Democracy Forward, a left-leaning legal group that represents the plaintiffs, applauded the ruling.
Page B1From§Eachthe milkman edition — 1 October 2026
THE LOSING STREAK
Trump loses his newest H-1B fight and his 26th voter-roll fight to two judges in one week.
As it ran on the front
Start counting on your fingers and you run out before the Justice Department does. On Wednesday a federal judge in Atlanta threw out the government's lawsuit demanding Georgia's complete voter rolls — not the first time, not the tenth, the twenty-sixth time a court has told this administration no when it goes looking for the names, addresses, and registration dates of everyone who voted. The same week, a second federal judge blocked the administration's $100,000 fee on new H-1B visas before it ever took effect. Two courtrooms, one week, the same verdict both times: no.
Rewind two weeks. On September 14, two judges — one of them a Trump appointee — froze a Postal Service rule rewriting how mail ballots get handled, the second freeze of that same rule in a single season, while the Supreme Court still sat on the emergency appeal. The next morning, a third judge blocked the Kennedy Center board's second attempt to put the president's name on the building, ruling that calling it an honor didn't make it legal the second time any more than it did the first. The president called that judge "hostile and conflicted" and pronounced the Kennedy Center "destined to doom" — one way to describe a building that keeps beating him in court.…
…(cont) Here's the part that should bother you more than the losing: none of it changes anything. The visa fee gets refiled. The voter-roll request gets refiled. The ballot rule, blocked twice already, is still waiting on a third shot from the Supreme Court. Losing in court costs the government a filing fee and a bad headline. It does not cost the government the policy. Twenty-six defeats on voter rolls is not a scoreboard, it's a subscription — they lose, they pay nothing real, and the file with your registration date in it stays exactly as open as it was before any judge looked at it.
That's the trick the count is hiding: the judiciary is doing its job, over and over, and the administration is treating every ruling as a rounding error on the way to the same outcome anyway. A 26th loss isn't a wall. It's a toll booth. And the toll comes out of a budget that was never going to run dry, because it isn't the administration's money being spent to keep asking — it's yours, in postage, in court costs, in the hours it takes twenty-six judges to say the same word.
“Twenty-six times a judge tells the Justice Department no on the voter rolls, and the next move looks the same every time: file again. That's not bad luck, that's a business model — losing in court doesn't cost them the file, it just costs them a Wednesday. They keep asking for your name and your address because losing doesn't make them stop.”
“Look, every administration gets sued — that's not a scandal, that's Tuesday. The Justice Department has every right to check that voter rolls are accurate, that's just good governance, and the visa fee was about protecting American jobs. Twenty-six dismissals is twenty-six examples of an activist judiciary overruling the executive, not — okay, maybe it is twenty-six examples of something, but it's not what you think.”
The receipts
A federal judge on Wednesday dismissed a Department of Justice lawsuit seeking Georgia’s complete voter rolls, marking the department’s 26th court defeat in its nationwide campaign to obtain sensitive voter information. U.S. District Judge Victoria Marie Calvert, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ruled that federal law did not…
· Trump Says Kennedy Center Is 'Destined to Doom' After Judge Stops Him From Slapping His Name on It from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Trump disses 'hostile and conflicted' judge who blocked Kennedy Center renaming from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Second judge freezes Trump mail ballot plan as Supreme Court ruling looms from the morgue, 14 Sep 2026
· Trump-nominated judge blocks USPS mail-in ballot rule as Supreme Court weighs case from the morgue, 14 Sep 2026
· Federal judge dismisses DOJ lawsuit challenging California policy allowing biological males in girls’ sports from the morgue, 3 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.