SCOTUS rejects Trump administration's challenge to 20k California ballots

Late today, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request from the Trump administration to weigh in on its effort to sideline those thousands of mail-in ballots here in California. Earlier today, the administration filed an emergency appeal after a divided appeals court. Rejected a request to set aside 20,000 ballots from people the federal government claims are likely non-citizens. California officials say the administration's list is highly unreliable and likely includes many people who are U.S. citizens. The Supreme Court did not give a reason for declining to weigh in on the issue this afternoon. Okay, so let's talk more about all of this with Professor David Levine from UC College of the Law in San Francisco. David, nice to see you. Good to see you both. So, boy, the Supreme Court really moving quickly on this. Why do you think they did move so fast, and what does it say about the administration's case here? Okay, they moved fast because they know that tomorrow's election day. Thank you very much. Now, the administration moved quickly because they lost the case just the other day at the Ninth Circuit for the second time, and just this morning they filed their emergency motion. So what was interesting is what happened internally in the court is because this was a case coming from the Ninth Circuit, Justice Kagan got the papers first because every judge... Justice is responsible for these kind of motions in different circuits. So she got it first. She could have acted on her own, but instead she referred it to the entire court, which strikes me that that was the right thing to do, given the provenance of the case. And then nobody. Wanted to touch it. What was interesting to me is that the order from the Supreme Court is one sentence and no recorded dissents at all, given that the Ninth Circuit had one judge who kept saying, no, no, the administration has a case. I kind of thought that two or three of the justices might say, wait a minute, we should look at this some more, but no recorded dissents. So they moved quickly, knowing it is election day coming up, knowing that the vote is going on and that this case from the administration just was never going to be passed. going anywhere. How unusual is it for the Supreme Court to rule on an application like this from the administration without even asking for responses from the two sides? Well, a lot of times with emergency motions, they will just say no. That's pretty common. But the administration has had such Such good luck with the Supreme Court. It's maybe a little bit surprising, again, that they didn't get any bites from any justices. We didn't see a Justice Alito or Justice Thomas saying, wait a minute, we're going too fast. One reason might have been that there's just not enough time with the election going, with tomorrow being election day, with the vote underway. To go through the rigmarole of some briefing. Was it just about the timing, you think, or were they looking at what, you know, the evidence that the administration was putting forth about these contested ballots? I suspect it's the timing as much as anything because they move so quickly and because we didn't get any recorded dissent. It was just we're in the midst of it now. It's too late to really to interfere. Now, the administration's remedy. There is a remedy, which is a couple of different ways. One is that if, in fact, some noncitizens voted. That's recorded. The administration can come back in, and they could indict people, and it's only a misdemeanor, but they could indict people for this after the fact, because the envelopes will be maintained, the voting records will be maintained, and if they really were serious, they could go after people. The other alternative is... The as the Ninth Circuit judges were saying is go to Congress and if you want to require a higher level of proof that people who are voting are citizens, you go to Congress and they can change the regulations and statutes for federal for federal elections. But California was following its own perfectly legal. process of verifying signatures, verifying that people are citizens who are voting, and all the studies that have been done is that it is an infinitesimal problem of non-citizens voting. They don't want to get in trouble. And it's just across the board. We hear a lot of noise about it, but the reality is it almost never, never happens. Okay, so what do you expect? After today, I mean, what's next? Do you believe the administration will say we'll cut its losses and say, OK, I'm forgetting we're forgetting about this issue? No. What they're going to do, I suspect, is, you know, what we've seen is we've seen the Alaska case, we've seen a little bit in Washington, we've seen a little bit in the state of Washington, a little bit in Washington, D.C., this case coming out of Los Angeles, all trying to create the narrative that there are problems. And so what I expect, what we're going to see is a lot of noise Tuesday night, Wednesday. We told you, this is the administration, we told you there were problems. Look at those results. We've got to look at this further. So the real issue is going to be what happens when the administration, who has been very aggressive so far, continues to be aggressive, whether it's in the courts or... When things turn to certifications in the states, and then when all those records go, or those results go to Congress, what will happen there? So the story is not over, it's just, we're just changing to another locale. Yeah, so yeah, you think all these legal challenges, kind of more so about laying the groundwork, potentially, for challenges after the election. Yeah, this is all about the politics and less about the law, because these cases have been so dreadful. Proof is in the pudding within a matter of hours today. Nine, nothing. Not one Supreme Court justice could say there's anything here. Even the most friendly justices to the administration, they said, uh-uh, not today. No way. David, thank you. Good to have you here. Yeah, appreciate it. Thank you.