SCOTUS could gut voting rights, and Trump’s attacks on law firms

Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back. Thanks to a bad decision from the Eighth ...

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Injustice for All is a weekly series about how the Trump administration is trying to weaponize the justice system—and the people who are fighting back.

Thanks to a bad decision from the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, the U.S. Supreme Court is likely to get a shot at further destroying the Voting Rights Act. 

The Eighth Circuit is now the second-most conservative federal appeals court, bested only by the positively rabid Fifth Circuit. In a voting rights case brought by the Arkansas NAACP in 2023, the Eighth Circuit unexpectedly held, in the face of decades of cases to the contrary, that private plaintiffs could not bring suit under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

For decades, people and groups have sued the government under Section 2, which prohibits denial or limitation of voting rights based on race, color, or membership in a language minority group. The Eighth Circuit’s ruling eliminated that right, saying that only the federal government could bring voting rights cases under that section. 

A cartoon by Clay Bennett.

And given that the Trump administration has already started dismantling the Department of Justice’s voting rights section, with attorneys instructed to dismiss all active cases, it doesn’t seem like the feds will be riding to the rescue any time soon. 

Earlier this week, the Eighth Circuit held that private plaintiffs also could not use a different federal law, Section 1983, to bring claims for a violation of voting rights. This functionally prevents people from bringing voting rights cases in the seven states covered by the Eighth Circuit.

The ruling is a gift to Supreme Court conservatives, with Justices Neal Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas already on record supporting the notion that private plaintiffs can’t sue under Section 2. And Chief Justice John Roberts has made it his life’s work to destroy voting rights. This case, if it reaches the Supreme Court, is a vehicle to continue undermining a core civil rights law.  

The award for this week’s most transparently bad faith argument goes to …

Stephen Billy. You’ve probably never heard of Stephen Billy, but he’s currently a senior adviser at the Office of Management and Budget, and he’s busy making an absolute clown of himself in federal court. 

Last week, U.S. District Judge Susan Illston imposed a two-week pause on the administration’s mass firing efforts across two dozen agencies. But as part of her ruling, she ordered the government to provide all of the reduction in force and reorganization plans used to justify the mass firings. 

Not so fast, says Stephen Billy, telling the court that they won’t provide these plans because they contain “highly sensitive information” and letting them out in the wild “might seriously hurt agency recruitment and retention.” 

It seems far more likely that people would be dissuaded from working for the federal government because the feral monkeys at the so-called Department of Government Efficiency have overseen the terminations of tens of thousands of workers, not because they saw a document discussing those terminations. 

Illston altered course somewhat in response to this, modifying her order so that the plans must be provided only to her, not the plaintiffs, for her review. We’ll have to wait and see what reason Billy comes up with for refusing that as well. 

Apparently you can’t just cancel grants because people said mean things about you

What is this country coming to if a president can’t arbitrarily cancel funding in retaliation for protected free speech?? 

After the American Bar Association criticized President Donald Trump, Todd Blanche, former Trump criminal defense attorney and current deputy attorney general, threw a temper tantrum and barred DOJ employees from speaking at or attending ABA events because it engages in “activist causes.” DOJ staff in policy positions were also barred from renewing their existing ABA memberships.

One day later, the Trump administration yanked more than $3 million in grants to the ABA, which were intended to be used to represent victims of sexual and domestic violence. 

The ABA sued to restore the funding, and earlier this week, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper granted the ABA’s request for a preliminary injunction.

Most lawyers learn in law school that the First Amendment bars the government from retaliating against you based on the content of your speech. That’s exactly what the Trump administration did here: punished the ABA for speaking out in a way that the administration didn’t like. 

But most lawyers are not Trump’s former personal criminal defense attorney, which is why the judge was able to quote directly from Blanche’s ham-handed memo whining about the ABA to demonsrate retaliation. Good job, Todd. 

Trump will never stop attacking law firms

Besides trying to muzzle the legal profession en masse by targeting the ABA, the Trump administration remains committed to hurting law firms when Trump’s mad at them.

Former special counsel Robert Mueller

WilmerHale is one of the big law firms targeted by one of Trump’s executive orders. Trump remains incandescently angry that WilmerHale used to employ former Special Counsel Robert Mueller and one of his deputies, Andrew Weissmann. Rather than bending the knee and giving the Trump administration millions in free legal services, WilmerHale sued in the Washington, D.C., federal district court, asking the court to block the order. 

WilmerHale will likely succeed, given that another judge in that court just permanently barred the Trump administration from enforcing a similar executive order against Perkins Coie. 

Meanwhile, even with this litigation pending, the Trump administration went ahead and suspended security clearances for two attorneys in the firm anyway.  

Can’t get in trouble for corruption if you stop investigating corruption

The FBI is shuttering its public corruption squad. You’d think an administration so committed to pretending to be rooting out fraud and firing traitorous deep state federal employees would want to keep the team that was responsible for those things. But the public corruption squad, working with special counsel Jack Smith, is the unit that investigated Trump’s many crimes. 

In this instance, the squad wasn’t likely shut down simply because it hurt Trump’s feelings. An administration that is 100% committed to its own graft and enabling the graft of others has no use for robust public corruption investigations. 

After all, that would greatly interfere with Trump’s effort to turn the government into his own personal corruption machine. 

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