Page B15From§Each · the Justice & Legal book5 September to 6 September 2026
Justice & Legal
THE WORKAROUND
By LouOne More Question · the wee small hours edition, 5 September 2026
I've got the ballot request in my hand right now. It came in Tuesday's mail, same envelope the county's used as long as I've lived in this house, and I set it on the passenger seat of the car — the one that still needs a fan belt, the one my wife keeps telling me to trade before the belt finally lets go — and it's been sitting there since.
Because Friday, a federal judge extended her block on the rule that would decide whether a ballot like this one gets counted the old way or the new way. It's the word both ABC News and the Washington Examiner used to describe it. Not new. The same order, kept going.
I wanted to walk through how it got there, because I wrote some of the dates down on the back of a receipt from the corner store and then couldn't read my own handwriting, so bear with me.
On August 26th, the Supreme Court lifted an earlier block on this same Postal Service rule — six to three, on standing, meaning the states suing didn't have the right kind of injury to sue with. Two days later, a judge in Boston put a block back on. The Washington Examiner, writing about the Justice Department's appeal that same week, called it her second block on the rule. Then on September 1st, a whistleblower complaint reached a senator's desk saying the Postal Service had rushed the verification system the rule depends on — rushed it while the administration was already asking a federal appeals court for permission to use it anyway. And Friday, that second block got turned into a preliminary injunction, the New York Post reported, replacing the temporary one that came before it.
I keep thinking about the toll plaza on the way to my brother's, the one that props the E-ZPass lane open an extra hour whenever there's construction. They don't build a new lane for that. They leave the one lane propped open a little longer so the backup doesn't reach the bridge.
So that's the lane — propped open, in Boston, as of Friday. Here's what I didn't expect, sitting outside the garage with this ballot request on my lap.
Hours before North Carolina became the first state in the country to start mailing these things out, its elections board — Republican majority, voting along party lines, per the Washington Examiner — approved its own rule directing county officials to reject certain absentee ballots for certain errors. Not the federal rule. A state rule. Voted in that same Friday, hours before the ballot trucks left.
I'm sorry to keep circling back to that word — the one about things kept going instead of built new — but there's a difference between propping a gate open and building a second gate beside it. Boston's gate is still propped. North Carolina's board built its own, on its own letterhead, on its own vote, the same week.
Excuse me — before you lick that envelope — does the injunction covering the U.S. Postal Service's rule reach a rule a state elections board wrote and passed itself, on its own schedule? The Boston order blocks a federal list-and-verify system. It doesn't mention North Carolina's board. It doesn't have to.
I've still got the ballot request on the car seat. I'll fill it out tonight. I just don't know yet which gate it's going through — the one that's propped, or the one that opened hours before I got it in the mail, the request.
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By MortThe Records Bureau · the wee small hours edition, 5 September 2026
Federal protection for many of the nation's streams and wetlands took another blow Friday, when the Trump administration proposed a supplemental rule further narrowing what counts as a "water of the United States" under the Clean Water Act. The Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers said the proposal builds on one they issued in November, which itself went further than the Supreme Court did in its 2023 decision in Sackett v. EPA. Common Dreams, which has tracked the law's decline since that ruling, called Friday's filing "yet another sledgehammer."
The timing was not lost on the family. On Wednesday, United Nations scientists reported that the world has already moved past the point where holding warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius is possible, a threshold now expected sooner than forecast, after which sea levels, heatwaves, hurricanes, wildfires and flooding all get worse regardless of what happens next. CBS News carried the same warning again Friday, in an interview with one of the report's lead authors, the same day the EPA and the Army Corps published their own filing. Nobody at either agency was asked to explain the coincidence, and nobody offered to, which is its own kind of malarkey.
The proposal was promoted on its way out by Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works Adam Telle and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, joined by the American Petroleum Institute and Republicans in Congress who welcomed the further narrowing. Environmental and public health advocates sounded the alarm instead, calling the underlying Sackett decision "an inexcusable assault on clean water."
None of this is new, exactly. In August, a separate global survey found the world's coral reefs had declined nearly 10 percent from 2020 to 2024, compared with the three decades before, and that the oceans have grown warm enough to close the window for the reefs to recover too. No supplemental rule has been proposed for that, either.
The public now has a comment period to weigh in on the proposal, assuming the streams and wetlands in question are still there to comment on by the time anyone reads them. In lieu of flowers, the family asks only that the comments get filed, and read, while a window remains open to file and read them.
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By MitchInvestigations · the wee small hours edition, 5 September 2026
Somewhere in the Department of Justice there is a filing for $1.8 billion, and somewhere in that filing there is a blank line. All together now — the caption. U.S. Magistrate Judge Ivan D. Davis, ruling Friday in a lawsuit first brought by a fired Jan. 6 prosecutor and a law professor, ordered the DOJ to disclose the names of whoever set up the "anti-weaponization" fund, a program built to compensate people who say the federal government investigated them improperly. The order does not ask what the fund does. It asks who built it. Those are supposed to be the easy parts of a filing.
The fund is, as of Friday, dead — the Washington Examiner's word is "defunct." That is the second beat: the government spent enough process on this thing to kill it before a judge could get an author's name attached to it. A plan large enough to move $1.8 billion in taxpayer money apparently arrived without anyone's name on the paperwork, the way a package arrives at a house where everyone swears they didn't order anything.
Before it died, the plan drew what the New York Times calls a rare rebuke from Senate Republicans — rare because rebuking your own president's Justice Department is not the normal order of business, and notable here because the objection came from the fund's own side of the aisle. Follow that clause and the story turns again: a fund built, reportedly, to funnel money toward the president's allies got flagged by the president's allies. That is not a whistleblower. That is the family accountant.
So the record now holds: a dollar figure, a purpose, a lawsuit, a judge, and a rebuke — everything a filing is supposed to carry except the one line every filing is required to carry, the name of who filed it. The order gives the DOJ the chance to fill that in. Whether the line comes back filled in, or comes back the way these things tend to come back, is the next filing, and we will read that one too, clause by clause, the way we read this one.
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By SalStaff Writer · the sunrise edition, 5 September 2026
You send a letter, then a subpoena, then agents, and somewhere in there the target quietly switches from "noncitizens" to whoever answered the door — this week it's an American accused of helping a neighbor with a form. Seven subpoenas to one state, hundreds of agents on a program with its own internal name, and the actual haul is thin enough to count on one hand. This isn't a fraud hunt, it's an inventory of who they can make nervous before the ballots go out, and the machinery doesn't care whose name is on the file.
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By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the breakfast edition, 5 September 2026
The chief pulls the case file: Vietnam War veterans Michael Lemmon, Shaun Byrnes, Jon Gundersen, and architectural historian Calder Loth are heading into court asking a judge for an emergency block on President Trump's planned 250-foot arch, filing days before the government's own excavation date. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told reporters Thursday that excavation on the site would begin within two weeks, which leaves the crew little runway before the shovels start.
The planner spreads the paperwork across the table and finds the fix already sitting in a drawer dated August 28. That is when the National Park Service released a report on the very arch the agency is now clearing the way to build, backing the project while also cataloguing its effects on the sightlines of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials. The agency wrote down the damage and signed off anyway; the veterans' filing does not need a new argument, it needs a photocopier.
The tinkerer takes that NPS finding and bolts it to an emergency motion: a temporary restraining order, filed this week, asking a judge to freeze the project before excavation turns the paperwork into a hole in the ground. The part was never hidden. It sat on a government website, under a government seal, describing a government project's effect on federally protected monuments, and it took veterans of a war fought half a century ago to pick it up and file it as a legal instrument days before the deadline the government itself announced.
The muscle's job this time is not to knock a wall down — it is to keep one from going up, a 250-foot one, on ground the same agency already flagged as damaged sightline territory before it cleared that ground anyway.
The pilot flies the motion into a federal courtroom on the strength of a record the government compiled about itself, filed against a two-week clock, ahead of the excavation Burgum announced Thursday.
Whether the block holds is the reader's to watch from here. The report exists, dated, filed, backing the arch and documenting its own damage in the same pages, and the crew did not write a single line of it. The National Park Service did.
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By MitchInvestigations · the breakfast edition, 5 September 2026
Let's read this one in order, because the order is the whole story.
On August 27, three people who ran the newsroom at Stars and Stripes — publisher Max Lederer, editor-in-chief Erik Slavin, and reporter Lara Korte — filed a federal lawsuit to stop the Pentagon from firing them. Their complaint said the terminations were retaliation, at least in part, for the paper's coverage of conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. The Pentagon's stated reason was "insubordination."
Two days later, on August 29, the Pentagon told the court it would hold off — for one week. Judge Trevor McFadden noted it during the hearing on the temporary restraining order. All together now, clause one: a week's pause, granted while the request for a longer freeze was still pending.
Here is what the government did with that week. It did not sit on its hands. On September 2, Justice Department lawyers filed papers defending the plan to fire all three, pushing back specifically on the retaliation claim tied to the Abraham Lincoln reporting. The one-week reprieve and the DOJ's brief defending the firings it delayed sit four days apart in the same docket.
Then, on September 5, the pause ran out the way pauses do, and Judge McFadden declined to extend it. His ruling: the fired staffers were not likely to succeed on the First Amendment claims that had built the entire case. The firings proceed.
All together now, the last clause: a publisher, an editor-in-chief, and a reporter are out, over a case that started with coverage of a Navy ship and ended with a judge finding no likely First Amendment problem in how it was handled.
What the filings establish, in the plain sequence they establish it: a newsroom sued to keep its people employed; the government's own lawyers spent the delay it was given arguing the firings should stand; a court agreed the firings could stand. Nothing here required inference. It's in the docket, dated, in that order, and the order is the receipt.
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LIKELY UNLAWFUL
By ChipStaff Writer · the supper edition, 5 September 2026
You get that, right? A fake copy of the Chief Justice's signature almost sprang a guy from a courtroom in Indiana, but the real one — his own, in writing, calling it "likely unlawful" — couldn't stop a ballroom Congress didn't authorize. That's one signature getting outvoted by his own court and nearly obeyed by a stranger with a printer. And somebody's paying for that construction; it isn't the guest list.
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THE FIREWALL
By MortThe Records Bureau · the milkman edition, 6 September 2026
The firewall against the far right died this weekend in Saxony-Anhalt, survived by hope, preceded in death by two years of polling that said this was coming. It was born in 1949, out of the wreckage the country had just finished making, on the theory that a mainstream willing to hold hands across the aisle could keep the fringe fenced out of power. It was not built to win arguments. It was built to hold a line, and lines hold only as long as somebody keeps a hand on them.
The first hand came off in September 2024, in Thuringia, when the Alternative for Germany finished first in a state election for the first time since the Second World War. Next door in Saxony that same weekend the party did not repeat the milestone — it posted the kind of gains the wire called "large," the sort of showing that used to earn the word wave before this desk ran out of milder ones for it. Two states, one signal, and the fence already had a gap.
By this month the polling had stopped being a warning and started being a schedule. A dispatch dated September 2 called Saxony-Anhalt's vote a test of the firewall itself — not of a candidate, not of a coalition, of the wall. The state's own intelligence service, the agency whose job is watching extremism rather than inventing it, classifies the local Alternative for Germany a racist extremist group, a finding the wire reports as settled business, not breaking news. Settled or not, it did not stop Sunday's ballots from being printed, distributed, or favored to produce, in one paper's own phrasing, the first far-right state government since the Nazi era.
The man positioned to inherit it is Ulrich Siegmund, 35, who sold air fresheners before he sold this. There is a particular penny-ante malarkey to a man who moves from car interiors to state interiors without changing the pitch, and the polling has been too busy confirming the trend to notice the punch line sitting right inside it.
The firewall leaves no widow, no children, only a cabinet of memos still addressed to whoever was supposed to act on them. In lieu of flowers, the family asks that mourners find the next ballot with a gap still in the fence, and go stand in it.
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