How Bad Are Things Going? Well, a Supreme Court Justice Just Used the Words ‘Kafkaesque Nightmare’…

Anyone who’s been craving a good ol’ humdinger to best capture the state of U.S. democracy today can now rest sated and happy. On Monday, the words “Kafkaesque nightmare”—for the first time in U.S. history—appeared on a Supreme Court justice’s dissenting opinion, describing a decision that ultimately sided with Trump and his dogged efforts to crack down on mail-in voting. Love this for us!

To recap, in March, Trump issued an executive order instructing the Postal Service to not deliver any mail-in ballots from states that refuse to hand over a list of approved voters to the administration. In June, Postmaster General David Steiner implemented that command into a new policy. Immediately after, a U.S. district judge—on behalf of Dem.-led states—blocked the order, calling Trump’s plans to intervene in state elections unconstitutional. Afterwards, the administration ran straight to the Supreme Court—and on Monday, SCOTUS decided in a 6-3 emergency decision along ideological lines that the lower court had no authority to block the order.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in her opinion—a separate one from the main dissent, which was drafted by Sonia Sotomayor. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

Decision aside, Trump’s crusade against American voting processes alone is worthy of a Kafka novel. The absurdity that he himself voted by mail—yet claims that mail-in ballots are “crooked” and “cheating.” The subplot where Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-Tex.) gets discovered bending voting rules so that they don’t apply to him. The overarching arc wherein Trump isn’t able to ram through Congress his precious SAVE Act—a voter suppression bill he thinks will “guarantee the midterms”—so his little cronies seem desperate to do the work for him in whatever ways possible.

Crucially, in Monday’s decision, the crux of the majority opinion was that the Democratic states that challenged the order in the first place acted too early, and that it was thus impossible to prove they’d be harmed by voting rules that hadn’t yet been put into effect. “On that score, time will tell,” they wrote. And while their decision lifts one injunction on the order, another remains in place.

Still, it’s not hard to imagine the floodgates that could keep opening under this order if it is fully greenlit, from the way it seeks to sic the Justice Department on state and local election officials issuing the ballots to “ineligible” voters, or get the Department of Homeland Security to create a “state citizenship list” to monitor a federal voter database. Because it’d be pretty ideal to realize why that’s bad before, y’know, time tells.

“We are committed to protecting the right to vote, including full access to mail ballots for the millions of eligible voters who rely on them,” the counsel and plaintiffs in League of Women Voters Massachusetts v. Trump told Jezebel in a statement. “President Trump’s attempt to seize control of election rules from the states and Congress is clearly unconstitutional and unlawful, and with today’s ruling, we will continue to vigorously pursue all available avenues to challenge this executive order.”

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