Trump admin appeals to Supreme Court a third time to restrict mail ballots that are already being mailed

…(cont) The Trump administration has gone to the Supreme Court three times now asking for the same thing — permission to change how the Postal Service handles mail ballots before November. Not three requests. The same one. I'm sorry, I keep coming back to this, but three is not a hard number to hold onto, and I still can't get it to sit right.

Start with the date. There was a block on the rule, and late last month the Supreme Court lifted it — the administration asked, the Court said go ahead. Then a federal judge in Massachusetts blocked it a second time, a two-week order, and on August 28th the Justice Department filed an appeal against that one too.

I'm sorry, I keep going back to the dates, but here's the third one: September 3rd. Two wire services filed the story the same day — the administration back at the Supreme Court again, this time calling it an emergency.

September 3rd is not early in this calendar. September 3rd is the week North Carolina starts mailing ballots. It did — September 4th, a Friday. Did the ballots wait for the Court to decide anything first? They didn't. They went out in envelopes, the way they do every cycle, addressed to people who are going to open their mailboxes and find them there whether the rule about them ever gets resolved.

There's a toll plaza on the turnpike near me with a change basket that doesn't always take quarters clean. You throw one in, the arm doesn't lift, you throw another. Fine — that's twice. Nobody behind you thinks much of a second try. It's the third quarter into the same basket that gets somebody two cars back leaning on the horn.

I'm sorry — I think that's the fourth time I've said "third" in this column, and it's not because I like the sound of it. It's the actual count. Filed, blocked. Filed again, blocked again. Filed a third time this week, while the ballots the whole fight is supposedly about are already sealed and already loaded onto trucks by people whose names aren't on any of the filings.

My wife asked me why I care about a mail rule in a state I've never lived in. I didn't have a clean answer for her. I know that the fan belt on my car is going to fail once, and when it does I'll fix it once — I can't afford to keep bringing it back to the same shop asking for the same thing to come out different.

Excuse me — before you go. I said I only trusted one number this week, the sixty-one dollars. That's not true anymore, is it? There's a second one. The third appeal.