Supreme Court asked twice in one week to reshape the midterms it's also asked to save.

As it ran on the front

The paper trail on this one starts three doors down from where you'd think. September 3rd, the administration goes to the Supreme Court and asks it to lift a block on a new mail ballot rule for the U.S. Postal Service — a rule a federal audit has already confirmed let ballots get mishandled, but leave that for the footnotes. Two days later, September 5th, Missouri walks into the same building with the same ask in a different jacket: overturn the state supreme court's block on a GOP-drawn congressional map, because, they argue, the state's highest court has created a "federal-election-administration disaster" by making Missouri use the map voters already had. By September 9th that Missouri filing has grown into a full mess the Court is being urged to wade into, per its own docket. Two separate emergency applications, one bench, one November election, six days apart.

You want to know what kind of building does this. In August, this same Court — Chief Justice included — let construction keep going on the White House ballroom even after Roberts himself called it "likely unlawful." Not innocent, not legal — likely unlawful — and the concrete got poured anyway on a solo order, until the full bench split five to three to let it ride. That's the pattern before this pattern: the administration asks, the Court finds a way to say yes first and sorts out the law after.…