A federal carrier snapshot is a summary of a trucking company’s record. It can help you investigate a crash, but it’s easy to read more into it than the government is saying.

Consider a made up carrier with 100 trucks whose federal record shows 20 vehicle inspections. Five led to an out of service finding, giving a rate of 25%.

That doesn’t mean a quarter of the company’s trucks were unsafe. It means inspectors found at least one violation requiring an out of service designation in five of those 20 inspections. The count is of inspections, not different trucks. You can’t use it to say 25 trucks in that fleet were unsafe, or even that the five findings involved five separate trucks.

Add another detail to the example. You’re reading the page in 2026, but the safety rating dates from 2019. The page may be current while the rating is years old. A more recent review date is a separate field, worth checking before you decide when the company was last examined.

The extra detail matters if someone is using the profile to argue that a carrier was safe or unsafe at the time of a crash.

The company profile and the truck in the crash

The federal trucking regulator, FMCSA, makes its SAFER Company Snapshot available free. You can search using a USDOT number, an MC or MX number, or a company name. Start by matching the legal name and identifying number to the documents you have. The profile also has a field for the name a company trades under.

Getting that match right is worth the extra minute. A similar name, an address that doesn’t match or an unfamiliar business name needs an explanation before you start drawing conclusions about the company involved.

Once you’ve found the record, resist the temptation to use the crash total as a verdict. The agency says its entries show involvement in crashes that qualify for reporting. They don’t assign responsibility. A carrier can appear in the table without having caused the collision.

The categories can also mislead. Suppose one crash killed a person and injured others. SAFER counts that event once, under fatal crashes. The injury column isn’t a count of everyone who was hurt. If you’re looking for the human toll, this table won’t give you a complete answer.

The inspection section presents a different problem. Vehicle and driver inspection counts can overlap because one inspection can cover both. Adding all the columns together may count an inspection twice. The figures cover the preceding two years, rather than the company’s entire history.

For a Texas family researching a truck involved in a wreck, a concerning inspection record raises questions worth asking. Which violation was recorded? When? Was the vehicle involved in the crash affected? A percentage on the company page doesn’t answer that last question.

Save enough of the record to explain it

A screenshot containing only a rating or a crash total leaves too much out. Save the company identification and the relevant table with its date range. If you’re recording an inspection percentage, keep the inspection count beside it. Record the rating date and review date separately from the date through which the page is current.

That gives you something useful to return to. You can show where a concern came from without relying on a number copied into a text message weeks earlier.

The agency’s Safety Measurement System offers more safety information, which FMCSA uses to decide where to direct enforcement attention. Its public view has limits too. Some information about freight carriers is withheld from public display, although inspection and crash data remain available. A blank or unavailable item isn’t evidence that there was nothing to report.

Public records research can identify questions about a company, but it won’t decide an injury claim. Readers who want to learn more about Texas truck accident claims can visit Texas Truck Accident Lawyer . Advice about an individual collision needs the facts of that collision.

In the example above, the useful note would say that five of 20 vehicle inspections produced an out of service finding. It would include the reporting period and the carrier’s USDOT number, so another person could look up the same fields and follow your reasoning. The record doesn’t support describing 25 of its 100 trucks as unsafe.

Photo: Markus Spiske via Pexels

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The post What a Trucking Company’s Safety Record Leaves Out appeared first on DCReport.org.

I’ve been wondering what was behind Chinese President Xi’s trip to see Trump at the White House, haven’t you? I mean, that is a looooong way to fly to eat rubber chicken and take a stroll through the gross construction site that Trump calls the White House these days. Trump clearly doesn’t realize that Xi can visit the Great Hall of the People anytime he wants to see excess in action – the place has a banquet hall that will seat 5,000 for dinner, and its main meeting hall seats 10,000 during the annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, which Trump would love. There are no votes, no laws passed, but lots of praise heaped on China’s Great Leader, President Xi.

Thankfully, the day after the Chinese president took off to fly back to Beijing, we learned what Trump and Xi had been up to. Trump, as usual in the presence of a fellow dictator, was in an expansive mood. He and Xi made another tariff deal so Trump could crow about reducing the trade deficit with China – an obsession of his that does no damage to the U.S. other than denting Trump’s fragile ego. They did some mumbling about having some of their people meet up about AI “incidents,” as the White House called them. That was good of them, as talk continues of AI ending civilization itself by the end of the decade.

While they were at it, Trump asked Xi if he’d like to buy some U.S. weapons. The U.S. Ambassador to China, a Georgia resident who has made a specialty of being a loser in business as well as politics, went on Fox News yesterday morning and said that Trump had told Xi that we sell weapons all over the world and asked Xi “would he like to buy some at one point.”

Trump is sitting there with Xi at the table at the Big Dinner and Melania is looking like she’s about to lift off carried by that balloon of a bow on her shoulder, and Trump just casually drops the offer of selling him some high-tech U.S. military technology. Why not? China’s main air force fighter jet is a cross between our F-22 and F-35 fighters, but it’s known that China is not completely up on what makes our jets so invisible to radar. Not to worry though. A whole bunch of key parts for an Australian F-35 was lost in shipment back to this country for maintenance, and two key elements of the plane’s stealth capability, the clear plastic cockpit canopy, and the bomb bay doors somehow ended up in Hong Kong in possession of China’s military authorities.

Oooops.

Oh, almost forgot. We’re running out of a lot of our best military hardware, having wasted tens of billions of dollars worth shooting at Iran during Trump’s abortive war that was supposed to last a couple of weeks and is now in its sixth month. And besides, all those promises we made to Taiwan to look after them are out the door along with every other promise we made to countries that have, or rather had, alliances with us. Hello, NATO! Trump is right now sitting on $14 billion worth of arms for Taiwan that was promised last December and is now delayed because….well, we don’t know why, because Trump doesn’t tell us, and besides he’s been busy with the reflecting pool and his mixed martial arts fight on the White House lawn, and he’s got the problem of how he’s going to get his name back on the Kennedy Center to worry about.

You know, and I know what happened when Xi was in town. He was so eager to please Xi, Trump threw his own press out of the White House and welcomed Xi’s stenographers with all access passes. Trump knew they would never write a wrong syllable about him because his pal Xi would put Chinese reporters out on the northern steppes bordering Mongolia herding yaks if they were lucky, and deep in the ground if they weren’t.

Trump is like the kid who hands his lunch money to the school bully in the playground even if the bully doesn’t ask for it, just so he can stay on his good side. Trump knows that China has been sending not only missiles other Chinese weapons to Russia to fight the Ukrainians. He knows that his pal Xi, with that perpetual mix of a scowl and a smile on his face, has had his intelligence agency handing over targeting coordinates to the Iranians during the war. Trump’s own intelligence people have told him that it was Chinese satellite imagery that targeted the Saudi Arabian airbase where two of our surveillance and control aircraft, each worth a billion dollars, were hit by Iranian missiles, not to mention several of our most expensive long-distance radar installations that are key to U.S. Patriot and Thaad anti-missile weapons.

But who needs radars when you’re running out of anti-missile missiles, right? And who cares if a few American soldiers are hit and killed by Iranian missiles that flew in using Chinese GPS data? What the fuck matters when…

Xi is coming to town!

Trump’s walls for his ballroom aren’t even up. His Corinthian columns aren’t standing tall. The “granite” that Xi loves so much hasn’t been trucked in yet. His marble floors aren’t gleaming. Ground hasn’t even been broken for his absurd arch. Pennsylvania Avenue hasn’t been renamed for him yet. He’s got to do something to show Xi who’s the boss of the U.S. A.

This is what loser dictators do when they know they’re headed for the door. Nicolae Ceaușescu was still building his almighty Palace of the Parliament in Bucharest when on Christmas Day in 1989, he was arrested, given a one-hour trail, and summarily executed by firing squad along with his wife Elena. The palace cost four billion dollars and nearly bankrupted the country when it was under construction. Trump’s ballroom is a comparative bargain at $600 million, or whatever the cost is by now. Three more Trumpian squiggles on its design plans, and it’ll hit a billion, trust me.

I’m poking fun at Trump here, of course. His time as president has become such an absurd collection of excess, bullshit, cruelty, theft, and treason, what else can you do? I mean, the idea of selling arms we don’t even have to the country that is the biggest rival of the United States on this earth…

What could be next? Putting up a sports stadium in a national park?

Oh, that’s right, those plans are already underway. That insane maniac Nicolae is going to look like a piker by the time Trump is done. The only questions left with Donald Trump are who will he go to war with next, and how much will a gallon of gas cost on January 20, 2029. I’m sure there’s a betting line on Polymarket, so get your wagers down now.

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Many of us are inconsistent in our economic desires. I would like the price of my home to rise, because it increases my wealth, but I would also like the prices of all other homes to fall, so that I could sell my house and buy an even nicer house. Also, I would like to have the value of my house rise, but also pay lower property taxes. David Schleicher digs into the second issue in “The Great American Property Tax Freak Out” (posted online at SSRN on September 1, 2026). He writes:

In the last three years, a number of states have substantially reformed their property tax systems, providing huge tax benefits to owner-occupied homes and shifting the burden of paying for services like schools and police to commercial property owners (including rental apartment buildings), to other local taxes, and to state funding, which itself largely comes from sources like sales taxes and income taxes. A few, including Florida, Ohio, North Dakota, and Texas, have considered going further, either completely abandoning property taxation for owner-occupied housing or even abandoning property taxation entirely. … One might think that homeowners would be happy that their largest asset has appreciated substantially in value, as homes did, particularly in suburbs, in the post-COVID period. But because property taxes are wealth taxes, property owners have responded to their increasing wealth with political anger, pushing shifts in property tax policy, often leading to increasing rates on commercial property owners who have seen declining values during the same period. …

[T]hese reforms shift the property tax from a tool homeowners use collectively to provide for locally-wanted services towards a more standard form of redistributive taxation, charging commercial property owners to pay for services for homeowners. Further, they will lead to greater state authority over local governments, less stable funding for local governments (but also less tax foreclosure in recessions), and stricter zoning controls (but more building of homes where it is legal). Perhaps most notably, these property tax reforms will lead to higher housing costs, and thus constitute a substantial transfer of wealth towards people who already own homes and have already seen their net worth increase substantially in the post COVID housing market.

A few other facts and insights seem worth appending here.

1) there’s a lot of local variation across public finance in the United States. But as a broad statement, property taxes are the major own-source of revenue for local US governments, and in turn the main source of financing for local schools. Many local governments have traditionally relied on property taxes to pay for police as well. The political dynamic of reducing property taxes often involves state-level actions that limit or block property taxes at the local level. It is not clear that voters for lower property taxes have drawn a connection in their mind to the likelihood of reduced local public services.

2) the property tax is a form of wealth tax, and it has the standard problems of a wealth tax: specifically, you can have more wealth–say, the value of your home, your business, or your retirement account went up–without having immediate income to pay a higher level of taxes. Thus, older voters who tend to have higher accumulated wealth, partly in the form of home equity, but also lower current income, are a politically powerful and sympathetic group in the push to reduce or eliminate property taxes.

3) If property taxes are reduced or abolished, the cost of owning a home falls. (For example, imagine that you could guarantee that the roof, exterior, driveway, plumbing and HVAC systems in your house would never need repair or replacement, which would also lead to a fall in the cost of owning a home.) With lower costs of owning a home, the market value of the home rises. Thus, the ironic outcome is that higher housing prices cause voters to want to limit or repeal property taxes, which would then lead to even higher housing prices. Moreover, the current homeowners who have already benefited from higher home values will benefit further, while homeownership will look even costlier for potential future homebuyers.

The post I Would Like the Value of My Home to Rise, While My Property Taxes Fall first appeared on Conversable Economist.

Oh, here we fucking go. The demands for civility and forgiveness are starting to roll in. Eat an entire bag of dicks and miss me with that shit, son. Trump voters made their pigsty. They can lay down and die in it without an ounce of pity from me. They certainly will never receive forgiveness. I’m fresh out, and I can’t be fucked to go to the store to get any more. Sorry, MAGA, you get nothing but the back of my hand until the day you die. Then you’ll get a round of applause. The world will be a better place without you in it.

These are dark times, but I will continue to tell the stories you need to hear in a clear (and usually profane) voice. If I entertain/anger/inform you, preferably all three, please consider becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!).

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OK, this is where we are: Just six weeks out from the midterms, and Republican voters have pretty much abandoned their party of pedophiles, Nazis, and thieves. Not because they’re pedophiles, Nazis, and thieves, of course. THAT, they don’t give a fuck about. The problem, you see, is that the collection of corrupt white nationalist sexual deviants is also manifestly incapable of governing, resulting in economic conditions that could charitably be described as “dog shit.”

It really is impressive how the regime took one of the strongest economies in the world in the last 50+ years and destroyed it in less than twenty months. Not only destroyed it, but did so in such a way that it is impossible to blame anyone else other than the regime. Joe Biden did not start a trade war with, well, everyone. Joe Biden did not slap tariffs on, well, everyone. Immigrants didn’t start a war with Iran and send the price of gas and diesel through the roof. Trans kids didn’t double your grocery bill.

Trump did all of that and then went on TV and bragged about it because he’s a fucking moron suffering from severe dementia. Thus, the entire country is furious at Republicans for the state of the dog-shit economy, and they’re either going to vote for Democrats or not vote at all.

That means Republicans are going to take a huge electoral hit. One they’re going to struggle to recover from, even two years from now (when Trump’s economy will be even worse). The illusion that Trump and MAGA are an unstoppable political and cultural power is about to be crushed like an empty beer can under a monster truck wheel. This brutal midterm beating will spawn the very real possibility that the GOP will turn on Trump in a desperate bid to save themselves ahead of 2028. He can’t run again, not legally, not physically, and not mentally. If Trump were twenty years younger, they would absolutely try to overthrow the government with their Hitler leading the charge, but he’s dying, and everyone sees it. He won’t last long enough to even be a figurehead for a 2028 coup.

Republicans understand, very clearly, that they are in a lot of trouble. There will be no Tea Party to erase their sins the way they erased the George W. Bush administration. The press will try as hard as possible to delete Trump, but over a decade of cult worship will not dissipate overnight, and Trump himself will not go away. He will remain on the scene, long after he’s been removed from power, screaming at the top of his lungs that he still controls the GOP and he’s still president. Trump will be an albatross around the neck of the Republican Party until the day he chokes to death on a hamburger.

After a full decade of lawlessness and hate and cruelty and sadism and evil and violence, Republicans have pushed the rest of the country into unknown territory. We are not talking about “moving forward” and “reaching across the aisle.” We are talking about investigations and tribunals and Nuremberg Trials. We are talking about accountability on a mass scale, and it is sending the right into an absolute fucking panic.

That’s why we’re starting to see bullshit like this:

The Social Contract with Joe Walsh

When A Trump Voter Finally sees The Light, Don’t Give Them The Middle Finger. Welcome Them.

So this pisses me off. I completely get it, I completely understand this human reaction, but it’s not helpful, and it pisses me off…

Read more

2 days ago · 81 likes · 31 comments · Joe Walsh

Fuuuuuuccccckkkk yyyyoooouuuuu! The middle finger is EXACTLY what they deserve. And so does Joe Walsh.

It’s hilarious, to me at least, that Joe Walsh calls his newsletter “The Social Contract.” Motherfucker, your party shredded the social contract decades ago. Long before Trump waddled down the escalator. Your party of racists and traitors and pedophiles has been hard at work actively undermining democracy longer than I’ve been alive. You do not get to show up after you lost control of your death cult and tell ME how to treat Republicans.

We both know that after Trump is gone, you will immediately, without a moment’s hesitation, try to reclaim your place in your party of rancid white nationalists. You will be right back to calling us “baby killers” and “godless communists” and “child-mutilating perverts.” You will be all in on white grievance and Great Replacement bullshit because yours will be the party of Nazis, and if that’s what you need to be to get back in on the grift, that’s what you’ll do.

It’s the same for every Republican voter. Not the wibbly-wobbly independents who switch back and forth depending on the weather. No one who voted for Obama, Trump, Biden, Trump is a committed Trump ideologue. They don’t really pay attention to politics or what Trump is doing. They have a middle-schooler’s understanding of the news and vote based on vibes. But the three-time Trump voter? They know exactly what they’re doing, and they feel no shame at all.

That’s really who Joe Walsh wants us to forgive. The GOP base. MAGAland and the ones who don’t love Trump but vote for him anyway because they hate the rest of us THAT much. Forgive those motherfuckers? Never in a million fucking years.

“Trust me, these Trump voters, when they wake up, feel bad enough about what they’ve done.” The fuck they do! Trump voters don’t “feel bad” about what they’ve done except in the sense that it hurt them personally.

They don’t feel bad that ICE is kidnapping children, torturing tens of thousands of people, and murdering Americans in the street unless it happens to one of them or one of their relatives.

They don’t feel bad that hundreds of thousands of government employees have lost their jobs until they need help and that help is gone.

They didn’t feel bad that Trump is a lawless, bloodthirsty warmonger until it cost $100 to fill up their pickup truck.

They don’t feel bad about any of the pain and suffering inflicted on Trans kids or Muslims or the Black community or Latinos or anyone the regime has targeted for destruction and humiliation and terror. They loved all of that because that’s what they voted for. They wanted the concentration camps and violent assaults in the streets and the abuse of government power. That was the promise Trump made to them, and they gave him their vote eagerly.

He gave them exactly what they demanded. But he also gave the billionaires (both domestic and foreign) what THEY demanded: The wholesale destruction of the government. The crippling of American economic power. The demolition of global order and the spread of chaos.

That’s all great for the rich. It’s all terrible for the rest of us, especially Trump’s rural voters, who feel the full brunt of his economic sabotage quicker than the rest of us. I only have to drive a mile or two a day, if I have to drive at all. My dentist, doctor, and hospital are all within 10 minutes if I’m taking my time.

Your typical Trump voter in the middle of nowhere Sisterfuck, Klannsylvania has to drive 20 miles just to reach the closest doctor. Their closest hospital is three counties over now that Medicaid cuts have closed every emergency room within 100 miles. Their kids don’t get school lunches anymore, and school is only four days a week because the Department of Education cut the grants that kept it open on the fifth. Oh, and the giant solar panel factory and all the good jobs up the road that Biden’s Build Back Better bill paid for are gone because Trump paid the company $20 billion to shut it down.

Doesn’t quite seem worth it to hurt some Trans kid in some school in California you’ve never met, does it? It’s all fun and games until there’s a price to pay, and MAGAland is the one paying it.

Now they’re mad as hell, not voting in the midterms, and Democrats are coming to look for a little retribution of their own. That means it’s time for civility and politeness, and everyone needs to be calm and rational. This is America! We don’t hold anyone accountable for their actions! Especially when they’re mediocre racist white people who have spent years engaged in an orgy of violence and evil. Why, it’s as American as Mom’s apple pie to forgive and forget. Right now. Immediately. Complete and total absolution. Do not pass go. Do not collect your pound of flesh.

Oh, but we are. Even in the middle of the massive economic collapse we will be in when Trump is gone, we will be coming for the masked ICE agents who thought they were safe. We will be coming for the concentration camp guards who thought no one would ever show up at their door with a warrant for their arrest. The billionaires will flee the country only to watch their companies and assets be seized. The collaborators who thought they would walk away unscathed will be shocked when they’re exposed and put on trial for corruption.

All those presidential pardons? Not worth the paper they’re written on when state AGs show up with subpoenas. Should have thought of that before you broke state laws in service to a fascist, kiddos. Trump has immunity. You do not.

As for Trump voters? Sure, some of them really will feel regret. Some of them may even do the work to earn forgiveness. But history tells us that the majority of them will not. History tells us that the vast majority of them will magically transform into “constitutional conservatives” or “independents” or “libertarians.” Anything but a Republican, so don’t you DARE try to hold them accountable for a decade of supporting Trump!

They can all burn in hell. None of them will regret anything. They’ll be embarrassed because they were wrong and they lost. Trump was a loser. He didn’t end democracy and install the white nationalist fascist dictatorship they were promised. He was a corrupt pedophile, and they’ll be furious we’ll want them to apologize for supporting him. That we’ll expect them to clean up their mess. THEIR mess? They didn’t do anything! Nothing is ever the fault of a Republican voter. Everyone else is to blame! Not them! Goddamn libtards! You’re making them vote for Republicans by being so mean!

That’s what they did after Bush. I promise you, this is what they’ll do after Trump. There’s no point in even trying to reach out to them. The only “civility” they want is for us to give them back power and surrender. They consider our very existence an affront. They will never EVER consider Democrats a legitimate governing party. No matter how much they lose an election by, they will never again accept the results. They will insist they were cheated, so how can they work with us if only Republicans are the rightful rulers of America?

The sooner we accept the reality that these people are lost to us forever, by their own choice, the sooner we can get to work isolating them from power and rebuilding around them. They cannot be saved because they do not WANT to be saved. And frankly, I’m OK with that. They’re not worth the effort to redeem. They chose to be soulless monsters? Let them live their lives apart from the rest of us, alone and angry and bitter and unwanted. It’s the very LEAST they deserve for what they’ve done, and Joe Walsh can eat shit. Don’t fucking ask me to be kind to people who laughed at kids being locked up in cages. Just because their fascist overlord fucked them, too, doesn’t make them worthy of pity. They’re still trash, and they always will be. Fuck them and fuck Joe Walsh.

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This by far the most dangerous thing that could possibly happen before the midterm elections. This morning, once again using its so-called “emergency docket,” the Supreme Court handed the Trump administration a submachine gun it can use to shoot up the voting rights of citizens of the United States. With just over a month before polls open for voting on November 3 and in violation of its own long-standing practice of not ruling on cases that have a major effect on elections soon before the elections take place, the Supreme Court today said in an unsigned order that the Trump administration can allow states to use a notoriously inaccurate Homeland Security Administration tool called the “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system” to verify the citizenship and voter eligibility of millions of American citizens. The Homeland Security system is normally used to check the immigration and citizenship status of people applying for federal benefits and licenses for businesses.

Today’s Supreme Court emergency docket ruling was issued without the presentation of arguments before the court. The ruling overturned a lower court decision barring the use of the Homeland Security system by states to analyze and screen their voter rolls. That decision was made by Judge Sparkle L. Sooknanan, who heard evidence and arguments in a case challenging Trump’s executive order that the federal government could combine the resources of several different departments, including the IRS, Social Security Administration, and Homeland Security into a system that could be used to screen for people who were ineligible to vote.

Trump issued his executive order based on his obsession that “millions” of undocumented immigrants and foreigners have voted in U.S. elections. There is exactly no evidence that this is true. In fact, every time that states have conducted studies looking for voting by ineligible non-citizens, they have found no such votes were cast, or only a handful, a number that was far short of being enough to affect the outcome of the election.

In Georgia recently, three non-citizens were indicted for voting in federal elections. In 2024, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger did an audit of the election that showed that out of 5.3 million ballots cast that year, 20 ineligible people had attempted to register and nine had cast ballots. The three indicted this week were among that number. This year 8.2 million people in Georgia are registered to vote in the midterm elections.

So, what’s going on here? Well, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson gave us a hint in a speech she made at the University of the District of Columbia when she called the court’s use of its emergency docket “problematic” and told students that the public could lose faith in the judicial system if the court kept ruling on major issues on an emergency basis without argument or signed decisions by the full court. At the time she made the speech yesterday, Jackson had clearly already written a 12-page dissent that was signed by herself and Justices Kagan and Sotomayor. “The harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take,” Jackson wrote in the dissent.

It’s even worse than that. Today’s action by the Supreme Court addresses a non-existent problem with a “solution” that will cause chaos as states attempt to cobble together a system to check the registration of voters who have already gone through the identification and approval process long used by states to verify their eligibility. Trump doesn’t want to find ineligible voters. He wants to make it harder for eligible citizens to vote. The plaintiffs in the court case heard by Judge Sooknanan presented evidence of the inaccuracies in the Homeland Security “Alien Verification for Entitlements” system. In the decision that was overturned today, Sooknanan wrote that “scrambling to comply with an executive order aimed at reshaping federal elections, private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable” was “haphazardly repurposed” by federal agencies that were combined in Trump’s executive order allowing states to use the system to weed through voter registration rolls.

That is exactly what Trump set out to do with his executive order. He wants to create chaos in the states. Here is what will likely happen. Citizens who thought that they were legitimately registered to vote will show up at the polls and be told that they were “flagged” by the Homeland Security system as a non-citizen. Who knows what will happen next. Maybe some cities and states will allow voters to vote provisionally. If the voters subsequently provide proof of citizenship to a judge, their vote might count. Or maybe they’ll have to provide proof of citizenship to the Homeland Security official running the system that denied them the right to vote in the first place. With 39 days to go before the election, no specific rules to implement Trump’s new system have been established.

Trump’s executive order amounts to a backdoor way to require proof of citizenship to vote, something the court ruled in 2013 was unconstitutional. The court ruled that Arizona could not unilaterally impose a proof of citizenship requirement for voters in a federal election. Only Congress has the right under the Constitution to regulate federal election procedures.

Until today, that is. The Supreme Court in today’s emergency docket ruling said that the lower court’s ruling “inhibits the Federal Government’s efforts to assist state and local agencies in the proper administration of the midterm elections.”

Nowhere in the Constitution does it say that it is the business of the Federal Government, administered by the President, to “assist” the states in running elections. Here is what Article 1, Section 4 states about federal elections such as the one scheduled to be held on November 3: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of choosing Senators.”

Where in that clause are the words “Homeland Security department” to be found? Where are the words “Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system?” Where does the Constitution say that the President can write an executive order that has the effect of requiring voters to provide proof that they are citizens, which is what the Homeland Security verification of citizenship system does?

The Supreme Court is supposed to interpret the Constitution, not unilaterally amend it with new requirements for voting imposed by the Federal Government. Trump and the Republican Party know that they are on track for a major loss in November. Instead of seeking to convince people to vote for their candidates, they are trying to pick who can vote and who can’t.

Trump has made noises that he might go to the next step and deploy ICE agents to polling places looking for people with skin that is not white and accents that come from south of the border. We may see people pulled out of voting lines and asked for their citizenship papers. That’s how bad it could get after today’s Supreme Court order. Buckle up. Election day is going to be a fight like we have never seen.

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