Trump administration asks Supreme Court for the ballot power California's court just ruled illegal, nationwide.

…(cont) I'm sorry, I'm going back to it again, from a different side this time — the part where doing this sort of thing has a cost attached, and I don't mean a receipt with a dollar figure on it, because I don't have one of those. I mean ten days earlier, on September 15th, the President was in front of cameras over a different mail-ballot ruling, a 7-to-2 loss at the U.S. Supreme Court on his own mail-in restrictions, calling the justices "not the people I interviewed." That's a strange thing to say about people who already have the job. I wrote it down anyway.

And I apologize, because here I am again, on the same number, except now I'm stuck on the part where somebody had to actually move it. Not the ruling — the ballots. Six hundred fifty thousand pieces of paper don't relocate themselves. I don't have a receipt telling me how it got done, so I'm not going to guess at the how. But it happened somehow, and that's a different kind of number than the one in the headline.

Which gets me thinking about my garage, if you'll let me, because it's the only comparison I've got handy. I've got a toolbox out there I can't lift anymore without setting it on the workbench first, unloading half of it, then moving the bench, then reloading it. Four trips, one box. I'm not saying that's what happened in Riverside County. I'm saying I don't know what it would take to move something six hundred fifty thousand times the size of my toolbox, and neither do you, and neither, as far as I can tell, does the record.

So here's the last side of it, and then I'll let you go. Because before any of this — before the 25th, before the sheriff, before the ruling — there was September 3rd. That's when the Trump administration went to the same U.S. Supreme Court and asked it to lift a block on a new mail-ballot rule, not for Riverside County, not for California, but for the whole country, for the U.S. Postal Service, ahead of the November elections.

Excuse me — before you go — one more thing, because I almost let it slide. The California court just found that seizing that many ballots in one county was against the law. The petition sitting in front of the same nine justices right now is asking for the authority to do the same thing everywhere ballots move by mail. So tell me — does the number that petition covers come out bigger, or smaller, than more than 650,000?