions about his own transparency is nothing new. He previously threatened legal action over the release of files related to his ties with a suspected Chinese intelligence operative, even as he had spent years demanding full disclosure from political opponents.
Barbosa arrived in the United States from Rio de Janeiro in January 2021 on an au pair visa. Swalwell hired her that fall. The article describes her enrolling at a community college while the green-card process played out, a detail that raises its own questions about whether off-campus employment was permissible under student visa rules.
The nanny payments sit inside a much larger cloud over Swalwell's campaign spending. Joel Gilbert, the California filmmaker and activist who filed the complaints, told the Post that Swalwell is already under FEC investigation for spending more than $200,000 in campaign funds on personal babysitting.
Gilbert did not mince words:
"It's a brazen disregard for the law. He's harboring and employing an illegal."
The FEC issued a 2022 opinion giving Swalwell the green light to use campaign contributions for overnight childcare, but only if the expenses resulted from travel for campaign events. Whether the payments to Barbosa fell within those narrow bounds is exactly what investigators are now examining. There have been no findings of wrongdoing to date.
The Washington Free Beacon previously reported that FEC disclosures showed Swalwell paid about $17,000 to babysitters from Nov. 14, 2022, through the end of that year, including after Election Day. Kendra Arnold, executive director of the Foundation for Accountability and Civic Trust, said at the time that using campaign funds for child care after the election "would be a violation if... they were not directly caused by campaign activity."
The broader pattern of donor-funded personal spending, previously scrutinized over luxury hotels and family payments, only sharpens the question of whether Swalwell treated his campaign treasury as a household checkbook. Eric and Brittany Swalwell had more than $400,000 in combined income, the Post noted, raising the obvious question of why campaign donors were footing the nanny bill at all.
Swalwell called the allegations "absolutely false" and vowed to "fight them with everything I have." His campaign did not respond to the Post's request for comment. Barbosa could not be reached.
Fox News reported that the nanny complaints surfaced as Swalwell was already facing the separate sexual assault and misconduct allegations tied to his gubernatorial campaign. In a video posted Friday, Swalwell addressed those claims directly, calling them "flat-out false." A former staffer alleged a 2024 attack that left her "bruised and bleeding," the Post reported.
The twin crises have battered Swalwell's standing. Online betting odds have shifted toward billionaire progressive Tom Steyer in the California governor's race. Swalwell's own legal entanglements continue to multiply, he recently quietly dropped a lawsuit against FHFA Director Pulte over a mortgage fraud referral, raising further questions about his judgment in picking fights he cannot finish.
Several questions hang over the case. What specific immigration and employment statutes does the government believe were violated? Did Barbosa hold any form of interim work authorization during 2023 and 2024, or was she working entirely without legal permission? And did the Swalwells make false statements on the labor certification application, as the Department of Labor complaint alleges?
The complaints have been filed, but no agency has yet announced an investigation or enforcement action based on them. The FEC inquiry into the broader babysitting spending predates these filings. Whether federal investigators treat the nanny payments as a standalone immigration matter, a campaign-finance violation, or both will shape the legal exposure Swalwell faces heading into the primary.
Meanwhile, a separate court filing has challenged Swalwell's eligibility for the governor's race entirely, another front in a campaign that now seems to be collapsing from every direction at once.
For a congressman who built a national profile lecturing others about accountability and the rule of law, the emerging picture is one of a politician who expected the rules to apply to everyone but himself. Voters in California will get their say on June 2.
The Supreme Court on Thursday shut down a former Democratic candidate's bid to force his way onto Ohio's Republican congressional primary ballot, ending a months-long dispute that state officials called a brazen scheme to infiltrate the GOP from within.
The Court denied an emergency application for injunction filed by Sam Ronan, a self-described progressive with a long Democratic pedigree who signed a declaration claiming Republican Party membership in order to appear on the May 5 primary ballot. Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose had removed Ronan from the ballot in March, and two lower courts declined to reverse that decision.
The one-line order, reported by Newsweek, was direct: "The application for injunction pending appeal presented to Justice Kavanaugh and by him referred to the Court is denied." With that, the lower court's ruling stands, and Ohio officials may keep Ronan off the Republican primary ballot as the May 5 election approaches.
The facts of the case read less like a garden-variety ballot-access dispute and more like a political sabotage operation caught in broad daylight. Attorneys representing LaRose, Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost, Solicitor General Mathura J. Sridharan, and Deputy Solicitor General Layne H. Tieszen, laid out a damning paper trail in their filings to the Court.
They alleged Ronan had "spent over a decade on a mission" to get Democrats to "primary Republicans in deep red districts, as Republicans." And the evidence did not stop with Ronan himself. His own campaign manager, Ana Cordero, they said, "confirmed that even in the upcoming Midterm Elections, their intent was to 'torpedo the republican party from within.'"
That is not a characterization from political opponents. Those are words attributed directly to the people running the campaign.
Just the News reported that court documents filed in U.S. District Court showed Ronan publicly admitted his candidacy was part of a Democratic strategy to run members of his party against Republicans in GOP-leaning districts. Ronan had previously run as a Democratic state and national candidate before attempting to challenge Republican Rep. Mark Carey in Ohio's 15th Congressional District GOP primary.
The timeline tells the story of a state election apparatus that caught the problem and acted. On February 17, the Franklin County Board of Elections certified Ronan to Ohio's Republican primary ballot. By March 19, LaRose had removed him, citing Ohio's good-faith candidacy-declaration requirement.
LaRose's attorneys argued Ronan was removed for "lying on his candidacy form about his membership in the Republican Party and willingness to abide by the Party's principles." In filings described by the Washington Times, LaRose wrote that "Mr. Ronan's public statements, and those of individuals associated with him and his candidacy, make clear that Mr. Ronan is seeking the Republican nomination as part of his longstanding strategy to have Democrats run as Republicans in Republican primaries."
LaRose did not mince words about the endgame: "The goal of his scheme is to get voters to vote for Democrats, believing they are voting for Republicans."
The Supreme Court's recent term has seen a range of consequential rulings, including its decision to vacate the Steve Bannon contempt conviction, reflecting the Court's continued willingness to weigh in on politically charged cases.
Ronan did not go quietly after LaRose pulled him from the ballot. The day after the March 19 removal, a district court issued a temporary restraining order that briefly restored him. But that reprieve was short-lived. In April, the same district court entered an order denying further preliminary injunctive relief.
That meant Ronan had already been refused an injunction twice in lower courts before asking the Supreme Court to intervene. LaRose's attorneys drove that point home in their filing:
"Ronan asks this Court to circumvent any standards at all, much less the very high one for injunctions pending appeal, and to enter an interim injunction, fashioned as an administrative stay. Having been refused an injunction twice below, Ronan cannot ask for a stay to obtain what he wants, placement on the ballot. This Court should reject both overreaching requests."
Chief U.S. District Judge Sarah D. Morrison, who handled the case at the district level, wrote in her ruling that the First Amendment argument Ronan raised did not save him: "It cannot be the case that a State must allow a candidate on a partisan ballot even if he lied about his party affiliation simply because the First Amendment is implicated."
That is a line worth reading twice. A federal judge stated plainly that the Constitution does not give someone a right to lie their way onto a party's ballot.
Ronan's legal team, attorneys Mark R. Brown and Oliver Hall, tried to frame the case as one of political evolution, not deception. They called the matter "urgent" as the May 5 primary neared and argued Ronan had been honest about his background.
"Here, Ronan did not act in bad faith. He was honest. He made plain that though he was once a Democrat he is now seeking to transport across the aisle ideas that were not embraced by the Democratic Party. Ronan's campaign is a good faith attempt to win over Republican voters by advocating his values, values he believes Democrats have forsaken. That is not a 'strategic candidacy' or some kind of trick. It is not unlawful. It is not wrong."
They went further, arguing that party-switching is a time-honored American tradition:
"The historical record is replete with elected officials, candidates and voters changing political parties from one election to the next. The one constant in American politics is change. People evolve politically just like parties. America's political system fortunately facilitates these changes. Neither voters nor candidates historically have been forcibly fixed into their political positions."
The argument has a surface appeal. People do change parties. Ronald Reagan was once a Democrat. But the state's case was not about a genuine convert. It was about a candidate whose own team described the strategy as torpedoing the Republican Party from within, and who signed a legal declaration affirming Republican membership that state officials concluded was false.
The Court has faced no shortage of high-profile emergency requests in recent terms, as Justice Sotomayor herself has noted in complaints about the pace of emergency appeals. But in this case, the full Court moved quickly and without dissent to deny Ronan's bid.
The practical effect is straightforward: Ronan stays off the Republican primary ballot, and Ohio voters in the 15th Congressional District will not have to sort out whether a candidate who publicly strategized about infiltrating their party is genuinely one of them.
The broader principle matters more. States enforce good-faith candidacy declarations precisely to prevent this kind of manipulation. If a candidate can sign a sworn statement claiming party membership, get caught publicly plotting to subvert that party, and still demand ballot access under the First Amendment, then the declaration requirement is meaningless.
The New York Post reported that lower courts and Ohio officials concluded Ronan fraudulently misrepresented his party affiliation and that the First Amendment did not protect that conduct. The Supreme Court's refusal to disturb those findings sends a clear signal: states have a legitimate interest in policing the integrity of their primary elections.
The case also raises questions about how often similar schemes go undetected. Ronan's plan was exposed in part because he and his campaign manager said the quiet part out loud. Not every infiltration attempt comes with a public confession.
The Court continues to shape the legal landscape around elections and executive authority, with major cases still pending on issues from asylum protections at the border to other contested questions of federal power. This Ohio ruling may not generate the same headlines, but it reinforces a principle that should be uncontroversial: you don't get to lie your way onto a ballot.
Several open questions remain. The specific congressional district, Ohio's 15th, where Republican Rep. Mark Carey holds the seat, will now proceed to its May 5 primary without Ronan on the ballot. Whether Ronan pursues further legal action or attempts to run under a different banner is unclear. The full scope of whatever network was behind the "primary Republicans in deep red districts, as Republicans" strategy remains unexplored in the public record.
But the outcome here is the right one. Ohio officials identified a candidate who, by the state's account, lied about his party affiliation to gain access to a primary election. Two lower courts agreed. The Supreme Court declined to override them. The system worked.
When someone tells you they plan to torpedo your party from within, believe them, and keep them off the ballot.
Republican Clay Fuller won the Georgia special election runoff Tuesday night, capturing the House seat vacated by former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and delivering a needed boost to Speaker Mike Johnson's razor-thin majority. Fuller, President Donald Trump's endorsed candidate, held 54% of the vote with 45% counted, as reported by Just the News, citing the Associated Press.
His Democratic opponent, Shawn Harris, trailed at 46%.
The result matters beyond Georgia. Every seat counts for House Republicans, who have struggled to hold their caucus together on a string of high-stakes votes. Fuller's arrival adds one more vote to Johnson's column at a moment when the Speaker can afford to lose almost none.
The race followed a familiar two-step process. In March, a crowded special election narrowed the field. Fuller and Harris emerged as the top two finishers, sending the contest to Tuesday's head-to-head runoff.
Trump's endorsement shaped the primary landscape. Fuller carried the president's backing into the runoff, and the eight-point margin at the time of the AP call suggests it carried real weight with Republican voters in the district. The dynamic mirrors a broader pattern: when Trump puts his thumb on the scale in a red-leaning seat, the endorsed candidate tends to run ahead of the pack.
That pattern has not always held in competitive general elections. But in a deep-red Georgia district built for a Republican, the endorsement functioned less as a gamble and more as a coronation, one the voters ratified at the ballot box.
Johnson has spent months managing a House Republican conference that can barely afford a handful of defections on any given vote. Every vacancy makes that math worse. Every filled seat makes it marginally better.
Fuller's win does not solve the Speaker's coalition problems. But it does give him one more body in the chamber, and in a majority this slim, one seat is not a rounding error. It is the difference between passing legislation and watching it stall on the floor.
Trump himself has shown a willingness to enforce discipline within the party. He recently pulled his support from Rep. Jeff Hurd after a House vote that challenged his tariff authority, sending a clear signal about the cost of crossing the White House.
Fuller, who owes his seat in part to Trump's endorsement, arrives in Washington with that signal fresh in the air. Whether he governs as an independent voice or a reliable vote for the administration's priorities will be one of the early tests of his tenure.
The seat opened because Marjorie Taylor Greene left Congress. The circumstances of her departure were not detailed in the Associated Press report, but her absence created the vacancy that triggered the special election cycle.
Greene, one of the most recognizable figures in the House Republican conference, had been a lightning rod for both parties. She has since explored a possible role on "The View," signaling a pivot from legislative politics toward media.
Fuller now inherits a constituency that elected Greene by wide margins. The district's voters clearly lean conservative. The question is whether Fuller carves out his own identity or steps into the combative mold his predecessor established.
The Georgia result adds another line to Trump's endorsement ledger. In a cycle where the president has been willing to reward loyalty and punish dissent, Fuller's comfortable margin reinforces the value of a Trump nod in a friendly district.
That willingness to pick sides has created friction elsewhere in the party. Trump publicly rebuked Tucker Carlson over nuclear-war claims tied to Iran, and senior Republicans like Mitch McConnell have broken with the president on foreign policy. The internal tensions are real.
But in Georgia on Tuesday night, none of that mattered. The Trump-backed candidate won going away. And Johnson's majority grew by one.
Several details remain outstanding as final votes are tallied. The AP called the race with only 45% of ballots counted, though Fuller's lead was wide enough to project a winner. The final certified totals, the exact district number, and the specific counties involved were not included in initial reporting.
None of that changes the bottom line. Fuller won. He heads to Washington. And House Republicans have one less headache, at least for now.
In a majority this thin, every seat filled is a problem deferred. Whether Fuller becomes a reliable vote or a new headache of his own is a story for another day.
Democratic-backed candidate Chris Taylor handily defeated Republican-backed Maria Lazar on Tuesday in a Wisconsin Supreme Court election that locks in a liberal majority on the state's highest court for at least five more years, and sets the stage for an even wider ideological gap next year.
The victory marks the fourth consecutive win for liberal judicial candidates in Wisconsin dating back to 2020. Taylor, a state Appeals Court judge and former Democratic state legislator, will fill an open seat left by a retiring conservative justice. With her on the bench, liberals are guaranteed to hold their majority until at least 2030.
And the bleeding may not stop there. Another conservative justice is set to retire next year, giving the left a shot at 6-1 control of the court, a margin that would make the Wisconsin Supreme Court one of the most lopsided in the country.
Taylor, who worked for Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin before entering politics, spent a decade as a Democrat representing Madison in the state Assembly. She became a judge in 2020. Throughout the campaign, she centered her message on abortion rights, a theme that has powered liberal judicial candidates in Wisconsin since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.
Lazar, a judge since 2015 who previously spent four years in the state Department of Justice under a Republican attorney general, tried to cast Taylor as a partisan operative. She labeled Taylor a "radical, extreme legislator" and a "judicial activist." In 2022, Lazar called the Supreme Court's overturning of Roe "very wise", a position that may have cost her with swing voters in a state where abortion access polls well.
The money gap told its own story. Taylor spent roughly nine times as much as Lazar on television ads, according to a tally by the Brennan Center for Justice. That kind of disparity doesn't happen by accident. It reflects a Democratic donor class that has learned to treat state court races like national elections, and a Republican infrastructure that hasn't kept pace.
In her victory speech, Taylor framed the result as a populist rebuke of wealth and influence:
"Once again, Wisconsin showed the entire nation that we believe that the people should be at the center of government and the priority of our judiciary, not the billionaires, not the most powerful and privileged, but the people."
That line might land better if her side hadn't outspent the opposition by a factor of nine.
Liberals first seized control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court in 2023, ending 15 years of conservative dominance. That earlier race, in which Milwaukee Judge Janet Protasiewicz defeated former Justice Dan Kelly to flip the court to a 4-3 liberal majority, was a preview of what was to come.
Since then, the court has moved fast. It struck down a state abortion ban. It ordered new legislative maps, dismantling districts drawn by Republicans. It reversed several election-related rulings, including one that had banned absentee ballot drop boxes.
Each of those decisions landed squarely on issues where conservatives had built legal ground over more than a decade, voter ID protections, redistricting, and abortion restrictions signed into law by former Republican Gov. Scott Walker. One by one, the liberal majority has been tearing that work apart.
The stakes extend to labor law as well. A circuit court judge ruled in December that the law effectively ending collective bargaining for most public workers, one of Walker's signature achievements, is unconstitutional. That case is expected to reach the state Supreme Court, where the outcome now seems preordained.
Wisconsin Republicans have controlled the state Legislature since 2011. But that legislative power means less when a liberal court can redraw the maps, rewrite the election rules, and strike down the laws the Legislature passes. The court has become the left's most effective policy tool in a state where voters keep sending Republicans to the statehouse.
Wisconsin's judicial races have become nationalized contests. Last year's Supreme Court race drew involvement from President Donald Trump, billionaire George Soros, and Elon Musk, who personally handed out $1 million checks to voters in the state. Liberals held their majority in that contest as well.
Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, writing about the court's direction, warned that Republicans must win in April or the state "may never be a battleground state again." Wisconsin Republican Party Chair Brian Schimming echoed that urgency, telling supporters it could "literally mean the success of President Trump's term."
They lost anyway. After the result, Schimming called on Republicans to "stay united and continue fighting for our conservative values." It was the kind of statement parties issue when they have nothing else to say.
The pattern in Wisconsin should alarm anyone on the right who pays attention to Democratic wins in competitive races across the country. When the left identifies a leverage point, a court seat, a special election, a ballot initiative, it floods the zone with money and messaging. Conservatives too often show up underfunded and unprepared.
That said, the picture is not uniformly bleak. In Virginia, for example, a Republican recently won a special election in a rout, puncturing the narrative that Democrats have unstoppable momentum in off-cycle contests. The difference often comes down to candidate quality, spending discipline, and whether the state party apparatus is functional.
The court is poised to be in the spotlight again in 2028, when the next presidential election arrives. With a liberal supermajority likely by then, every election dispute in Wisconsin, from ballot procedures to recount rules, will be adjudicated by justices who owe their seats to the same donor networks and activist coalitions that backed Taylor and Protasiewicz.
Democrats also have their eyes on November, when they'll try to hold the governor's office and flip the state Legislature. If they succeed, the combination of a friendly court and unified government would give them unchecked power in one of the nation's most closely divided states.
Republicans, meanwhile, face a structural problem they've been slow to address. The left has figured out that courts and voting rules are where elections are shaped long before voters show up. Conservatives keep learning that lesson the hard way.
The internal challenges facing both parties are real. Democrats are dealing with their own strategic reckonings at the national level. But in Wisconsin, they have executed a clear, disciplined plan to capture the judiciary, and it has worked.
Four straight losses. A 9-to-1 spending gap. A liberal majority locked in through 2030 at minimum, with 6-1 control on the horizon. At some point, the Wisconsin Republican Party has to ask itself harder questions than Brian Schimming's call to "stay united" can answer.
The conservative bench in Wisconsin is shrinking because conservatives keep retiring into elections they can't win. The donor infrastructure is outmatched. The messaging, Lazar's attempt to brand Taylor as a radical, didn't land with enough voters. And the issues that animate the left's base in judicial races, especially abortion, continue to drive turnout in ways the right has not figured out how to counter.
Wisconsin is a warning. When one side treats court races like the most important elections on the calendar and the other side treats them like afterthoughts, the results are predictable. And the consequences, redrawn maps, rewritten election rules, dismantled laws, are felt for a generation.
Conservatives who wonder why they keep winning legislatures but losing ground should look at Wisconsin's Supreme Court. That's where the left governs now, whatever their internal squabbles may look like elsewhere.
You can hold every seat in the statehouse and still lose the state if you let the other side own the bench.
Judge Maria Lazar conceded her Wisconsin Supreme Court bid Tuesday night after Judge Chris Taylor opened a commanding lead, roughly 20 percentage points, within about 40 minutes of polls closing. Standing before a few dozen supporters at her watch party in Pewaukee, Lazar said she had already called Taylor to congratulate her, then told the room not to hang their heads.
The speed of the call told the story. Networks and wire services barely had time to tally precincts before the margin made further counting a formality. For Wisconsin Republicans, the loss extends a painful streak in statewide judicial contests, and raises hard questions about whether the party's infrastructure and donor base are keeping pace with the left's investment in state courts.
Wisconsin Republican Party Chairman Brian Schimming pointed to one factor before the final numbers even settled. He told WKOW's 27 News earlier in the evening that lack of funding played a role in the outcome, in part because the seat at stake would not have changed the court's ideological balance. That calculus, don't spend where the math doesn't flip, may be rational on a spreadsheet. It is cold comfort on election night.
Lazar struck a tone that was gracious but unmistakably forward-looking. She called the campaign "the opportunity of a lifetime" and said she had run the kind of race she always promised.
As she told the room in Pewaukee:
"I care about the courts so much, and I have led the type of campaign I always said I would. I have been honest, I have been transparent, I have been above board, I have led with integrity and I want you to know that is how we need to run races in the state of Wisconsin."
She added simply: "the fight isn't over." Whether that signals another run or a broader rallying cry for conservative judicial candidates, she did not say. What she did say is that she will return to her seat on the Wisconsin Court of Appeals, a bench where she can still shape the law, even if the top court slipped away.
Lazar also urged that future judicial races include at least three televised debates, a proposal that cuts in a clear direction. Candidates who believe their ideas hold up under scrutiny tend to want more debates, not fewer. The suggestion is worth watching, particularly as both parties gear up for the next cycle of judicial elections in a state where the courts have become a proxy battlefield for national politics.
The Pewaukee watch party drew notable Republican figures. Former Governor Scott Walker attended. So did Fond du Lac County District Attorney Eric Toney, who is running for state attorney general. And Brad Schimel, himself a former Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate, was on hand, a reminder that this ground has been contested before, and lost before.
Schimel lost his own high-profile Supreme Court race last year to Democratic-backed candidate Susan Crawford. That defeat, followed now by Lazar's, amounts to back-to-back setbacks for conservatives trying to compete for Wisconsin's highest bench. The ideological composition of the court matters enormously. State supreme courts increasingly decide cases on redistricting, election law, regulatory authority, and individual rights, issues that shape national policy as much as any federal ruling.
When Schimming cited the funding gap, he was identifying a structural problem, not making an excuse. Democratic-aligned groups have poured enormous resources into state court races across the country in recent cycles. If the Republican establishment treats a seat as expendable because it won't change the majority, it cedes the field, and the narrative, to the other side.
Schimming did not provide specific dollar figures, and the exact spending disparity between the two campaigns was not detailed Tuesday night. But his candid acknowledgment matters. It suggests the party's own leadership recognizes that conservative judicial candidates are being outspent, and that the decision not to invest heavily was at least partly strategic rather than accidental.
That strategy deserves scrutiny. A 20-point margin is not a close race. But margins like that don't materialize in a vacuum. They reflect months of organizing, advertising, and voter contact, or the absence of it. Conservatives who want to compete for state courts will need to decide whether they are willing to fund races even when the immediate payoff is uncertain. Building a bench, in both senses of the word, requires sustained investment.
The dynamics at the state level mirror tensions playing out at the U.S. Supreme Court, where ideological fault lines continue to generate friction. Recent clashes between justices, including a rare public exchange between Justice Jackson and Justice Kavanaugh over the emergency docket, illustrate how much the composition of any high court shapes the direction of the law.
Lazar returns to the Court of Appeals, where her judicial philosophy will continue to influence Wisconsin law. The question is whether her loss, and Schimel's before her, will prompt a strategic reassessment on the right. State supreme courts are not consolation prizes. They are where redistricting maps get drawn or redrawn, where election-law challenges land, and where regulatory overreach gets checked or blessed.
Chris Taylor, for her part, did not appear in the reporting from Lazar's watch party. Her margin spoke for itself. She will take the seat, and the court's ideological balance will remain unchanged, which is precisely the outcome Schimming suggested made donors reluctant to open their wallets.
The broader landscape of judicial power continues to shift. The U.S. Supreme Court's own docket, from cases involving gun rights and marijuana use to rulings on sovereign immunity and discrimination claims, shows how much rides on who sits on the bench. The same is true in Madison.
Lazar told her supporters she met people all across the state during the campaign who care deeply about the courts. She said she cares too. The room was small, a few dozen, not a few thousand. But small rooms have launched comebacks before.
The real test for Wisconsin conservatives isn't whether they can find candidates willing to run with integrity. Maria Lazar proved they can. The test is whether the party and its donors will show up for the fight before it's already lost.
Two Republican election officials told ABC News they expect President Donald Trump's executive order restricting mail-in voting to be struck down in court, even as a coalition of Democratic state attorneys general filed suit in federal court in Boston to challenge it.
Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt and former Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer both said they believe the litigation to block the order is likely to succeed. Their comments arrived alongside a growing number of legal challenges from Democrat attorneys general, House Democrats, and left-leaning advocacy groups, all racing to block the order before it reshapes how states conduct elections.
The White House has defended the order as intended to strengthen election integrity and ensure only eligible citizens vote. That goal is not controversial among Republicans. But the messengers lining up against it, and the legal terrain they're choosing, tell a more complicated story.
Trump's executive order directs his administration to compile a list of confirmed U.S. citizens eligible to vote in each state and to use federal data to help state election officials verify eligibility. It requires the U.S. Postal Service to deliver ballots only to voters on each state's approved mail-in ballot list. States must also preserve election-related records for five years.
None of those provisions sound radical. Verifying citizenship, maintaining voter rolls, preserving records: these are the basic hygiene of election administration that conservatives have demanded for years. The question isn't whether those goals are worthy. It's whether an executive order is the right vehicle to achieve them.
Schmidt, appearing on ABC News' "This Week," framed his concern around voter confidence rather than partisan loyalty. He said:
"We want voters to know that the election is going to be free, fair, safe, and secure, and that everyone knows what the rules are prior to going into this."
His worry is confusion, not the underlying policy. When rules change mid-cycle or get tangled in litigation, voters lose clarity about how to cast their ballots. That uncertainty, Schmidt argued, cuts against the very trust the order is meant to build.
"So confusion is never a positive thing unless you are seeking to sow distrust in the outcome of an election."
According to Newsweek, Richer, who ran Maricopa County elections from 2021 to 2025, struck a similar note. He acknowledged agreeing with "some of the elements in the executive order and some of the aspirations" but called the order unnecessary, noting that Arizona already has many of the features Trump wants applied nationally. His core objection was procedural:
"While I agree with some of the elements in the executive order and some of the aspirations, the form does matter."
This is a familiar fault line on the right. Conservative election officials who have spent years building integrity measures at the state level often bristle when Washington attempts to dictate process from the top down. It's the same federalism instinct that drove Republican resistance to federal election mandates under the Obama administration. The principle doesn't change because the president signing the order has an R next to his name.
A coalition of Democrat state attorneys general announced Friday they were filing a lawsuit challenging the executive order in federal court in Boston. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, who filed one of the separate lawsuits, offered predictably breathless commentary on "This Week":
"That executive order is unlawful and unconstitutional. We've already filed litigation, and we expect that it will be declared so in short order by the courts."
Jeffries also declared his side would "work as hard as we can to make sure that this is a free and fair election." Which is interesting language from a party that has spent the last several years arguing that any attempt to verify voter eligibility is voter suppression. Democrats have fought voter ID laws, resisted citizenship verification on registration forms, and sued states for cleaning outdated names from voter rolls. Now they invoke "free and fair elections" as their rallying cry against an order that asks the Postal Service to deliver ballots only to approved voters.
The contradiction is loud. When Republicans propose verifying who votes, Democrats call it disenfranchisement. When Democrats sue to block those verification measures, they call it protecting democracy. The principle bends to serve the outcome they want.
Additional cases are being pursued by what the source material describes as "arms of the Democratic Party and voting rights advocates," a coalition that functions as the legal infantry of the progressive movement whenever election rules shift rightward.
The honest conservative conversation here isn't about whether election integrity matters. It does. It isn't about whether mail-in voting has vulnerabilities. It does. The conversation is about strategy.
Executive orders are inherently fragile instruments. They can be reversed by the next president, enjoined by a single federal judge, and litigated into irrelevance before they ever take effect. The legal challenges already piling up in Boston and elsewhere suggest this order may spend more time in courtrooms than in practice.
State-level election reform, by contrast, has proven durable. Georgia's Election Integrity Act survived a corporate boycott, media hysteria, and DOJ scrutiny. Florida tightened its mail-in voting rules and saw smooth elections with broad public confidence. Arizona, as Richer himself noted, already has many of the features the executive order seeks to impose nationally. These reforms succeeded because they were built through legislatures, survived legal challenges on their own constitutional footing, and earned democratic legitimacy in the process.
The goals embedded in Trump's executive order, citizen verification, ballot delivery controls, record preservation, are goals that belong in state law. Codified through legislation, they become far harder for the next Democrat administration to unwind. Issued by executive pen, they become lawsuit magnets that hand Democrats a sympathetic narrative about overreach.
The legal trajectory is predictable. A federal judge, likely in a blue-leaning jurisdiction, will issue an injunction. The administration will appeal. The case will grind through the courts while Democrats fundraise off every hearing. Meanwhile, the actual policy goals remain unimplemented.
None of this means the underlying impulse is wrong. Americans deserve to know that only eligible citizens are voting. The Postal Service should not be delivering ballots to addresses with no verified voter. Election records should be preserved long enough to audit.
But achieving those goals requires building them on ground that courts cannot easily wash away. Two Republican officials who share the president's priorities are saying, plainly, that this particular foundation won't hold.
That's not opposition. It's advice worth hearing.
Rep. Eric Swalwell is threatening to sue FBI Director Kash Patel if Patel complies with a request to send the so-called Fang files to the Trump White House. The files are part of a long-secret trove of documents showing Chinese infiltrations into American politics and elections dating back more than a decade.
The same congressman who spent years demanding the release of every document even tangentially related to Donald Trump now wants these particular files locked away. The reason isn't hard to guess. They include him.
Swalwell, a top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee and now a candidate for California governor, learned last week that the Trump White House might release the files. His attorneys, Norm Eisen and Sean Hecker, fired off a letter to Patel that read less like a legal argument and more like a warning shot:
"The Congressman has never been accused of wrongdoing in that matter and your attempt to release the file is a transparent attempt to smear him and undermine his campaign for Governor of California."
The letter went further, promising consequences:
"Your actions threaten to expose you, others at the FBI, and the FBI itself to significant legal liability."
Swalwell's office and Eisen did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Just the News on Sunday.
At the center of this is Christine Fang, also known as "Fang Fang," a suspected Chinese intelligence asset who, according to a 2020 report by Axios citing U.S. intelligence officials, conducted an extensive political influence operation between 2011 and 2015 on behalf of the Chinese Communist Party in the Bay Area and elsewhere.
According to Just the News, Fang reportedly helped Swalwell with fundraising and placing an intern in his office during the 2014 campaign cycle. Federal agents carrying out a counterintelligence investigation into Fang alerted Swalwell to their concerns and provided him with a defensive briefing in 2015, according to Axios. Fang soon left the United States in the summer of 2015.
The House Ethics Committee opened an investigation into Swalwell in April 2021. By May 2023, the committee sent a letter closing the matter:
"The Committee on Ethics informed you that it had determined to investigate allegations raised in the complaint that you may have violated House Rules, laws, or other standards of conduct in connection with your interactions with Ms. Christine Fang."
The committee said it would "take no further action in this matter." Swalwell has consistently denied any wrongdoing in his dealings with Fang.
That's the end of the formal inquiry. But it's not the end of the story, because the files themselves remain unseen by the public. And Swalwell clearly wants to keep it that way.
The hypocrisy here isn't subtle. It's structural. Swalwell built a significant chunk of his political career on the principle that the American public deserves full transparency into government investigations, particularly when those investigations touch powerful people. He just never imagined that principle would come for him.
Start with the Mueller report. In March 2019, Swalwell declared:
"Congress and the American public must see every single word of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report. And we should see it at the same time as President Trump, a subject of the investigation, sees it. Nothing less than the rule of law in our country is on the line. Congress must also hear from Mueller himself to make sure that we have received the whole, unvarnished truth. No President is above the law."
Every single word. The whole, unvarnished truth. No exceptions.
Then there was September 2019, when Swalwell appeared on Fox News and accused the Trump White House and the Department of Justice of "an ongoing cover-up." He complained that transcripts with the Ukrainian president "were moved into a top secret covert action system" and called it "consciousness of guilt."
Swalwell also talked openly with liberal talk show host Rachel Maddow about investigating former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page, who was targeted by a secret FISA warrant. Page was never charged with wrongdoing. Special Counsel John Durham ultimately concluded there was no basis for the FBI to even open a probe into Russia collusion and target Page with a FISA warrant. Multiple probes found significant evidence of wrongdoing in that FBI investigation, including the false submission of a court filing.
Swalwell's own congressional website still carries a post about Page's 2016 trip to Moscow to deliver a speech, noting that "the Trump campaign approved this trip" and that Page "criticized American foreign policy as being hypocritical." The post treats a speech in Moscow as inherently suspicious. Bill Clinton did the same thing.
Then came the Epstein files. Swalwell relentlessly pressed to release all the Jeffrey Epstein files, even if innocent people were implicated. He dismissed concerns by the DOJ that the names of innocent Americans should be redacted. When the files weren't moving fast enough, he suggested penalties, including contempt charges and reduced DOJ funding for violating the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
In a tense exchange at a congressional hearing late last year, Swalwell confronted Patel directly:
"Every member of the Judiciary Committee, every Republican, every Democrat voted to release these documents and to have them in our hands."
"Where the hell are these files? And why are you keeping Donald Trump's name, to the degree that you are, out of them?"
No redactions for the innocent. No patience for process. Full transparency, immediately, regardless of who gets caught in the blast radius.
Unless, of course, the blast radius includes Eric Swalwell.
The New York Post editorial board called him out last week with characteristic directness:
"Eric Swalwell wants the Jeffrey Epstein files released — just not the Fang Fang files."
"Now, all of a sudden, Swalwell doesn't like the idea of the FBI releasing files."
The Post noted the obvious: "this time, the files involve documents about Christine Fang, or Fang Fang, an alleged Chinese spy who reportedly had a relationship with Swalwell."
Swalwell's response to all of this has been to frame himself as a political target. He posted on X:
"The reason Trump is so desperately trying to stop me is not because I'm running for Governor of California, but because now I'm the favorite."
That's the move. When transparency threatens someone else, it's a sacred democratic principle. When it threatens you, it's a political attack.
Here is the standard Eric Swalwell established with his own words and actions over the past six years:
Every single one of those principles now applies to him. And he wants none of them enforced.
Swalwell himself, in an exchange with Patel about the Epstein files, asked the question that now echoes back at him with uncomfortable precision:
"If the president is not implicated, then why not release everything?"
If the congressman is not implicated, then why threaten to sue?
Democrats filed suit against the Trump administration on Wednesday, aiming to kill an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to send mail-in ballots only to verified American citizens. The lawsuit, backed by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer(D-NY), House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the Democratic National Committee, and other party organizations, treats the most basic election integrity measure imaginable as an existential constitutional crisis.
The order's mechanism is straightforward. President Trump announced earlier this week that he directed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, along with the Social Security Administration, to create a list of verified U.S. citizens who are eligible to vote. The Postal Service would then send ballots only to those people.
That's the proposition Democrats are calling tyranny: confirming that voters are who they say they are before mailing them a ballot.
According to The Hill, prominent Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias wrote the complaint, and his language tells you everything about the strategy. This isn't a narrow legal challenge. It's a messaging vehicle dressed in constitutional clothing.
"Our Constitution's Framers anticipated this kind of desire for absolute power. They recognized the menace it would pose to ordered liberty and the ways in which it would corrode self-government like an acid."
Absolute power. Menace. Acid corroding self-government. All because the federal government wants to verify that people receiving ballots are, in fact, eligible to vote. Elias also argued in the complaint that the order "seeks to impose radical changes to the manner and conditions under which citizens may cast absentee or mail-in ballots" and that these changes "plainly exceed the President's lawful authority."
Schumer called the executive order "outlandish" and promised a courtroom victory:
"Senate Democrats have led the fight against Donald Trump's voter suppression efforts before and won. We will see him in court and we will beat him again."
Jeffries, for his part, declared that Trump's "unhinged efforts to rip away our rights will not prevail."
Ripping away rights. Voter suppression. Unhinged. The rhetorical escalation is as predictable as it is revealing. None of these statements engages with the substance of the order. Not one Democratic leader quoted in the complaint or in public statements explained why verifying citizenship before mailing a ballot is unreasonable. They skipped the argument entirely and went straight to apocalyptic framing.
Strip away the hysteria, and the executive order does something that most Americans, when asked plainly, would consider common sense. It directs federal agencies to compile a list of verified citizens eligible to vote and limits the Postal Service to sending ballots to those individuals.
This is not a poll tax. It is not a literacy test. It does not prevent a single eligible American from casting a ballot. It prevents ballots from being mailed to people who aren't eligible to receive them. The distinction matters, and Democrats know it, which is why they refuse to engage with it directly.
The left's position on voter verification has become genuinely difficult to articulate without exposing the contradiction at its core. They claim to support secure elections. They claim to oppose fraud. But every single mechanism proposed to verify that voters are citizens, that ballots reach the right people, that rolls are accurate, gets branded as suppression. At some point, the pattern speaks for itself.
Democrats have reason for confidence in the court, and conservatives should be clear-eyed about the terrain. After the president issued an executive order last year seeking to overhaul elections, federal judges ruled it was likely unconstitutional. That history gives the left both a legal precedent and a talking point.
But prior judicial skepticism toward one order does not automatically invalidate a differently constructed one. The question before the courts will be whether the federal government can use existing agency infrastructure to verify citizenship for ballot distribution. That is a narrower and more defensible proposition than a wholesale election overhaul, and it deserves to be adjudicated on its own merits rather than dismissed by reference to a prior ruling.
Democrats and their allies in the press have spent years noting that Trump himself votes by mail. He cast his ballot that way in a Florida special election last month. The implication is supposed to be hypocrisy: he votes by mail but wants to restrict it.
The argument collapses on contact. Trump is a verified U.S. citizen casting a ballot in his state of residence. His executive order would not prevent him, or anyone like him, from voting by mail. It would ensure that the system sending out those ballots knows who is eligible to receive one. The fact that Trump uses mail-in voting and still wants the process verified is not a contradiction. It is the entire point.
Every election cycle, the same dynamic plays out. Republicans propose verification. Democrats call it suppression. The media amplifies the suppression framing. Courts weigh in. And the underlying question never gets answered honestly: why would anyone oppose confirming that ballots go only to eligible voters?
The arguments offered are always procedural or constitutional, never substantive. It's always about executive overreach, or disenfranchisement in the abstract, or the specter of eligible voters somehow falling through the cracks. What it never is, curiously, is a straightforward defense of mailing ballots to unverified recipients.
Because that argument can't survive daylight.
Schumer promises a court victory. Jeffries promises resistance. Elias promises constitutional grandeur. What none of them promise is a better system for making sure that only eligible citizens receive and cast ballots. That silence is the tell. They are not fighting for voting rights. They are fighting against verification. Those are not the same thing, no matter how many times they pretend otherwise.
President Trump signed an executive order on Tuesday, tightening the rules around mail-in voting, directing federal agencies to build state-by-state citizenship verification lists that will determine who receives an absentee ballot ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.
The order is straightforward in its mechanics: only voters confirmed as citizens will be mailed ballots. Ballots will arrive in secure envelopes with barcodes to track them. The Department of Homeland Security, working with the Social Security Administration, will create the voter lists. The Department of Justice will investigate any wrongdoing in mail-in ballot distribution.
States that disobey the order may lose federal funds.
Trump signed the order during an Oval Office ceremony, framing it in terms that cut to the core of the issue.
"We want to have honest voting in our country, because if you don't have honest voting, you can't have, really, a nation if you want to know the truth."
According to the New York Post, the executive order requires a list to be created in each state of citizens who are eligible to vote. Absentee ballots will only be sent to those on the approved list. Trump has directed DHS to establish a system to compile and transmit the "state citizenship list" within 90 days, which puts the deadline at the end of June.
That timeline matters. Midterm primary elections are already underway in many states, and Election Day is November 3. The administration is moving to get the infrastructure in place well before voters head to the polls.
The concept is not radical. It is, in fact, the bare minimum of what election administration should look like: verify that the person receiving a ballot is a citizen, and track the ballot to ensure it arrives where it's supposed to. The fact that this requires an executive order tells you everything about how degraded the system has become.
Trump has pushed heavily for the Save America Act, which would require proof of U.S. citizenship, such as a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote in federal elections. He has said he is in favor of the act.
But the legislation remains stuck in a legislative logjam on Capitol Hill. The executive order functions as a parallel track, achieving through administrative action what Congress has failed to deliver through legislation. It targets the specific vulnerability of mail-in voting rather than the broader registration system, but the principle is the same: if you aren't a citizen, you don't get to participate in choosing American leaders.
This is not a controversial proposition anywhere outside Washington. Every other serious democracy on the planet manages to verify voter identity. The resistance to doing so in the United States has always been more revealing than the arguments against it.
Mail-in voting, by design, removes the voter from any point of human verification. No poll worker is checking an ID. There is no signature compared in real time. There is a ballot, an envelope, and a mailbox. The opportunities for error, and for something worse than error, multiply at every step of that chain.
A long-standing vocal critic of mail-in voting, Trump has consistently identified this as a structural weakness in the system. The executive order addresses it not by eliminating mail-in voting but by imposing verification requirements that should have existed from the start.
Citizenship lists built from DHS and Social Security Administration records represent the most reliable data the federal government has. Cross-referencing those databases to confirm that a ballot recipient is actually an American citizen is not suppression. It is competence.
The mail-in voting reforms are all but certain to face legal challenge in the courts. That much is predictable. Every election integrity measure of the last decade has been met with litigation from groups that treat verification as an obstacle rather than a safeguard.
The arguments write themselves: claims of disenfranchisement, allegations of disparate impact, procedural objections to executive authority. The playbook hasn't changed. But the legal landscape has shifted, and the administration clearly built this order with court battles in mind.
Trump himself seemed unbothered by the prospect, expressing confidence in the durability of the order.
"I believe it's foolproof, and maybe it'll be tested. Maybe it won't."
Watch how opponents of this order frame their objections. They will not say they oppose verifying citizenship. They will say the process is too burdensome, the timeline too tight, the databases too imperfect. They will argue around the principle because they cannot argue against it.
No serious person believes that non-citizens should vote in American elections. But a remarkable number of serious people have spent years building a system where it is functionally impossible to confirm that they don't. Every proposal to close that gap meets the same wall of procedural outrage.
The executive order forces a simple question into the open: if you oppose verifying that mail-in ballots go only to citizens, what exactly are you protecting?
Midterm Election Day is November 3. The clock is running. The lists are being built.