Bluesky

New Jersey made a mistake. Well, more accurately, software used by New Jersey’s Department of Motor Vehicles made a mistake. The state learned this week that a computer malfunction at the DMV led to approximately 6,600 individuals who indicated that they were not US citizens being registered to vote between June 2023 and June 2024. Around 400 of these people who were registered incorrectly voted in a New Jersey election.

New Jersey Governor Mikie Sherrill apologized for the error, which occurred before she was in office. She released a statement expressing how seriously she takes the problem and assuring the public that the glitch has been fixed and the registrations revoked.

You can imagine how this all went over with the Trump administration. Even before this revelation, the Republican National Committee was working to subpoena voter registration records in New Jersey as part of their endless fishing expedition for alleged voter fraud. That request was soundly rejected in court. But we can expect the RNC to try again based on this DMV error.

And they’ll be joined by the Trump Department of Justice. The DOJ has now requested the full names, addresses, and voter information of the noncitizens incorrectly registered in New Jersey. There’s no reason for the DOJ to have this data; if anything, the DOJ should be investigating the software company that produced the error, not harassing the people who answered truthfully and were accidently registered anyway.

But something worse than harassment will probably happen to the nearly 400 noncitizens who voted. The DOJ will come down on them like a hammer and, most likely, attempt to detain and deport them.

Since nobody in power in the Democratic Party will have the courage to say this, I will stand on a hill and shout that 400 people voting illegally doesn’t matter. Approximately 6,600 people accidentally being registered doesn’t matter.

New Jersey has 6,682,699 registered voters. The DMV error meant that 0.0988 percent of those voters shouldn’t have been registered. In the 2024 presidential election, 4,272,725 people cast a ballot in New Jersey. If 400 people did vote illegally, that works out to 0.00936 percent of total ballots cast.

This error is negligible. It had no effect—and unlike Governor Sherrill, I don’t take it seriously. Caring about this is like caring that somebody is going (pulls out the calculator) 55.005148 miles per hour in a 55mph zone. This entire “issue” is stupid.

The Bad and the Ugly

• Trump’s army of election deniers took all the big prizes in Arizona’s Republican primaries this week. Andy Biggs won the GOP primary for governor. That’s the same Andy Biggs who, as a representative in the House, voted against counting his own state’s electoral votes in 2020. Meanwhile, Alex Kolodin won the primary for secretary of state. Kolodin is a longtime election denier who helped file the “Kraken” lawsuit after the 2020 election. Let us hope voters in Arizona actually want their votes counted.
• In May, a federal judge ruled that ICE has no authority to make immigration arrests inside New York City immigration courts. ICE has made at least six arrests inside Manhattan courthouses since being explicitly told it couldn’t.
• Workers who say they were laid off from Meta based on metrics gathered by AI were denied a temporary restraining order that would have prevented the company from firing them. The judge ruled that the workers suffered no “immediate harm” because they can always sue after they’ve been fired if their terminations were legally bogus. I’m starting to wonder if all federal judges were just the kids in middle school who got right up in your face and shouted, “I’m not touching you. You can’t be mad because I’m not touching you.”
• Trump has rejected nearly 6,000 clemency applications from people who weren’t part of the mob he sent to overthrow the government on January 6. While “removing the presidential pardon power” isn’t at the top of my list of “constitutional amendments we need right now,” it’s for sure on the list.
• This won’t technically go down as another ICE murder when the truth and reconciliation commission finally gets going, but a Mexican man was killed when he was hit by a truck as he tried to run across a busy road to flee ICE. The man was a tourist, just here on vacation, with a valid travel visa. Some might ask, “Well then, why did he run?” The answer is that ICE is terrifying, regularly kidnaps people, and appears to be subject to no law or regulation. Running away from jackboot thugs empowered to violate your body and your rights is the rational play. ICE didn’t hit him with the truck, but it was the ultimate cause of his death.

Inspired Takes

• I hate that I am aware that Andrew Tate exists. But Jeet Heer explains in The Nation why I kind of have to be aware of him. Among other things, he has the ear of the Trump boys, especially Barron.
• I have spent a lot of time thinking about emigrating from this fascist nation. But I always run into the same roadblock: Where the fuck else is measurably better? I’m a Black man raising two Black children. Where the hell am I supposed to go? In The Nation, Edna Bonhomme tells me “not Germany.” In fairness, I could have guessed that. Still, the piece is confirmation that, as much as it sucks to be Black here, it sucks to be Black anywhere. Best thing I can say about America is that it is the devil I know.
• Journalist Radley Balko lays out the case for suing Stephen Miller. It absolutely needs to happen: Miller needs to go to jail to tell future Stephen Millers that they too might go to jail. But… I don’t think it will ever happen.

Worst Argument of the Week

One of the reasons I have little hope that Miller or any of Trump’s odious henchmen will ever face accountability for their fascist actions is that law professor John Yoo is still out there, free and spreading evil. This is the guy who wrote the torture memos during the George W. Bush administration. He’s literally the legal architect of war crimes. And yet, he’s still a “respected” law professor, at Berkeley no less, who regularly goes on television and is allowed to live a life of freedom, despite being the guy who gave Dick Cheney the legal cover for waterboarding. Justice never comes for these people.

Yoo is back in the news because he has the ear of the current administration, and he’s arguing for lawfare against the guy who scares Republicans the most: New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Ahead of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the UN General Assembly this fall, Mamdani said he’d “look into” what his options were to arrest the man. Netanyahu is on the lam from the International Criminal Court, which has issued a warrant for his arrest. Mamdani said he’d ask his lawyers if there is anything he can do about that.

He could have asked me (though I’d like to think I’ve priced myself out of a city government salary). The answer is “no.” Netanyahu is protected by diplomatic immunity while traveling to the United Nations. Mamdani literally can’t even give him a parking ticket. And that [deep existential sigh] is as it should be. Leaders from all over the world must be able to travel freely to the UN for the UN to function, and those leaders include strongmen and dictators and people some countries perceive as “evil.” Diplomatic immunity must exist, and must be respected. New Yorkers are not uncivilized thugs like the Spartans.

There’s also a law, the American Service-Members’ Protection Act, that prevents Mamdani from doing anything. This is a Bush era law that prevents US officials from working with the International Criminal Court in any capacity. The Bush regime was particularly interested in not being held accountable for war crimes.

That’s the law Yoo invoked on Fox News while declaring that Mamdani should be investigated by the Justice Department. But, as Joe Patrice explained at Above the Law, Yoo overplayed his hand. You can’t investigate a guy for talking to a lawyer. You can’t charge a guy for breaking the law when he hasn’t broken it. Mamdani called around, asked a few experts; they ultimately told him that Netanyahu is untouchable, and—as Mamdani acknowledged—that’s that. Yoo’s attempt to threaten Mamdani is just another case of MAGA trying to gin up some reason to go after the popular lefty mayor.

The American Service-Members’ Protection Act is, by the way, a shit law. It’s something that either Obama or Biden should have repealed the first chance they got. It’s sometimes called the “Hague Invasion Act” because it preposterously argues that the United States can send military forces to the Hague to stage a prison break should one of our people be held there for, let’s not forget, war crimes or crimes against humanity. Any American president should be willing to abide by the rules of the International Criminal Court, and the fact that none of them do—not Republican presidents nor Democratic presidents—is a stain on our country and one of the (many) reasons we’re viewed as global thugs.

Anyway, neither Benjamin Netanyahu nor John Yoo should be able to travel to any country that respects international law. Fortunately for both of them, our country protects war criminals.

What I Wrote

I didn’t put anything on the board this week, but, in fairness to me, it’s the middle of the summer, and my kids are done with camp. Also, Jay Willis on Balls and Strikes wrote everything I was going to say about the Supreme Court’s declining poll numbers.

In News Unrelated to the Current Chaos

I haven’t written about the Nolan Wells situation. Wells was an 18-year-old college football player who disappeared over Fourth of July weekend after a boat trip with friends to Horn Island, off the Mississippi Gulf coast. Wells and a bunch of friends went out, but Wells never came back. His body was found six days later. Mississippi officials have not released the autopsy, although the family ordered a private autopsy that came back inconclusive as to the cause of death.

I haven’t written about it because, even though Wells’s family has hired high-powered lawyer Benjamin Crump, there’s nothing for me to say about the legal, or potentially criminal, circumstances surrounding his death. We don’t know how he died, we don’t know why he died, and while the Mississippi officials appear incredibly unconcerned about his death, there’s not as of yet a cause of action against the state that I can see.

I can only speak about Wells as a parent, and the Wells situation strikes at an acute fear I think is shared, in full, only by other Black parents. Wells happens to be Black, but most of the friends he went on the trip with are white. I can tell you that sending your Black child to any kind of party with predominantly white friends is its own special kind of terror.

You’re not worried that the white friends are going to kill or lynch your child, not exactly anyway. You’re more worried that, should others decide it’s time for a lynching, the white friends will be of no help. You’re not exactly worried that the white friends are going to do something; you’re worried that they won’t do anything when something needs to be done. You’re worried that, in an all-white crowd, your kid is alone, even if the kid thinks they’re with a bunch of friends.

Wells’s white friends all claim that they have no idea what happened to him. I believe them. I have no reason not to believe them. But that’s kind of the point: a whole group of friends, and nobody knows what happened to the Black one. A whole group of buddies, and nobody was looking out for the Black one—on an island in Mississippi, of all places.

And don’t even get me started on how this situation would play out if the races were reversed. If a bunch of Black kids with one white friend went out to an island, and the white one didn’t come home, the Black kids would be under the jail until somebody “remembered” something.

In college, I had a couple of white friends I could trust. On campus, it was whatever, but if we ever went into Boston, they wouldn’t leave me. They knew they couldn’t leave me. They couldn’t let me be the lone Black guy trying to drunkenly get home on the train out of Southie. They had to be around to hail the cab I couldn’t otherwise get.

I survived college. And I’m still friends with them to this day. When I watch my children interact with their white friends in and around school… this is literally the only quality I’m looking for.

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