Supreme Court blocks Trump's mail voting plan three times, clears his citizenship tool the same week

…(cont) So I flip back. I wrote: allowed. Truthout called it a rare victory for the administration's effort to put more federal hands on how the country runs its own elections — is a victory rare because it doesn't happen often, or because it isn't supposed to?

Keep going. Ten days before that, I wrote: blocked. Not allowed — blocked, and not for the first time. The mail-in voting plan had been brought to the same court's emergency docket a third time, and a third time the block held, over the public dissents of two justices, with the election fifty days out at the time. Is a plan that needs three tries at the same docket a plan, or is it a habit?

I drive past the toll plaza on the way to the hardware store, the one with an E-ZPass lane and a cash lane side by side. The E-ZPass lane doesn't stop you — a sensor reads the tag and you're through before you've slowed down. The cash lane stops you every time, window down, whatever you owe counted out by hand. Nobody built those two lanes to feel the same, and nobody driving through either one would mistake which lane makes you wait. Which lane does the citizenship tool sound like to you, and which lane does the mail-in plan sound like, going by what got waved through this month and what got stopped three times?

There's a third thing in the notebook, from the same week, and I almost didn't write it down because it isn't a ruling at all — it's a piece of reporting on where the mail-in restriction came from in the first place, who drafted it, whose idea it started as before it ever got near a docket. I don't have the origin story for the citizenship tool sitting next to it. Is that because nobody asked, or because there wasn't one worth chasing?

I was about to close the notebook — oh, hold on, one more line I flagged and almost skipped past. Same court. Same month. Same nine seats deciding both questions. One tool gets to run through November before anyone's finished arguing about the privacy and purge risks critics raised. One plan sits blocked while the courts keep asking who wrote it and why. I wrote a question mark next to that pairing and never filled in an answer, and I'm not going to start tonight.

So tell me — when I flip back to the page where I'd written the date twice, and I check what's on the other side of the same month, whose paperwork moved and whose didn't, and does the notebook say September 25 once, or does it say September 25 twice?