Supreme Court blocks Trump's mail voting plan again, then clears his citizenship check for the same midterms

…(cont) Nine days later, September 14th, a different case, same building. The Court declined again. That's the plan blocked a second time now, same effort, same nine seats. Two conservative justices dissented; I wrote their names down and then crossed them back out, because that's not the part I keep coming back to.

Then last week — I have to flip forward to find this one, it's near where I started keeping receipts from the corner store, don't ask — the same Court let the citizenship tool proceed. Truthout called it a rare victory for the administration's push to put more federal hands on how the country runs its own elections. Cleared. Same building, different door.

Here's a thing I do most mornings that I think about now. There's a toll plaza on the way into town with two lanes, one for the transponder and one where you stop and hand somebody cash. Same road, same car, same driver — I go through whichever lane's open, and I've never once thought there was a reason one lane moves and the other doesn't, beyond which one happened to be staffed that day. I don't go looking for a pattern in a toll booth. Should I be looking for one at a building where a mail-in ballot plan gets turned back a second time and a citizenship-verification tool gets waved through the same month?

ProPublica went and found where the mail-in restriction actually came from — traced its origins, they said, before it was ever a plan on a docket. I read that piece again before I trusted it, and wrote down origins with a question mark next to it, because I wanted to know what a thing looks like before it's a thing.

Oh — before you go. The Times ran a retrospective this week too, cataloguing what they called the president's most durable lie: rigged, fraud, hoax, the same word attached to elections for years now, older than anything else in my notebook. I wonder whether that's the word sitting under the block and the second block and the clearance alike — the same claim about a rigged vote used to justify stopping one thing and freeing another. Is that the word doing the work both times, or is it just a word I keep finding twice?