#Attorney Irvin Box

[wyrmghost]

Hello I’m Arthur (he/him), but I’ve been called Wyrm so much that it’s basically my nickname so that’s cool too.

My commissions are open via Venmo

I mostly draw my ocs and the object of whatever my current hyperfixation is and occasionally just things I have a normal amount of interest in.

Currently the fandoms I interact with and occasionally draw things for are (the bolded ones are hyperfixations)

Ace Attorney

Ninjago

Hermitcraft

The Life Series

Trigun Stampede

If you’d like to request I draw something or just want to give me ideas or say something random don’t hesitate to hit up my ask box!

OC STUFF

my oc tag is #my oc stuff

My oc’s and their stories are (this isn’t even all of them just the ones I draw more often)

Liar Street

Reign

Nikolai

Valentine

Riley

Daniel

Annie

Abscond

Terra

Matt

Lyon

Sinoco

Rowan

Robot/android story

Charlie

Benedict

lilie

stage performer story

Clement

Jynx

Gay urban fantasy story

Luca

Dahlia

Eve

Derek

Clow

Misty

Bethany

God run city story

Sarah

Alondra

Nick

Leo

London

Cracks

Ritz

gamby

ww2 secret husband podcast

Percival

thomas

hunted

Claus

Devin

Molly

superheros?

Neil

Calibri

Sealia

Fenrick

Baxter

Nicole

Ace attorney ocs

Percy Irvin (perceiving)(private investigator)

Obasea Irvin (observing)

Sea Irvin (serving)

Una Irvin (unnerving)

and many many more

[benandstevesposts]

MAN WANTED IN CALIFORNIA RAPPER MURDER ARRESTED IN OKLAHOMA

Man wanted for murder of CA. Rapper arrested in Blanchard Okla. according to court records. Attorney Irvin Box says "Isaiah Reupena is in McClain County jail accused (along w/ an accomplice) of killing Melota Lasi Jr, aka Cutty Banks, outside of CA. mall

[tcm]

The Longevity of George Segal by Susan King

Newer generations of audiences primarily know George Segal as a sitcom actor who played the publisher of a fashion magazine on the NBC comedy series Just Shoot Me!, and for the past six seasons, the amiable grandfather always eager to give advice on ABC’s The Goldbergs. But to baby boomers, he was one of top leading men of the 1970s. He may not have reached the heights of Burt Reynolds, Paul Newman, Robert Redford or Al Pacino during the decade, but nobody could do romantic comedy better than Segal. He was charming, adorable, sexy and a bit world-weary. Sort of a neurotic New York Jewish Cary Grant with a fabulous head of thick air.

Segal starred in such comedies as 1970’s WHERE’S POPPA? (the funniest scene is when Ruth Gordon pulls down his pants and bites him on the tuchus) and THE OWL AND THE PUSSYCAT, THE HOT ROCK (‘72), BLUME IN LOVE (‘73) and A TOUCH OF CLASS (‘73), for which he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor and his costar, Glenda Jackson, took home the Best Actress Oscar.

Segal, now 85, told me during an interview I did with him in 2011 for the Los Angeles Times at the famed eatery Musso & Franks that he had “no notion I was going to take a comedy direction.” In fact, one of his first major stage roles was in 1956 in Jose Quintero’s legendary off-Broadway production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, starring Jason Robards in his signature role of Hickey.

And when he began in features in the early 1960s, Segal starred in such dramatic fare as 1965’s SHIP OF FOOL; Mike Nichols’ superb WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? (‘66), for which Segal earned an Oscar nomination for supporting actor; the 1966 thriller THE QUILLER MEMORANDUM and that same year, CBS’ broadcast of Arthur Miller’s DEATH OF A SALESMAN.

Segal was also a popular guest on daytime and evening talk shows where he got to demonstrate his goofy charming side. He’d always bring out his banjo and sing the 1909 song “The Yama Yama Man.” Housewives and mothers—mine included—fell in love with him.

And so did director Jack Smight, who, Segal noted, thought he would be perfect for his 1968 dark comedy NO WAY TO TREAT A LADY. Segal was pitch perfect as Morris Brummel, a tough-nosed New York detective out to kill a flamboyant serial killer (Rod Steiger) with major mother issue.

Hollywood realized they had a romantic leading man on their hands.

The depth and breadth of Segal’s talent—both comedic and dramatic—can be seen in Bryan Forbes’ searing 1965 World War II drama, KING RAT. Segal plays one of the 10,000 American, Australian and British prisoners at a Japanese POW II. But Segal’s Captain King is a ruthless hustler who runs the black-market operation in the camp. Segal’s skill is also present in Robert Altman’s underrated CALIFORIA SPLIT (‘74), a comedy with dramatic overtones with Segal and Elliott Gould as gamblers who bond over the gambling tables.

Segal is in full flower as a romantic leading man in Paul Mazursky’s comedy BLUME IN LOVE. He plays a divorce attorney who falls in love with the beautiful Nina (Susan Anspach), marries her, cheats on her then tries to win her back after they divorce. The film also stars Marsha Mason in her film debut and a delightful Kris Kristofferson.

At the time of my interview, Segal and the late Mazursky were still the best of friends and met for breakfast several times a month. “I just saw him this morning,” he noted. “I meet these geezers at the Farmer’s Market. We usually talk about showbusiness, the old days and what’s happening now.”

Segal didn’t turn his back on dramas in the 1970s, as witnessed with Irvin Kershner’s superb 1970 dramedy LOVING, in which he plays a commercial artist living in the suburbs with his wife (Eva Marie Saint) and their kids while not dealing very well with a mid-life crisis.

Segal also starred in Sidney Lumet’s 1968 dramedy BYE BYE BRAVERMAN, a box-office flop the filmmaker didn’t like: “It should have been a soufflé, but it turned out a pancake.” The film about four Jewish intellectuals—Segal, Jack Warden, Sorrell Booke and Joseph Wiseman—that travel to a friend’s funeral in a cramped Volkswagen Beetle, may not have excited the critics either, but it’s a wonderful opportunity to catch an early comedic turn by Segal as a public relations writer. Time singled out Segal: “As the story’s central character, actor Segal shows flashes of a comic talent hitherto unexplored by Hollywood.”

By the end of the 1970s and early 80s, Segal’s career slowed because his films weren’t burning up the box office. “Most of us get about 10 years at best [at the top],” Segal confessed. “As you get into playing father roles, the parts dry up because, I don’t mean to say it’s a sex thing, but you have that testosterone vitality. But there are certain actors, like Jack Nicholson, who crested and just kept going. I am in another group, whatever that group is, but I have been tremendously lucky. You just have to keep bellying up to the table.”

[dipulb3]

Republicans continue their nationwide campaign to restrict voting

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/republicans-continue-their-nationwide-campaign-to-restrict-voting/

Republicans continue their nationwide campaign to restrict voting

The vote came after an often-heated debate on the floor of the Texas House with Democratic lawmakers pressing the bill’s author, GOP Rep. Briscoe Cain, to cite examples of the election fraud the bill sought to prevent.

“We don’t need to wait for bad things to happen” to take action, Cain responded at one point.

The vote moves Texas closer to joining a host of other states racing to change the ground rules for future elections, following former President Donald Trump’s repeated and unfounded claims that voter fraud contributed to his loss last November. Around the country, Republicans have cast their effort as needed to restore voter confidence in the integrity of elections. But critics say the nationwide push aims to retain GOP power in key battlegrounds by making it harder for people of color and younger voters to cast their ballots.

There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

“Most of these changes are unnecessary to make voting more efficient or to prevent fraud, which is quite rare in our elections,” said Richard Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California at Irvine. “These measures are political and are being passed on a partisan basis for partisan reasons.”

The Texas measure, which now goes back to the state Senate, would empower partisan poll watchers, increase penalties for voting crimes and bar counties from sending unsolicited applications to vote by mail. It included Democratic amendments, including one that would allow election officials to call the police to remove disruptive partisan poll watchers.

“Under the cover of darkness, the Texas House just passed one of the worst anti-voting bills in the county,” Sarah Labowitz, policy and advocacy director of the ACLU of Texas, said after lawmakers voted to advance the bill in the early morning hours Friday. “SB7 will target votes of color, voters with disabilities and the civil servants who run our elections.”

A separate measure approved previously by the Texas Senate is more expansive. It would allow poll watchers to videotape people receiving assistance to vote and would ban drive-thru voting and other measures employed in urban areas in 2020 that made it easier to vote in the pandemic.

Those provisions still could make into the final law.

State action

In Florida, DeSantis said the new law would “increase transparency and strengthen the security of our elections.” Its critics, such as NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson, called it a “horrifying reminder” of democracy’s “fragility.”

The law brings sweeping changes to Florida’s election rules, such as imposing new identification requirements to request vote-by-mail ballots or to change an address. It also limits the location and hours of ballot drop boxes and requires election workers to monitor boxes. Election supervisors face a $25,000 fine for the failure to do so.

Texas and Florida — both populous and diverse states — are just the latest Republican-led states to move forward with voting restrictions.

Georgia and Iowa already have passed far-reaching election restrictions. Montana has tightened voter ID requirements and ended same-day voter registration. Bills to tighten voting rules also are advancing in the battleground state of Michigan.

And this week, the Republican majority in the Kansas legislature overrode Democratic Gov. Laura Kelly’s vetoes of controversial election bills. As a result, it’s now a misdemeanor for someone in Kansas to collect and return more than 10 ballots — which opponents say will hamper efforts by churches and other organizations to help the elderly and disabled vote.

Meanwhile, legislation introduced Thursday by Republicans in the Ohio House would significantly revise election laws there. Among other things, the GOP package co-authored by Republican state Rep. Bill Seitz would tighten voter ID requirements, eliminate a day of early voting and limit drop box locations to local election offices.

Asked about the moves in Texas and Florida, White House press secretary Jen Psaki on Friday said, “The President’s view — the fact of the matter is that these laws make it harder to vote. That’s not a good thing.”

She said Biden will leave it up to the Justice Department and Attorney General Merrick Garland to make any decisions about whether to intervene in states implementing restrictive voting measures.

Arizona ‘audit’

In Arizona — a state Biden narrowly won last November — a controversial election audit demanded by Republican state senators of the 2020 ballots cast in Maricopa County is underway. Two previous audits by county elections officials found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. The state’s results have long been certified.

This week, the head of the US Department of Justice’s civil rights division wrote to the president of the Arizona Senate, suggesting that the recount by a private contractor of some 2.1 million ballots could violate federal law that requires state and local officials to maintain ballots and election materials for 22 months.

Justice Department official Pamela Karlan also warned that the plan by the recount contractor, Florida-based Cyber Ninjas, to knock on voters’ doors to confirm their addresses could violate federal laws banning voter intimidation.

Ken Bennett, the former Republican secretary of state who is acting as the liaison between the private contractor and Senate Republicans, said there’s no plan to intimidate voters. “If somebody knocks on your door and you don’t want to answer their questions, you don’t have to,” he said.

Senate Republicans in Arizona show no signs of retreat. One state lawmaker, Republican Sen. Wendy Rogers, tweeted this week: ” ‘Justice’ Department – you need to stay in your lane. Do not touch Arizona ballots or machines unless you want to spend time in an Arizona prison.”

Trump has cheered on the recount effort.

On Thursday, Rep. Elise Stefanik, a New York Republican and vocal Trump ally, said she “fully” supported the privately conducted audit in Arizona. Stefanik is the leading contender to replace Rep. Liz Cheney in US House Republican leadership following Cheney’s public repudiation of Trump’s election lies.

“When you talk to any voter across this country, certainly at any Republican event, they are focused on election security and election integrity,” Stefanik said during an appearance on Steve Bannon’s show this week.

“It is important to stand up for these constitutional issues and these are questions that are going to have to be answered before we head into the 2022 midterms so that the American people have faith in our election system,” she added.

Appradab’s Dianne Gallagher, Stephanie Becker, Maegan Vazquez and Wes Breur contributed to this story.

[david-box]

fair warning to anyone voting in-person

from an atlantic article : https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/

Article under the cut

There is a cohort of close observers of our presidential elections, scholars and lawyers and political strategists, who find themselves in the uneasy position of intelligence analysts in the months before 9/11. As November 3 approaches, their screens are blinking red, alight with warnings that the political system does not know how to absorb. They see the obvious signs that we all see, but they also know subtle things that most of us do not. Something dangerous has hove into view, and the nation is lurching into its path.

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The danger is not merely that the 2020 election will bring discord. Those who fear something worse take turbulence and controversy for granted. The coronavirus pandemic, a reckless incumbent, a deluge of mail-in ballots, a vandalized Postal Service, a resurgent effort to suppress votes, and a trainload of lawsuits are bearing down on the nation’s creaky electoral machinery.

Something has to give, and many things will, when the time comes for casting, canvassing, and certifying the ballots. Anything is possible, including a landslide that leaves no doubt on Election Night. But even if one side takes a commanding early lead, tabulation and litigation of the “overtime count”—millions of mail-in and provisional ballots—could keep the outcome unsettled for days or weeks.

If we are lucky, this fraught and dysfunctional election cycle will reach a conventional stopping point in time to meet crucial deadlines in December and January. The contest will be decided with sufficient authority that the losing candidate will be forced to yield. Collectively we will have made our choice—a messy one, no doubt, but clear enough to arm the president-elect with a mandate to govern.

As a nation, we have never failed to clear that bar. But in this election year of plague and recession and catastrophized politics, the mechanisms of decision are at meaningful risk of breaking down. Close students of election law and procedure are warning that conditions are ripe for a constitutional crisis that would leave the nation without an authoritative result. We have no fail-safe against that calamity. Thus the blinking red lights.

“We could well see a protracted postelection struggle in the courts and the streets if the results are close,” says Richard L. Hasen, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law and the author of a recent book called Election Meltdown. “The kind of election meltdown we could see would be much worse than 2000’s Bush v. Gore case.”

A lot of people, including Joe Biden, the Democratic Party nominee, have mis­conceived the nature of the threat. They frame it as a concern, unthinkable for presidents past, that Trump might refuse to vacate the Oval Office if he loses. They generally conclude, as Biden has, that in that event the proper authorities “will escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”

The worst case, however, is not that Trump rejects the election outcome. The worst case is that he uses his power to prevent a decisive outcome against him. If Trump sheds all restraint, and if his Republican allies play the parts he assigns them, he could obstruct the emergence of a legally unambiguous victory for Biden in the Electoral College and then in Congress. He could prevent the formation of consensus about whether there is any outcome at all. He could seize on that un­certainty to hold on to power.

Trump’s state and national legal teams are already laying the groundwork for postelection maneuvers that would circumvent the results of the vote count in battleground states. Ambiguities in the Constitution and logic bombs in the Electoral Count Act make it possible to extend the dispute all the way to Inauguration Day, which would bring the nation to a precipice. The Twentieth Amendment is crystal clear that the president’s term in office “shall end” at noon on January 20, but two men could show up to be sworn in. One of them would arrive with all the tools and power of the presidency already in hand.

“We are not prepared for this at all,” Julian Zelizer, a Prince­ton professor of history and public affairs, told me. “We talk about it, some worry about it, and we imagine what it would be. But few people have actual answers to what happens if the machinery of democracy is used to prevent a legitimate resolution to the election.”

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede.

Nineteen summers ago, when counterterrorism analysts warned of a coming attack by al‑Qaeda, they could only guess at a date. This year, if election analysts are right, we know when the trouble is likely to come. Call it the Interregnum: the interval from Election Day to the next president’s swearing-in. It is a temporal no-man’s-land between the presidency of Donald Trump and an uncertain successor—a second term for Trump or a first for Biden. The transfer of power we usually take for granted has several intermediate steps, and they are fragile.

The Interregnum comprises 79 days, carefully bounded by law. Among them are “the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December,” this year December 14, when the electors meet in all 50 states and the District of Columbia to cast their ballots for president; “the 3d day of January,” when the newly elected Congress is seated; and “the sixth day of January,” when the House and Senate meet jointly for a formal count of the electoral vote. In most modern elections these have been pro forma milestones, irrelevant to the outcome. This year, they may not be.

“Our Constitution does not secure the peaceful transition of power, but rather presupposes it,” the legal scholar Lawrence Douglas wrote in a recent book titled simply Will He Go? The Interregnum we are about to enter will be accompanied by what Douglas, who teaches at Amherst, calls a “perfect storm” of adverse conditions. We cannot turn away from that storm. On November 3 we sail toward its center mass. If we emerge without trauma, it will not be an unbreakable ship that has saved us.

Let us not hedge about one thing. Donald Trump may win or lose, but he will never concede. Not under any circumstance. Not during the Interregnum and not afterward. If compelled in the end to vacate his office, Trump will insist from exile, as long as he draws breath, that the contest was rigged.

Trump’s invincible commitment to this stance will be the most important fact about the coming Interregnum. It will deform the proceedings from beginning to end. We have not experienced anything like it before.

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           Maybe you hesitate. Is it a fact that if Trump loses, he will reject defeat, come what may? Do we know that? Technically, you feel obliged to point out, the proposition is framed in the future conditional, and prophecy is no man’s gift, and so forth. With all due respect, that is pettifoggery. We know this man. We cannot afford to pretend.

Trump’s behavior and declared intent leave no room to suppose that he will accept the public’s verdict if the vote is going against him. He lies prodigiously—to manipulate events, to secure advantage, to dodge accountability, and to ward off injury to his pride. An election produces the perfect distillate of all those motives.

Pathology may exert the strongest influence on Trump’s choices during the Interregnum. Well-supported arguments, some of them in this magazine, have made the case that Trump fits the diagnostic criteria for psychopathy and narcissism. Either disorder, by its medical definition, would render him all but incapable of accepting defeat.

Conventional commentary has trouble facing this issue squarely. Journalists and opinion makers feel obliged to add disclaimers when asking “what if” Trump loses and refuses to concede. “The scenarios all seem far-fetched,” Politico wrote, quoting a source who compared them to science fiction. Former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade, writing in The Atlantic in February, could not bring herself to treat the risk as real: “That a president would defy the results of an election has long been unthinkable; it is now, if not an actual possibility, at the very least something Trump’s supporters joke about.”

But Trump’s supporters aren’t the only people who think extra­constitutional thoughts aloud. Trump has been asked directly, during both this campaign and the last, whether he will respect the election results. He left his options brazenly open. “What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. Okay?” he told moderator Chris Wallace in the third presidential debate of 2016. Wallace took another crack at him in an interview for Fox News this past July. “I have to see,” Trump said. “Look, you—I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”

How will he decide when the time comes? Trump has answered that, actually. At a rally in Delaware, Ohio, in the closing days of the 2016 campaign, he began his performance with a signal of breaking news. “Ladies and gentlemen, I want to make a major announcement today. I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters, and to all the people of the United States, that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election.” He paused, then made three sharp thrusts of his forefinger to punctuate the next words: “If … I … win!” Only then did he stretch his lips in a simulacrum of a smile.

The question is not strictly hypothetical. Trump’s respect for the ballot box has already been tested. In 2016, with the presidency in hand, having won the Electoral College, Trump baldly rejected the certified tallies that showed he had lost the popular vote by a margin of 2,868,692. He claimed, baselessly but not coincidentally, that at least 3 million undocumented immigrants had cast fraudulent votes for Hillary Clinton.

All of which is to say that there is no version of the Interregnum in which Trump congratulates Biden on his victory. He has told us so. “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election,” Trump said at the Republican National Convention on August 24. Unless he wins a bona fide victory in the Electoral College, Trump’s refusal to concede—his mere denial of defeat—will have cascading effects.

The ritual that marks an election’s end took its contemporary form in 1896. On the Thursday evening after polls closed that year, unwelcome news reached the Democratic presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan. A dispatch from Senator James K. Jones, the chair of the Democratic National Committee, informed him that “sufficient was known to make my defeat certain,” Bryan recalled in a memoir.

He composed a telegram to his Republican opponent, William McKinley. “Senator Jones has just informed me that the returns indicate your election, and I hasten to extend my congratulations,” Bryan wrote. “We have submitted the issue to the American people and their will is law.”

After Bryan, concession became a civic duty, performed by telegram or telephone call and then by public speech. Al Smith brought the concession speech to radio in 1928, and it migrated to television soon afterward.

Like other rituals, concessions developed a liturgy. The defeated candidate comes out first. He thanks supporters, declares that their cause will live on, and acknowledges that the other side has prevailed. The victor begins his own remarks by honoring the surrender.

Concessions employ a form of words that linguists call performative speech. The words do not describe or announce an act; the words themselves are the act. “The concession speech, then, is not merely a report of an election result or an admission of defeat,” the political scientist Paul E. Corcoran has written. “It is a constitutive enactment of the new president’s authority.”

In actual war, not the political kind, concession is optional. The winning side may take by force what the losing side refuses to surrender. If the weaker party will not sue for peace, its ramparts may be breached, its headquarters razed, and its leaders taken captive or put to death. There are places in the world where political combat still ends that way, but not here. The loser’s concession is therefore hard to replace.

Consider the 2000 election, which may appear at first glance to demonstrate otherwise. Al Gore conceded to George W. Bush on Election Night, then withdrew his concession and fought a recount battle in Florida until the Supreme Court shut it down. It is commonly said that the Court’s 5–4 ruling decided the contest, but that’s not quite right.

The Court handed down its ruling in Bush v. Gore on December 12, six days before the Electoral College would convene and weeks before Congress would certify the results. Even with canvassing halted in Florida, Gore had the constitutional means to fight on, and some advisers urged him to do so. If he had brought the dispute to Congress, he would have held high ground as the Senate’s presiding officer.

Not until Gore addressed the nation on December 13, the day after the Court’s decision, did the contest truly end. Speaking as a man with unexpended ammunition, Gore laid down his arms. “I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College,” he said. “And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.”

We have no precedent or procedure to end this election if Biden seems to carry the Electoral College but Trump refuses to concede. We will have to invent one.

Trump is, by some measures, a weak authoritarian. He has the mouth but not the muscle to work his will with assurance. Trump denounced Special Counsel Robert Mueller but couldn’t fire him. He accused his foes of treason but couldn’t jail them. He has bent the bureaucracy and flouted the law but not broken free altogether of their restraints.

A proper despot would not risk the inconvenience of losing an election. He would fix his victory in advance, avoiding the need to overturn an incorrect outcome. Trump cannot do that.

But he’s not powerless to skew the proceedings—first on Election Day and then during the Interregnum. He could disrupt the vote count where it’s going badly, and if that does not work, try to bypass it altogether. On Election Day, Trump and his allies can begin by suppressing the Biden vote.

There is no truth to be found in dancing around this point, either: Trump does not want Black people to vote. (He said as much in 2017—on Martin Luther King Day, no less—to a voting-­rights group co-founded by King, according to a recording leaked to Politico.) He does not want young people or poor people to vote. He believes, with reason, that he is less likely to win reelection if turnout is high at the polls. This is not a “both sides” phenomenon. In present-day politics, we have one party that consistently seeks advantage in depriving the other party’s adherents of the right to vote.

Just under a year ago, Justin Clark gave a closed-door talk in Wisconsin to a select audience of Republican lawyers. He thought he was speaking privately, but someone had brought a recording device. He had a lot to say about Election Day operations, or “EDO.”

At the time, Clark was a senior lieutenant with Trump’s re­election campaign; in July, he was promoted to deputy campaign manager. “Wisconsin’s the state that is going to tip this one way or the other … So it makes EDO really, really, really important,” he said. He put the mission bluntly: “Traditionally it’s always been Republicans suppressing votes … [Democrats’] voters are all in one part of the state, so let’s start playing offense a little bit. And that’s what you’re going to see in 2020. That’s what’s going to be markedly different. It’s going to be a much bigger program, a much more aggressive program, a much better-funded program, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.” (Clark later claimed that his remarks had been misconstrued, but his explanation made no sense in context.)

Of all the favorable signs for Trump’s Election Day operations, Clark explained, “first and foremost is the consent decree’s gone.” He was referring to a court order forbidding Republican operatives from using any of a long list of voter-purging and intimidation techniques. The expiration of that order was a “huge, huge, huge, huge deal,” Clark said.

His audience of lawyers knew what he meant. The 2020 presidential election will be the first in 40 years to take place without a federal judge requiring the Republican National Committee to seek approval in advance for any “ballot security” operations at the polls. In 2018, a federal judge allowed the consent decree to expire, ruling that the plaintiffs had no proof of recent violations by Republicans. The consent decree, by this logic, was not needed, because it worked.

The order had its origins in the New Jersey gubernatorial election of 1981. According to the district court’s opinion in Democratic National Committee v. Republican National Committee, the RNC allegedly tried to intimidate voters by hiring off-duty law-enforcement officers as members of a “National Ballot Security Task Force,” some of them armed and carrying two-way radios. According to the plaintiffs, they stopped and questioned voters in minority neighborhoods, blocked voters from entering the polls, forcibly restrained poll workers, challenged people’s eligibility to vote, warned of criminal charges for casting an illegal ballot, and generally did their best to frighten voters away from the polls. The power of these methods relied on well-founded fears among people of color about contact with police.

This year, with a judge no longer watching, the Republicans are recruiting 50,000 volunteers in 15 contested states to monitor polling places and challenge voters they deem suspicious-looking. Trump called in to Fox News on August 20 to tell Sean Hannity, “We’re going to have sheriffs and we’re going to have law enforcement and we’re going to have, hopefully, U.S. attorneys” to keep close watch on the polls. For the first time in decades, according to Clark, Republicans are free to combat voter fraud in “places that are run by Democrats.”

Trump’s crusade against voting by mail

is the strategy of a man who expects to be outvoted and means to hobble the count.

Voter fraud is a fictitious threat to the outcome of elections, a pretext that Republicans use to thwart or discard the ballots of likely opponents. An authoritative report by the Brennan Center for Justice, a nonpartisan think tank, calculated the rate of voter fraud in three elections at between 0.0003 percent and 0.0025 percent. Another investigation, from Justin Levitt at Loyola Law School, turned up 31 credible allegations of voter impersonation out of more than 1 billion votes cast in the United States from 2000 to 2014. Judges in voting-rights cases have made comparable findings of fact.

Nonetheless, Republicans and their allies have litigated scores of cases in the name of preventing fraud in this year’s election. State by state, they have sought—with some success—to purge voter rolls, tighten rules on provisional votes, uphold voter-­identification requirements, ban the use of ballot drop boxes, reduce eligibility to vote by mail, discard mail-in ballots with technical flaws, and outlaw the counting of ballots that are postmarked by Election Day but arrive afterward. The intent and effect is to throw away votes in large numbers.

These legal maneuvers are drawn from an old Republican playbook. What’s different during this cycle, aside from the ferocity of the efforts, is the focus on voting by mail. The president has mounted a relentless assault on postal balloting at the exact moment when the coronavirus pandemic is driving tens of millions of voters to embrace it.

This year’s presidential election will see voting by mail on a scale unlike any before—some states are anticipating a tenfold increase in postal balloting. A 50-state survey by The Washington Post found that 198 million eligible voters, or at least 84 percent, will have the option to vote by mail.

Trump has denounced mail-in voting often and urgently, airing fantastical nightmares. One day he tweeted, “mail-in voting will lead to massive fraud and abuse. it will also lead to the end of our great republican party. we can never let this tragedy befall our nation.” Another day he pointed to an imaginary—and easily debunked—scenario of forgery from abroad: “rigged 2020 election: millions of mail-in ballots will be printed by foreign countries, and others. it will be the scandal of our times!”

By late summer Trump was declaiming against mail-in voting an average of nearly four times a day—a pace he had reserved in the past for existential dangers such as impeachment and the Mueller investigation: “Very dangerous for our country.” “A catastrophe.” “The greatest rigged election in history.”

Summer also brought reports that the U.S. Postal Service, the government’s most popular agency, was besieged from within by Louis DeJoy, Trump’s new postmaster general and a major Republican donor. Service cuts, upper-management restructuring, and chaotic operational changes were producing long delays. At one sorting facility, the Los Angeles Times reported, “workers fell so far behind processing packages that by early August, gnats and rodents were swarming around containers of rotted fruit and meat, and baby chicks were dead inside their boxes.”

In the name of efficiency, the Postal Service began de­commissioning 10 percent of its mail-sorting machines. Then came word that the service would no longer treat ballots as first-class mail unless some states nearly tripled the postage they paid, from 20 to 55 cents an envelope. DeJoy denied any intent to slow down voting by mail, and the Postal Service withdrew the plan under fire from critics.

If there were doubts about where Trump stood on these changes, he resolved them at an August 12 news conference. Democrats were negotiating for a $25 billion increase in postal funding and an additional $3.6 billion in election assistance to states. “They don’t have the money to do the universal mail-in voting. So therefore, they can’t do it, I guess,” Trump said. “It’s very simple. How are they going to do it if they don’t have the money to do it?”

What are we to make of all this?

In part, Trump’s hostility to voting by mail is a reflection of his belief that more voting is bad for him in general. Democrats, he said on Fox & Friends at the end of March, want “levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”

Some Republicans see Trump’s vendetta as self-defeating. “It to me appears entirely irrational,” Jeff Timmer, a former executive director of the Michigan Republican Party, told me. “The Trump campaign and RNC and by fiat their state party organizations are engaging in suppressing their own voter turnout,” including Republican seniors who have voted by mail for years.

But Trump’s crusade against voting by mail is a strategically sound expression of his plan for the Interregnum. The president is not actually trying to prevent mail-in balloting altogether, which he has no means to do. He is discrediting the practice and starving it of resources, signaling his supporters to vote in person, and preparing the ground for post–Election Night plans to contest the results. It is the strategy of a man who expects to be outvoted and means to hobble the count.

Voting by mail does not favor either party “during normal times,” according to a team of researchers at Stanford, but that phrase does a lot of work. Their findings, which were published in June, did not take into account a president whose words alone could produce a partisan skew. Trump’s systematic predictions of fraud appear to have had a powerful effect on Republican voting intentions. In Georgia, for example, a Monmouth University poll in late July found that 60 percent of Democrats but only 28 percent of Republicans were likely to vote by mail. In the battleground states of Pennsylvania and North Carolina, hundreds of thousands more Democrats than Republicans have requested mail-in ballots.

Trump, in other words, has created a proxy to distinguish friend from foe. Republican lawyers around the country will find this useful when litigating the count. Playing by the numbers, they can treat ballots cast by mail as hostile, just as they do ballots cast in person by urban and college-town voters. Those are the ballots they will contest.

The battle space of the Interregnum, if trends hold true, will be shaped by a phenomenon known as the “blue shift.”

Edward Foley, an Ohio State professor of constitutional law and a specialist in election law, pioneered research on the blue shift. He found a previously un­remarked-upon pattern in the overtime count—the canvass after Election Night that tallies late-reporting precincts, un­processed absentee votes, and provisional ballots cast by voters whose eligibility needed to be confirmed. For most of American history, the overtime count produced no predictably partisan effect. In any given election year, some states shifted red in the canvass after Election Day and some shifted blue, but the shifts were seldom large enough to matter.

Two things began to change about 20 years ago. The overtime count got bigger, and it trended more and more blue. In an updated paper this year, Foley and his co-author, Charles Stewart III of MIT, said they could not fully explain why the shift favors Democrats. (Some factors: Urban returns take longer to count, and most provisional ballots are cast by young, low-income, or mobile voters, who lean blue.) During overtime in 2012, Barack Obama strengthened his winning margins in swing states like Florida (with a net increase of 27,281 votes), Michigan (60,695), Ohio (65,459), and Pennsylvania (26,146). Obama would have won the presidency anyway, but shifts of that magnitude could have changed the outcomes of many a closer contest. Hillary Clinton picked up tens of thousands of overtime votes in 2016, but not enough to save her.

The blue shift has yet to decide a presidential election, but it upended the Arizona Senate race in 2018. Republican Martha McSally seemed to have victory in her grasp with a lead of 15,403 votes the day after Election Day. Canvassing in the days that followed swept the Democrat, Kyrsten Sinema, into the Senate with “a gigantic overtime gain of 71,303 votes,” Foley wrote.

It was Florida, however, that seized Trump’s attention that year. On Election Night, Republicans were leading in tight contests for governor and U.S. senator. As the blue shift took effect, Ron DeSantis watched his lead shrink by 18,416 votes in the governor’s race. Rick Scott’s Senate margin fell by 20,231. By early morning on November 12, six days after Election Day, Trump had seen enough. “The Florida Election should be called in favor of Rick Scott and Ron DeSantis in that large numbers of new ballots showed up out of nowhere, and many ballots are missing or forged,” he tweeted, baselessly. “An honest vote count is no longer possible—ballots massively infected. Must go with Election Night!”

Trump was panicked enough by the blue shift in somebody else’s election to fabricate allegations of fraud. In this election, when his own name is on the ballot, the blue shift could be the largest ever observed. Mail-in votes require more time to count even in a normal year, and this year there will be tens of millions more of them than in any election before. Many states forbid the processing of early-arriving mail ballots before Election Day; some allow late-arriving ballots to be counted.

“Any scenario that you come up with will not be as weird as the reality of it,” a Trump legal adviser says.

Trump’s instinct as a spectator in 2018—to stop the count—looks more like strategy this year. “There are results that come in Election Night,” a legal adviser to Trump’s national campaign, who would not agree to be quoted by name, told me. “There’s an expectation in the country that there will be winners and losers called. If the Election Night results get changed because of the ballots counted after Election Day, you have the basic ingredients for a shitstorm.”

There is no “if” about it, I said. The count is bound to change. “Yeah,” the adviser agreed, and canvassing will produce more votes for Biden than for Trump. Democrats will insist on dragging out the canvass for as long as it takes to count every vote. The resulting conflict, the adviser said, will be on their heads.

“They are asking for it,” he said. “They’re trying to maximize their electoral turnout, and they think there are no downsides to that.” He added, “There will be a count on Election Night, that count will shift over time, and the results when the final count is given will be challenged as being inaccurate, fraudulent—pick your word.”

The worst case for an orderly count is also considered by some election modelers the likeliest: that Trump will jump ahead on Election Night, based on in-person returns, but his lead will slowly give way to a Biden victory as mail-in votes are tabulated. Josh Mendelsohn, the CEO of the Democratic data-modeling firm Hawkfish, calls this scenario “the red mirage.” The turbulence of that interval, fed by street protests, social media, and Trump’s desperate struggles to lock in his lead, can only be imagined. “Any scenario that you come up with will not be as weird as the reality of it,” the Trump legal adviser said.

Election lawyers speak of a “margin of litigation” in close races. The tighter the count in early reports, and the more votes remaining to count, the greater the incentive to fight in court. If there were such a thing as an Election Administrator’s Prayer, as some of them say only half in jest, it would go, “Lord, let there be a landslide.”

Could a landslide spare us conflict in the Interregnum? In theory, yes. But the odds are not promising.

It is hard to imagine a Trump lead so immense on Election Night that it places him out of Biden’s reach. Unless the swing states manage to count most of their mail-in ballots that night, which will be all but impossible for some of them, the expectation of a blue shift will keep Biden fighting on. A really big Biden lead on Election Night, on the other hand, could leave Trump without plausible hope of catching up. If this happens, we may see it first in Florida. But this scenario is awfully optimistic for Biden, considering the GOP advantage among in-person voters, and in any case Trump will not concede defeat. This early in the Interregnum, he will have practical options to keep the contest alive.

Both parties are bracing for a torrent of emergency motions in state and federal courts. They have already been skirmishing from courthouse to courthouse all year in more than 40 states, and Election Day will begin a culminating phase of legal combat.

Mail-in ballots will have plenty of flaws for the Trump lawyers to seize upon. Voting by mail is more complicated than voting in person, and technical errors are common­place at each step. If voters supply a new address, or if they write a different version of their name (for example, by shortening Benjamin to Ben), or if their signature has changed over the years, or if they print their name on the signature line, or if they fail to seal the ballot inside an inner security envelope, their votes may not count. With in-person voting, a poll worker in the precinct can resolve small errors like these, for instance by directing a voter to the correct signature line, but people voting by mail may have no opportunity to address them.

During the primaries this spring, Republican lawyers did dry runs for the November vote at county election offices around the country. An internal memo prepared by an attorney named J. Matthew Wolfe for the Pennsylvania Republican Party in June reported on one such exercise. Wolfe, along with another Republican lawyer and a member of the Trump campaign, watched closely but did not intervene as election commissioners in Philadelphia canvassed mail-in and provisional votes. Wolfe cataloged imperfections, taking note of objections that his party could have raised.

There were missing signatures and partial signatures and signatures placed in the wrong spot. There were names on the inner security envelopes, which are supposed to be unmarked, and ballots without security envelopes at all. Some envelopes arrived “without a postmark or with an illegible postmark,” Wolfe wrote. (Watch for postmarks to become the hanging chads of 2020.) Some voters wrote their birthdate where a signature date belonged, and others put down “an impossible date, like a date after the primary election.”

Some of the commissioners’ decisions “were clear violations of the direction in and language of the election code,” Wolfe wrote. He recommended that “someone connected with the party review each application and each mail ballot envelope” in November. That is exactly the plan.

Legal teams on both sides are planning for simultaneous litigation, on the scale of Florida during the 2000 election, in multiple battleground states. “My money would be on Texas, Georgia, and Florida” to be trouble spots, Myrna Pérez, the director of voting rights and elections at the Brennan Center, told me.

There are endless happenstances in any election for lawyers to exploit. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, not far from Wolfe’s Philadelphia experiment, the county Republican committee gathered surveillance-style photographs of purportedly suspicious goings-on at a ballot drop box during the primary. In one sequence, a county employee is described as placing “unsecured ballots” in the trunk of a car. In another, a security guard is said to be “disconnecting the generator which supplies power to the security cameras.” The photos could mean anything—­it’s impossible to tell, out of context—but they are exactly the kind of ersatz evidence that is sure to go viral in the early days of the Interregnum.

The electoral combat will not confine itself to the courtroom. Local election adjudicators can expect to be named and doxed and pilloried as agents of George Soros or antifa. Aggressive crowds of self-proclaimed ballot guardians will be spoiling to reenact the “Brooks Brothers riot” of the Bush v. Gore Florida recount, when demonstrators paid by the Bush campaign staged a violent protest that physically prevented canvassers from completing a recount in Miami-Dade County.

Things like this have already happened, albeit on a smaller scale than we can expect in November. With Trump we must also ask: What might a ruthless incumbent do that has never been tried before?

Suppose that caravans of Trump supporters, adorned in Second Amendment accessories, converge on big-city polling places on Election Day. They have come, they say, to investigate reports on social media of voter fraud. Counter­protesters arrive, fistfights break out, shots are fired, and voters flee or cannot reach the polls.

Then suppose the president declares an emergency. Federal personnel in battle dress, staged nearby in advance, move in to restore law and order and secure the balloting. Amid ongoing clashes, they stay to monitor the canvass. They close the streets that lead to the polls. They take custody of uncounted ballots in order to preserve evidence of fraud.

“The president can’t cancel the election, but what if he says, ‘We’re in an emergency, and we’re shutting down this area for a period of time because of the violence taking place’?” says Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute. If you are in Trump’s camp and heedless of boundaries, he said, “what I would expect is you’re not going to do one or two of these things—you’ll do as many as you can.”

There are variations of the nightmare. The venues of intervention could be post offices. The predicate could be a putative intelligence report on forged ballots sent from China.

This is speculation, of course. But none of these scenarios is far removed from things the president has already done or threatened to do. Trump dispatched the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and sent Department of Homeland Security forces to Portland, Oregon, and Seattle during summertime protests for racial justice, on the slender pretext of protecting federal buildings. He said he might invoke the Insurrection Act of 1807 and “deploy the United States military” to “Democrat-run cities” in order to protect “life and property.” The federal government has little basis to intercede during elections, which are largely governed by state law and administered by about 10,500 local jurisdictions, but no one familiar with Attorney General Bill Barr’s view of presidential power should doubt that he can find authority for Trump.

With every day that passes after November 3, the president and his allies can hammer home the message that the legitimate tabulation is over and the Democrats are refusing to honor the results. Trump has been flogging this horse already for months. In July he tweeted, “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!”

Does it matter what Trump says? It is tempting to liken a vote count to the score at a sporting event. The losing coach can belly­ache all he likes, but when the umpire makes the call, the game is over. An important thing to know about the Interregnum is that there is no umpire—no singular authority who can decide the contest and lay it to rest. There is a series of lesser officiants, each confined in jurisdiction and tangled in opaque rules.

Trump’s strategy for this phase of the Interregnum will be a play for time as much as a concerted attempt to squelch the count and disqualify Biden votes. The courts may eventually weigh in. But by then, the forum of decision may already have moved elsewhere.

The Interregnum allots 35 days for the count and its attendant lawsuits to be resolved. On the 36th day, December 8, an important deadline arrives.

At this stage, the actual tabulation of the vote becomes less salient to the outcome. That sounds as though it can’t be right, but it is: The combatants, especially Trump, will now shift their attention to the appointment of presidential electors.

December 8 is known as the “safe harbor” deadline for appointing the 538 men and women who make up the Electoral College. The electors do not meet until six days later, December 14, but each state must appoint them by the safe-harbor date to guarantee that Congress will accept their credentials. The controlling statute says that if “any controversy or contest” remains after that, then Congress will decide which electors, if any, may cast the state’s ballots for president.

We are accustomed to choosing electors by popular vote, but nothing in the Constitution says it has to be that way. Article II provides that each state shall appoint electors “in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct.” Since the late 19th century, every state has ceded the decision to its voters. Even so, the Supreme Court affirmed in Bush v. Gore that a state “can take back the power to appoint electors.” How and when a state might do so has not been tested for well over a century.

Trump may test this. According to sources in the Republican Party at the state and national levels, the Trump campaign is discussing contingency plans to bypass election results and appoint loyal electors in battleground states where Republicans hold the legislative majority. With a justification based on claims of rampant fraud, Trump would ask state legislators to set aside the popular vote and exercise their power to choose a slate of electors directly. The longer Trump succeeds in keeping the vote count in doubt, the more pressure legislators will feel to act before the safe-harbor deadline expires.

To a modern democratic sensibility, discarding the popular vote for partisan gain looks uncomfortably like a coup, whatever license may be found for it in law. Would Republicans find that position disturbing enough to resist? Would they cede the election before resorting to such a ploy? Trump’s base would exact a high price for that betrayal, and by this point party officials would be invested in a narrative of fraud.

The Trump-campaign legal adviser I spoke with told me the push to appoint electors would be framed in terms of protecting the people’s will. Once committed to the position that the overtime count has been rigged, the adviser said, state lawmakers will want to judge for themselves what the voters intended.

“The state legislatures will say, ‘All right, we’ve been given this constitutional power. We don’t think the results of our own state are accurate, so here’s our slate of electors that we think properly reflect the results of our state,’ ” the adviser said. Democrats, he added, have exposed themselves to this stratagem by creating the conditions for a lengthy overtime.

“If you have this notion,” the adviser said, “that ballots can come in for I don’t know how many days—in some states a week, 10 days—then that onslaught of ballots just gets pushed back and pushed back and pushed back. So pick your poison. Is it worse to have electors named by legislators or to have votes received by Election Day?”

When The Atlantic asked the Trump campaign about plans to circumvent the vote and appoint loyal electors, and about other strategies discussed in the article, the deputy national press secretary did not directly address the questions. “It’s outrageous that President Trump and his team are being villainized for upholding the rule of law and transparently fighting for a free and fair election,” Thea McDonald said in an email. “The mainstream media are giving the Democrats a free pass for their attempts to completely uproot the system and throw our election into chaos.” Trump is fighting for a trustworthy election, she wrote, “and any argument otherwise is a conspiracy theory intended to muddy the waters.”

In Pennsylvania, three Republican leaders told me they had already discussed the direct appointment of electors among themselves, and one said he had discussed it with Trump’s national campaign.

“I’ve mentioned it to them, and I hope they’re thinking about it too,” Lawrence Tabas, the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s chairman, told me. “I just don’t think this is the right time for me to be discussing those strategies and approaches, but [direct appointment of electors] is one of the options. It is one of the available legal options set forth in the Constitution.” He added that everyone’s preference is to get a swift and accurate count. “If the process, though, is flawed, and has significant flaws, our public may lose faith and confidence” in the election’s integrity.

Jake Corman, the state’s Senate majority leader, preferred to change the subject, emphasizing that he hoped a clean vote count would produce a final tally on Election Night. “The longer it goes on, the more opinions and the more theories and the more conspiracies [are] created,” he told me. If controversy persists as the safe-harbor date nears, he allowed, the legislature will have no choice but to appoint electors. “We don’t want to go down that road, but we understand where the law takes us, and we’ll follow the law.”

Republicans control both legislative chambers in the six most closely contested battleground states. Of those, Arizona and Florida have Republican governors, too. In Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, the governors are Democrats.

Foley, the Ohio State election scholar, has mapped the ripple effects if Republican legislators were to appoint Trump electors in defiance of the vote in states like Pennsylvania and Michigan. The Democratic governors would respond by certifying the official count, a routine exercise of their authority, and they would argue that legislators could not lawfully choose different electors after the vote had taken place. Their “certificates of ascertainment,” dispatched to the National Archives, would say that their states had appointed electors committed to Biden. Each competing set of electors would have the imprimatur of one branch of state government.

In Arizona, Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who oversees elections, is a Democrat. She could assert her own power to certify the voting results and forward a slate of Biden electors. Even in Florida, which has unified Republican rule, electors pledged to Biden could meet and certify their own votes in hope of triggering a “controversy or contest” that would leave their state’s outcome to Congress. Much the same thing almost happened during the Florida recount battle of 2000. Republican Governor Jeb Bush certified electors for his brother, George W. Bush, on November 26 of that year, while litigation of the recount was still under way. Gore’s chief lawyer, Ronald Klain, responded by booking a room in the old Florida capitol building for Democratic electors to cast rival ballots for Gore. Only Gore’s concession, five days before the Electoral College vote, mooted that plan.

In any of these scenarios, the Electoral College would convene on December 14 without a consensus on who had legitimate claims to cast the deciding votes.

Rival slates of electors could hold mirror-image meetings in Harris­burg, Lansing, Tallahassee, or Phoenix, casting the same electoral votes on opposite sides. Each slate would transmit its ballots, as the Constitution provides, “to the seat of the government of the United States, directed to the President of the Senate.” The next move would belong to Vice President Mike Pence.

This would be a genuine constitutional crisis, the first but not the last of the Interregnum. “Then we get thrown into a world where anything could happen,” Norm Ornstein says.

Two men are claiming the presidency. The next occasion to settle the matter is more than three weeks away.

January 6 comes just after the new Congress is sworn in. Control of the Senate will be crucial to the presidency now.

Pence, as president of the Senate, would hold in his hands two conflicting electoral certificates from each of several swing states. The Twelfth Amendment says only this about what happens next: “The President of the Senate shall, in the presence of the Senate and the House of Representatives, open all the certificates and the votes shall then be counted.”

Note the passive voice. Who does the counting? Which certificates are counted?

The Trump team would take the position that the constitutional language leaves those questions to the vice president. This means that Pence has the unilateral power to announce his own reelection, and a second term for Trump. Democrats and legal scholars would denounce the self-dealing and point out that Congress filled the gaps in the Twelfth Amendment with the Electoral Count Act, which provides instructions for how to resolve this kind of dispute. The trouble with the instructions is that they are widely considered, in Foley’s words, to be “convoluted and impenetrable,” “confusing and ugly,” and “one of the strangest pieces of statutory language ever enacted by Congress.”

If the Interregnum is a contest in search of an umpire, it now has 535 of them, and a rule book that no one is sure how to read. The presiding officer is one of the players on the field.

Foley has produced a 25,000-word study in the Loyola University Chicago Law Journal that maps out the paths the ensuing fight could take if only one state’s electoral votes are in play.

If Democrats win back the Senate and hold the House, then all roads laid out in the Electoral Count Act lead eventually to a Biden presidency. The reverse applies if Republicans hold the Senate and unexpectedly win back the House. But if Congress remains split, there are conditions in which no decisive outcome is possible—no result that has clear force of law. Each party could cite a plausible reading of the rules in which its candidate has won. There is no tie-breaking vote.

How can it be that Congress slips into unbreakable deadlock? The law is a labyrinth in these parts, too intricate to map in a magazine article, but I can sketch one path.

Suppose Pennsylvania alone sends rival slates of electors, and their 20 votes will decide the presidency.

One reading of the Electoral Count Act says that Congress must recognize the electors certified by the governor, who is a Democrat, unless the House and Senate agree otherwise. The House will not agree otherwise, and so Biden wins Pennsylvania and the White House. But Pence pounds his gavel and rules against this reading of the law, instead favoring another, which holds that Congress must discard both contested slates of electors. The garbled statute can plausibly be read either way.

With Pennsylvania’s electors disqualified, 518 electoral votes remain. If Biden holds a narrow lead among them, he again claims the presidency, because he has “the greatest number of votes,” as the Twelfth Amendment prescribes. But Republicans point out that the same amendment requires “a majority of the whole number of electors.” The whole number of electors, Pence rules, is 538, and Biden is short of the required 270.

On this argument, no one has attained the presidency, and the decision is thrown to the House, with one vote per state. If the current partisan balance holds, 26 out of 50 votes will be for Trump.

Before Pence can move on from Pennsylvania to Rhode Island, which is next on the alphabetical list as Congress counts the vote, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi expels all senators from the floor of her chamber. Now Pence is prevented from completing the count “in the presence of” the House, as the Constitution requires. Pelosi announces plans to stall indefinitely. If the count is still incomplete on Inauguration Day, the speaker herself will become acting president.

Pelosi prepares to be sworn in on January 20 unless Pence reverses his ruling and accepts that Biden won. Pence does not budge. He reconvenes the Senate in another venue, with House Republicans squeezing in, and purports to complete the count, making Trump the president-elect. Three people now have supportable claims to the Oval Office.

There are other paths in the labyrinth. Many lead to dead ends.

This is the next constitutional crisis, graver than the one three weeks before, because the law and the Constitution provide for no other authority to consult. The Supreme Court may yet intervene, but it may also shy away from another traumatizing encounter with a fundamentally political question.

Sixty-four days have passed since the election. Stalemate reigns. Two weeks remain until Inauguration Day.

Foley, who foresaw this impasse, knows of no solution. He cannot tell you how we avoid it under current law, or how it ends. It is not so much, at this point, a question of law. It is a question of power. Trump has possession of the White House. How far will he push boundaries to keep it, and who will push back? It is the same question the president has posed since the day he took office.

I hoped to gain some insight from a series of exercises conducted this summer by a group of former elected officials, academics, political strategists, and lawyers. In four days of simulations, the Transition Integrity Project modeled the election and its aftermath in an effort to find pivot points where things could fall apart.

They found plenty. Some of the scenarios included dueling slates of electors of the kind I have described. In one version it was the Democratic governor of Michigan who first resorted to appointing electors, after Trump ordered the National Guard to halt the vote count and a Trump-friendly guardsman destroyed mail-in ballots. John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair in 2016, led a Biden team in another scenario that was prepared to follow Trump to the edge of civil war, encouraging three blue states to threaten secession. Norm-breaking begat norm-breaking. (Clinton herself, in an August interview for Showtime’s The Circus, caught the same spirit. “Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances,” she said.)

If you are a voter, think about voting in person. If you are at low risk for COVID-19, volunteer to work at the polls.

A great deal has been written about the proceedings, including a firsthand account from my colleague David Frum. But the coverage had a puzzling gap. None of the stories fully explained how the contest ended. I wanted to know who took the oath of office.

I called Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown professor who co-founded the project. Unnervingly, she had no answers for me. She did not know how the story turned out. In half of the simulations, the participants did not make it as far as Inauguration Day.

“We got to points in the scenarios where there was a constitutional impasse, no clear means of resolution in sight, street-level violence,” she said. “I think in one of them we had Trump invoking the Insurrection Act and we had troops in the streets … Five hours had gone by and we sort of said, ‘Okay, we’re done.’ ” She added: “Once things were clearly off the rails, there was no particular benefit to seeing exactly how far off they would go.”

“Our goal in doing this was to try to identify intervention moments, to identify moments where we could then look back and say, ‘What would have changed this? What would have kept it from getting this bad?’ ” Brooks said. The project didn’t make much progress there. No lessons were learned about how to restrain a lawless president once a conflict was under way, no alternative moves devised to stave off disaster. “I suppose you could say we were in terra incognita: no one could predict what would happen anymore,” Brooks told me in a follow-up email.

The political system may no longer be strong enough to preserve its integrity. It’s a mistake to take for granted that election boards and state legislatures and Congress are capable of drawing lines that ensure a legitimate vote and an orderly transfer of power. We may have to find a way to draw those lines ourselves.

There are reforms to consider some other day, when an election is not upon us. Small ones, like clearing up the murky parts of the Electoral Count Act. Big ones, like doing away with the Electoral College. Obvious ones, like appropriating money to help cash-starved election authorities upgrade their operations in order to speed up and secure the count on Election Day.

Right now, the best we can do is an ad hoc defense of democracy. Begin by rejecting the temptation to think that this election will carry on as elections usually do. Something far out of the norm is likely to happen. Probably more than one thing. Expecting other­wise will dull our reflexes. It will lull us into spurious hope that Trump is tractable to forces that constrain normal incumbents.

If you are a voter, think about voting in person after all. More than half a million postal votes were rejected in this year’s primaries, even without Trump trying to suppress them. If you are at relatively low risk for COVID-19, volunteer to work at the polls. If you know people who are open to reason, spread word that it is normal for the results to keep changing after Election Night. If you manage news coverage, anticipate extra­constitutional measures, and position reporters and crews to respond to them. If you are an election administrator, plan for contingencies you never had to imagine before. If you are a mayor, consider how to deploy your police to ward off interlopers with bad intent. If you are a law-enforcement officer, protect the freedom to vote. If you are a legislator, choose not to participate in chicanery. If you are a judge on the bench in a battleground state, refresh your acquaintance with election case law. If you have a place in the military chain of command, remember your duty to turn aside unlawful orders. If you are a civil servant, know that your country needs you more than ever to do the right thing when you’re asked to do otherwise.

Take agency. An election cannot be stolen unless the American people, at some level, acquiesce. One thing Brooks has been thinking about since her exercise came to an end is the power of peaceful protest on a grand scale. “We had players on both sides attempting to mobilize their supporters to turn out in large numbers, and we didn’t really have a good mechanism for deciding, did that make a difference? What kind of difference did that make?” she said. “It left some with some big questions about what if you had Orange Revolution–style mass protest sustained over weeks. What effects would that have?”

Only once, in 1877, has the Interregnum brought the country to the brink of true collapse. We will find no model in that episode for us now.

Four states sent rival slates of electors to Congress in the 1876 presidential race between Democrat Samuel Tilden and Republican Rutherford B. Hayes. When a special tribunal blessed the electors for Hayes, Democrats began parliamentary maneuvers to obstruct the electoral count in Congress. Their plan was to run out the clock all the way to Inauguration Day, when the Republican incumbent, Ulysses S. Grant, would have to step down.

Not until two days before Grant’s term expired did Tilden give in. His concession was based on a repugnant deal for the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, where they were protecting the rights of emancipated Black people. But that was not Tilden’s only inducement.

The threat of military force was in the air. Grant let it be known that he was prepared to declare martial law in New York, where rumor had it that Tilden planned to be sworn in, and to back the inauguration of Hayes with uniformed troops.

That is an unsettling precedent for 2021. If our political institutions fail to produce a legitimate president, and if Trump maintains the stalemate into the new year, the chaos candidate and the commander in chief will be one and the same.

[plusorminuscongress]

New story in Politics from Time: Democrats Just Won Several Major Lawsuits Over Mail Ballots—But Their Fight Continues

After securing a several major court victories on Thursday, Democrats who have been worried about whether the United States Postal Service (USPS) is capable of efficiently and securely delivering ballots before Election Day, breathed a—temporary—sigh of relief.

“We are fortunate to have a system where an attorney general could walk into a courtroom and make that case to a federal judge and put a stop to this madness,” says Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who led the coalition of attorneys general in a federal lawsuit that successfully procured a national temporary injunction against changes at the Postal Service.

In addition to the case led by Ferguson, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court issued a decision Thursday that expanded mail-in voting access in the state, a blow to the Trump campaign, which had been trying to stop that from happening. On Friday, USPS and the state of Colorado also reached a settlement after the Secretary of State, Jena Griswold, sued the Postal Service for sending a postcard with inaccurate information to her constituents, alleging their efforts amounted to disenfranchisement. As part of the settlement agreement, the USPS agreed to destroy any remaining postcards that would have been sent to voters, and allowed Colorado officials review any subsequent election-related materials.

But some election experts still raised a note of caution. President Donald Trump, who has actively and repeatedly questioned, without evidence, the validity of mail voting and future election results, continues to inject uncertainty into the electoral process. And a plethora of voting-rights cases are still winding their way through the courts. “There are still a lot of cases out there on mail-in ballot rules that have yet to be decided and appeals,” Rick Hasen, a law professor at University of California, Irvine and an election law expert, wrote in an e-mail to TIME. “We are not even at half-time when it comes to election litigation.”

But the significance of this week’s court decisions are indisputable. For weeks, Democrats have been alleging that the changes implemented at the United States Postal Service under Postmaster General Louis DeJoy—a longtime donor to Trump—were designed to tilt the election in the President’s favor. In issuing the temporary injunction, the federal judge overseeing case, Stanley Bastian, an Obama appointee, affirmed the Democrats’ argument. “Although not necessarily apparent on the surface, at the heart of DeJoy’s and the Postal Service’s actions is voter disenfranchisement,” Bastian wrote in his decision.

USPS representatives pushed back against Bastian’s ruling. “Any suggestion that there is a politically motivated attack on the efficiency of the Postal Service is completely and utterly without merit,” Lee Moak, chair of the Election Mail Committee and a member of the USPS Board of Governors, said in a statement.

As a result of the injunction, the Postal Service must halt all the policies that have caused a nation-wide slowdown in mail delivery in recent weeks. That includes a directive implemented by DeJoy mandating that all trucks leave processing plants according to schedule, even if they are not yet filled with mail. The decision also requires that the Postal Service treat any election mail as first class, even if it lacks the requisite postage. “We believe this [injunction] will have an impact on the delivery of mail, and by definition, assist with making sure everybody’s ballots are counted,” Washington state’s Ferguson said.

Just hours before that federal court decision, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court ruled in a separate case that the state could receive absentee ballots through November 6, providing that they were postmarked on or before Election Day, and that ballot drop-boxes were permissible. Mark Gaber, director of trial litigation at the bipartisan Campaign Legal Center, described the decision as among the most significant of the cycle. While Pennsylvania adopted vote-by-mail in 2019, he was concerned the state lacked infrastructure—including drop-boxes and extended deadlines—to support the likely surge of mailed ballots during this year’s unprecedented pandemic. “This is probably the state that had the biggest potential problem coming up in November,” he says. “It’s really important these changes happened.”

Vic Walczak, the Legal Director of the Pennsylvania American Civil Liberties Union, which represented organizations who filed an amicus brief in the Pennsylvania case, also claimed victory. “[The decision] will result in more voters being able to cast safe ballots and ultimately have those ballots, and thats what democracy should be all about,” Walczak says.

Sarah Silbiger—Bloomberg/Getty ImagesA voter wears a protective mask while entering an early voting polling location for the 2020 Presidential elections in Arlington, Virginia. on Sept. 18.

But battles still rage on, both in and out of the court. In Pennsylvania, litigation could still continue in the federal courts. In June, the Trump campaign filed a federal suit seeking to prevent Pennsylvania from using drop-boxes. In July, the state Democratic Party responded by filing a suit in state court, arguing that the state’s policy of only counting ballots delivered to county offices by election night was unconstitutional. After that filing, federal Judge J. Nicholas Ranjan, a Trump appointee, temporarily placed the Trump campaign’s suit on hold pending the outcome in the state courts. Ranjan lifted the hold after the Supreme Court’s decision, but noted that the decision “appears to have materially altered many of the claims and defenses in this case.” He requested that the campaign file its response by September 20. A Trump campaign representative did not respond to TIME’s request for comment about a subsequent course of action.

It’s also unclear whether the federal court decision on Thursday halting DeJoy’s reforms at the USPS will have any real effect on speeding up the delivery of election mail. Matthew Titolo, a law professor at West Virginia University who studies the Postal Service, wrote in an e-mail to TIME that if the USPS disregards the injunction, there are solid grounds to hold DeJoy in contempt. But the Postal Service also has grounds to file an appeal, which could potentially put the injunction in limbo. David Partenheimer, a spokesperson for the USPS, said in a statement that the organization is “exploring our legal options.”

It is also unclear if the injunction, even if it goes into effect, will solve the underlying problems at the embattled agency. In ongoing conversations over the past month, more than a dozen postal workers and union advocates have told TIME that the backlog in mail at processing plants—which was causing a slowdown in delivery—was primarily the result of two factors: the removal of sorting machines, and DeJoy’s directive that all trucks leave on time. Titolo says that the latter may be mitigated through the injunction, but it’s unlikely that all of the sorting machines that have been removed will be reinstalled and operational in the next weeks.

In Pennsylvania, the state’s highest court upheld the current policy of rejecting so-called naked ballots—mailed ballots that were not sent inside a provided envelope, for secrecy. Failing to use the proper mailing material or failing to comply with other requirements, like signing the correct forms “are small errors people all the time make, particularly when they are new to voting by mail, as most people in Pennsylvania are,” says Gaber. “Thats unfortunate, and that’s something that needs to be communicated to folks. It’s great to have the deadlines extended, it’s great to have the drop boxes, but people need to take extra care.”

At the end of the week, election officials and voting rights advocates struck an ambivalent tone. While Ferguson, the Washington State Attorney General, praised the federal injunction halting changes to USPS, he lamented that lawsuits were even necessary. “The fact that we’re at a place in our society where…Federal judges have to call out the Postmaster General for using the Postal Service in a political manner—we’ve reached an especially sad state of affairs when that’s the case,” he says.

But Campaign Legal Center’s Gaber described this week’s spate of legal decisions as not only positive, but indicative of an overall trend of ruling in favor of expanded voter enfranchisement. “We’ve made significant headway this year [in voting rights cases],” he says. “Now it’s just a function of the wheels in the process starting to go into motion.”

By Alana Abramson on September 18, 2020 at 03:33PM

[weekendwarriorblog]

The Weekend Warrior Jan. 24, 2020 – THE GENTLEMEN, THE TURNING, THE LAST FULL MEASURE

If you read last week’s column, you’ll already know that I’m no longer with The Beat, so I’ll more than likely be doing all of my box office stuff here for a while. I just won’t promise to write so much about each movie as I did in my Box Office Preview, because a.) I don’t have time, and b.) I’m not getting paid to write this. Sorry if that’s a bit too blatantly honest, but getting paid for my writing matters to me, especially having done it for 25 years.

Before I forget, tonight, Wednesday, January 22, I’m hosting a 30thanniversary screening of Brain Dead, the freaky thriller starring Bills Pullman and Paxton, Bud Cort and George Kennedy. If you’re looking to check out crazy mind-fuck of a movie from 1990, there are still a few tickets left.

Anyway, it’s probably a good thing I didn’t get paid for last week’s column cause I way, way, WAY underestimated the power of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence to bring in audiences after 17 years since Bad Boys II. I thought the movie would make somewhere between $35 and 40 million over the four-day weekend, but it ended up making almost $60 million just over the three-day weekend, and $73 million for the four day, the second best after American Sniper. Obviously, Sony is already developing a fourth movie in the series and presumably they won’t wait another 18 years. Personally, I really liked Bad Boys for Life, as it was way better than Bad Boys II and it was a generally enjoyable and entertaining action-comedy.

Universal’s Dolittlealso did more than I predicted, but it wasn’t as vastly different, just closer to my original prediction last Wednesday before I thought I might be overestimating and lowered it. Waugh, Waugh…

Let’s get to this week…

The movie I’m most excited about this week is THE GENTLEMEN (STXfilms), which is Guy Ritchie’s return to ensemble crime comedy after his foray into large-scale Disney adaptations like Aladdin, which I quite liked, and his “Sherlock Holmes” movies, the first of which I also loved.  Ritchie has a great cast for this one including Matthew McConaughey, Charlie Hunnam, Colin Farrell, Hugh Grant, Henry Golding (from Crazy Rich Asians and the underrated 2019 film Last Christmas), Michelle Dockery (from Downton Abbey) and one of my favorite character actors, Eddie Marsan! Honestly, I don’t know very much else about the movie (as I’m only seeing it on Monday night) but I loved what I saw at CinemaCon last year, and I’ve just been such a huge Ritchie fan going all the way back to Lock, Stock and Two Smokin’ Barrels. (Sadly, I wasn’t able to interview him for this movie due to my other part-time job, but you’ll get an actual review instead!)  Also, I think the movie will do decently but probably not more than $10 million since STX is dropping it into around 2,000 theaters, which isn’t particularly wide.

Mini-Review: Back in the late ‘90s, when Guy Ritchie first made his big debut with Lock, Stock, he was coming on the tail end of a new breed of directors like Tarantino and Smith who proved that screenplay-driven ensemble movies could deliver big audiences. In the time since then, Tarantino has gotten bigger and bigger for that feat, while Ritchie has tried a lot of different things, including last year’s Aladdin.

It’s pretty exciting to see Ritchie returning to the world of crime and to jolly old England with the addition of a few Americans like Matthew McConaughey as mega-wealthy drugdealer Mickey Pearson, who has turned his upper-class connections quite literally into a farm industry. Mickey is ready to sell the business, hoping to get $400 million from Jeremy Strong’s interested investor.

The story is told through a framing sequence involving a strange character named Fletcher, played by Hugh Grant, having an extended conversation with Charlie Hunnam’s Ray, Mickey’s “fixer,” of sorts. It’s another fantastic performance by Grant that really allows him to push the envelope with a heavy cockney accent. Another great performance comes from Colin Farrell as the coach of a group of young and bratty MMA fighers who break into one of Mickey’s farms.

Using this storytelling method, Ritchie doesn’t give his entire hand away at once, instead revealing just what’s necessary to keep the viewer tuned in. The film features another witty script and it’s thoroughly entertaining, although it’s also somewhat confounding at times trying to keep track of all the characters and how they relate.

In that sense, The Gentlemen is slightly flawed, but it’s also a welcome return for Ritchie to do what he does best, and there’s no denying that there’s quite a bit to enjoy here. Rating: 7/10

The third horror movie of January (with another one next week!) is THE TURNING (Universal), a horror take on Henry James’ novel “The Turn of the Screw,” starring Mackenzie Davis (Terminator: Dark Fate), Finn Wolfhard (It) and the adorable Brooklynn Prince from The Florida Project. The basic premise involves a nanny played by Davis, who is brought to an enormous mansion to care for two kids. Once there, she is told by the kids that there are dark forces in the house, and she starts to believe them.  I had a chance to speak to the film’s director, Floria Sigismondi, an amazing visual artist whose only previous feature film was The Runaways, starring Kristen Stewart.  The movie is also written by the Hayes Brothers, who wrote the original The Conjuring, and produced by Roy Lee (The Conjuring and It), so there’s quite a decent pedigree for this movie. I also conducted a great interview with Ms. Sigismondi that you can check out on Next Best Picture.

As the third horror movie this month, I’m not sure this can deliver where the previous two (The Grudge and Underwater) failed, especially without much star power, but because it’s January, and there’s very little else to do, it can probably make $8 to 10 million in its 2,500 theaters.

Opening in moderate release this weekend  (theater count TBD) is filmmaker Todd Robinson’s THE LAST FULL MEASURE (Roadside Attractions), a military drama that the director has been trying to make for a decade. He’s pulled together an amazing cast that includes Christopher Plummer, Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris, Diane Ladd, Sebastian Stan, Bradley Whitford, Peter Fonda, William Hurt, Jeremy Irvine and Michael Imperioli. I still remember Robinson mentioning this project when I spoke to him for his excellent movie Lonely Heartswhen we spoke for ComingSoon.netway back in 2007, having seen that movie at the Tribeca Film Festival.

It involves a group of Vietnam vets trying to get a brave soldier, Airman William H. Pitsenberger Jr. (played by Irvine), the Medal of Honor for his actions on the battlefield to save them 34 years after his death. It sounds like a terrific premise, so it’s a movie I’ve been waiting to see for a very long time.  I’m not sure exactly how many theaters Roadside Attractions will release the movie into, but I doubt it will be enough to get it into the top 10, as I think it will end up making $2 to 3 million at best. (This probably would have been a good movie to release over Veterans’ Day, but I guess it was afraid of Roland Emmerich’s Midway, which did end up winning that weekend.)

Mini-Review: It’s pretty obvious what a passion project this must have been for filmmaker Todd Robinson from the time it’s taken for him to get this movie made, but once watch how this story plays out, it’s much more obvious why he was so driven. Even fifty years after the events depicted in the film’s Vietnam War flashback

It’s 1999, and Sebastian Stan plays Scott Huffman, an Air Force attorney working at the Pentagon who is assigned the duty of investigating the heroics of Airman William H. Pitsenberger Jr., who dropped into one of the bloodiest battles of the Vietnam War to save a number of soldiers. William Hurt plays Tulley, the soldier that comes to Huffman, although the lawyer tries to put him off due to the upcoming regime change. Against his will, Scott has to pursue this endeavor, so he goes to interview a number of the living men who were there on that fateful day.

What’s amazing about Robinson’s film is that while it focuses mainly on Stan’s character, the various actors he meets on his journey deliver some absolutely amazing performances, from Christopher Plummer (as the dead airman’s dying father), Samuel L. Jackson, Ed Harris and the late Peter Fonda.

At its worst, The Last Full Measure veers into TV movie melodrama, so it takes some of the stronger actors to drag it back. The worst example of this are the scenes between Stan and his ersatz family, which seems the most like needless scenes added to create some sort of artistic license. It probably will be little surprise that many of the names and circumstances have been changed for similar reason.

It’s a shame that Roadside Attractions doesn’t have enough faith in this movie to give this a bigger push, instead dumping it into a January weekend with little fanfare. Sure, this is certainly the type of movie that cynical film critics like tearing apart, trying to find faults over the good…. And there’s a lot of good to be had. There’s no denying that this is an important story that needs to be told, and hopefully, the audiences that might appreciate it will be able to find it. Rating: 7.5/10

What should be interesting to see if the horror film The Turning does well enough to surpass Dolittle for third place or falls just short. Either way, Universal will have three movies in the top 5, which is quite remarkable considering what a horrid December the studio had.

This week’s Top 10 should look something like this…

1. Bad Boys for Life (Sony) - $29.5 million -53%

2. 1917 (Universal) - $13 million -41% (up 1 million)*

3. Dolittle (Universal) - $10.1 million -54%

4. The Turning (Universal) - $9.3 million N/A (up .2 million)*

5. The Gentlemen (STXfilms) - $8.6 million N/A (up .1 million)*

6. Jumanji: The Next Level  (Sony) - $5 million -48%

7. Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (Lucasfilm/Disney) - $4 million -52%

8. Little Women (Sony)  - $3.5 million -45%

9. Just Mercy (Warner Bros.) - $3.1 million -47%

10. Knives Out  (Lionsgate) - $2.6 million -40%

- The Last Full Measure (Roadside Attractions) - $2 million N/A (down .5 million)*

* UPDATE: Not a ton of changes but mainly a little bit of tweaking due to revised theater counts

LIMITED RELEASES

Not a ton of limited releases of note that I’ve seen, although I did see Richard Stanley’s sci-fi thriller COLOR OUT OF SPACE (RLJE Films), starring the one and only Nicolas Cage, and I even spoke to Stanley, an interview you’ll be able to read on Next Best Picturehopefully later this week. It’s based on HP Lovecraft’s short story, and in the movie, Cage plays an Alpaca farmer whose family is affected by a meteorite that falls on the property, causing all sorts of bizarre changes both mentally and physically. It’s another movie where Cage can go a little nuts, but I also liked the performances by Madeleine Arthur and Joely Richardson, who ALSO appears in The Turning this weekend. There are also some smaller roles from Q’orianka Kilcher (from Malick’s The New World) and the great comic, Tommy Chong.  There will be a special screening tonight in select cities with a satellite QnA with Stanley and Cage, and then it opens for real Friday. Being RLJE, it should be On Demand shortly afterwards.

Oddly, I haven’t seen any of the movies in the franchise that brings us DETECTIVE CHINATOWN 3  (Wanda Pictures/WB International), but the previous installments of director Sicheng Chen’s police action-comedy must have done well enough for people to want to see more of detectives Tang Ren (Baoquiang Wang) and Qin Feng (Haoran Liu) to get a third movie. The first movie made $120.6 million worldwide while the sequel made $544 million, so yeah, a third movie was inevitable. The sequel made less than $2 million domestically but one can expect that Chinese audiences in America will help the third movie do similarly. For comparison, the latest installment of the Ip Man franchise, starring Donny Yen, has grossed $3.5 million in North America. This will open in about 150 theaters.

Sadly, I also didn’t get a chance to see Dante Lam’s The Rescue (CMC Pictures), the Chinese filmmaker’s follow-up to his global blockbuster Operation Red Sea, before writing this column, but this is clearly one of the major Chinese tentpoles being released for the Lunar New Year movie season. It stars Eddie Peng from Operation Mekong as the captain of an elite rescue team, and it’s shot by Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’s Oscar-winning cinematographer Peter Pau.  I’m hoping to see it this coming Friday.

Terry Crews stars as John Henry (Saban/Paramount) in Will Forbes, in this case Henry being an ex-gang member who puts aside his life of violence to take care of his aging father (played by Ken Foree from Dawn of the Dead )in South L.A. where he meets two immigrant kids on the run from his former gang leader (Ludacris), putting him in a tough spot. It will open in select cities and On Demand this Friday.

Bertrand Bonello, who made the excellent Nocturama a few weeks back, returns with his eighth feature Zombi Child (Film Movement), which is a very different take on the genre.  It draws from the true story of Clairvius Narcisse, who was reportedly zombified in 1962 Haiti, this one centering around Narcisse’s (fictional) orphaned granddaughter who is trying to fit in with the mostly white girls at her boarding school. It will open in New York at the Quad Cinemaand at Lincoln Center.

Lastly, there’s the Bollywood film Panga (FIP) from director Ashwiny Iyer Tiwari, starring Kangana Ranaut as a middle-class Indian woman and former kabaddiworld champion looking for new meaning as a wife and mother, who decides to return to the sport despite her age and responsibility to family. It will open in roughly 100 theaters.

REPERTORY

METROGRAPH (NYC):

Opening Friday at the Metrograph is the 1stU.S. release of the director’s cut of Jia Zhangke’s 2010 documentary I Wish I Knew,which looks at the past and present of Shanghai in a documentary full of interviews with people from all different walks of life including local actresses and fellow filmmaker Hou Hsiao-hsien. It also follows Zhangke’s favorite actress Zhao Tao, who was amazing in last year’s Ash is Purest White, as she explores the site of the Shanghai World Expo Park as it’s under construction. It’s a great film to learn more about the history of mainland China, something I greatly appreciated having been such a longtime inhabitant of Chinatown.

Even more exciting is that the Metrograph is starting a retrospective series for indie filmmaker Hal Hartleythis Friday, which is exciting since I’ve been such a big fan but haven’t seen nearly as many of his films as there are out there, having only seen his debut The Unbelievable Truth (1989) a few years back, also at the Metrograph. Hal Hartley will be at the Metrograph this Friday night, January 24, and then back on February 1 for screenings of Henry Fool (1997) and its 2006 sequel, Fay Grim. This weekend, you can see Trust from 1990, Simple Men (1992), 1994’s Amateur and more.

With the nomination of Julia Reichert and Steven Bonar’s American Factory receiving an Oscar nomination, Metrograph has put together a last-minute series, “The Academy-Nominated Films of Julia Reichert and Steven Bognar,” a program of three shorts including the 2009 short The Last Truck(shown with American Factory), 1976’s Union Maids and 1971’s Growing Up Female, and the 2006 miniseries A Lion in the House.

This weekend’s Late Nites at Metrograph  is the Jackie Chan action classic Police Story (1985). Oops, I made a little error as Playtime: Family Matinees, was supposed to be Taika Waititi’s 2016 film The Hunt for the Wilderpeople, but it got changed to Peter Weir’s 1989 movie Dead Poets Society, starring Robin Williams, which is also quite good.

ALAMO DRAFTHOUSE BROOKLYN (NYC)

Besides tonight’s “Weird Wednesday” of Brain Dead (1990), they’re doing a Troop Beverly Hills “Quote-Along” tomorrow night. If that isn’t good enough, on Monday, you can see the Lonely Island’s amazing Popstar: Never Stop Stopping either as part of the monthly “Out of Tune” hosted by my pal Jeremy Wein at 7pm or at 9:30 as a Sing-Along, well except that both are very close to sold out. Next week’s “Terror Tuesday” is the Japanese horror classic Ringu (1998) (I’ll be there) and then “Weird Wednesday” is 1979’s Killer Nun.

THE NEW BEVERLY (L.A.):

Wednesday’s “Afternoon Classics” is Ernest Borgnine’s 1955 film Marty, and then Weds. and Thurs’ night’s double feature is Bob & Carol & Ted & Aliceand Jacques Demy’s Model Shop, both from 1969. Friday’s “Freaky Friday”… um… “Afternoon Classics” is the 1985 vampire thriller Fright Night, and Friday night’s midnight screening is Tarantino’s Django Unchained. (The Saturday midnight screening of Scorsese’s Goodfellasis already sold out.) The weekend’s “Kiddee Matinee” is Miyazaki’s How’s Moving Castleand then the Monday Matinee is the 1971 thriller Klute. (Most of the weekend evening slots are taken up by Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, just to make sure all the Oscar voters have a chance to see it in the next couple weeks.) Monday and Tuesday night is a Henry Hathaway double feature of The Lives of a Bengal Lancer(1935) and The Trailer of the Lonesome Pine (1936).

FILM FORUM (NYC):

While the “Black Women: Trailblazing African American Performers & Images, 1920 – 2001” continues this weekend with the 1934 and 1959 iterations of Imitation of Life, as well as screenings of What’s Love Got To Do with It, the Tina Turner biopic starring Angela Basset, who received an Oscar nomination for it, and then the Film Forum Jr. screening is The Wiz, starring Michael Jackson and Donna Summer. Other movies in the series include Cleopatra Jones, Gone with the Wind and Spike Lee’s debut She’s Gotta Have it. Film Forum is also doing a special Homage to Anna Karenina, the late Jean-Luc Godard muse who starred in many of his classics including Band of Outsiders, Alphaville, Pierrot Le Fou, plus six other films will be screened beginning Wednesday and through January 30. On Sunday, Film Forum is showing Lee Grant’s 2005 documentary A Father … a Son … Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is about Kirk and Michael Douglas with Grant in person doing a QnA. The theater will also screen William Wyler’s 1951 film Detective Story, which stars Grant on Sunday and next Tuesday.

EGYPTIAN THEATRE (LA):

This weekend begins “Cinematic Void 2020” with the Friday selection being Dario Argento’s The Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), followed on Saturday by a 5-movie Giallo Marathon, including Argento’s Opera(1987), Bava’s A Blade in the Dark (1983), Fulci’s The Black Cat  (1981), and two more. Joe Dantewill be on Sunday for his 16mm Spotlight, showing 1972’s Richard. This week’s “Sunday Print Edition” is Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich(1940) in 35mm in the afternoon and then Richard Benjamin and Dyan Cannon will be on hand to discuss the amazing 1973 thriller The Last of Sheila, one of my favorite movies.

AERO  (LA):

Besides a matinee screening of Scorsese’s Goodfellas on Thursday (free to Cinemateque members), the AERO begins a “Ford Vs.” series with a double feature of John Ford’s The Quiet Man  (1952) with Sam Peckinpah’s classic Straw Dogs (1971). Friday is Ford’ sStagecoach(1939) with Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff  (2010). Saturday at 9AM, you can watch a triple-feature of Toy Story, Toy Story 2 and Toy Story 3, and then in the afternoon, the AERO will show Toy Story 4 with guests. That’s a full day of Toy Story viewing! Saturday night’s “Ford Vs.” is Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance with Akira Kurosawa’s Sanjuro, both from 1962. Sunday night’s double is Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West  (1968) with Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946). Tuesday’s Scorsese matinee is his debut Mean Streets.

QUAD CINEMA (NYC):

You can still catch a few of the movies in the lead-up to Bonello’s Zombi Child with another screening of I Walked with a Zombie on Weds. night, as well as De Palma’s Carrie and the Extended Director’s Cut of The Exorcist on Thursday.

MOMA  (NYC):

Modern Matinees: Jack Lemmon will present the classic Billy Wilder film Some Like It Hot  (1959) on Wednesday, Black Edwards’ The Great Race (1965) on Thursday and 1968’s The Odd Couple on Friday. 

IFC CENTER (NYC)

This week’s Weekend Classics: Luis Buñuelwill screen a double feature of the classic short Un Chien Andalou (1929) with the doc L’Age D’or (1930) while Waverly Midnights: Hindsight is 2020s will screen Alfonso Cuaron’s Children of Men and Late Night Favorites: Winter 2020goes with Argento’s Suspiria… again.

MUSEUM OF THE MOVING IMAGE (NYC):

On Saturday, there will be a “Texas Chainsaw Double Feature” of the first two movies from 1974 and 1986 as part of the “Disreputable Series.” Also, the museum continues to screen Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey as part of its exhibition.

ROXY CINEMA(NYC)

The Nicolas Cage love continues on Weds. with Martin Scorsese’s 1999 movie Brinigng Out the Dead, and then on Saturday, Bottleneck Gallery will screen 1987’s The Monster Squad and 1986’s Night of the Creeps.

LANDMARK THEATRES NUART  (LA):

Friday’s night’s midnight movie is John Carpenter’s adaptation of Stephen King’s Christine (1983).

FILM AT LINCOLN CENTER (NYC):

The New York Jewish Film Festival continues through next week so no rep stuff.

STREAMING AND CABLE

On Sunday, Netflix will stream the first season of Fast and Furious: Spy Racers, which I have little to no interest in. I have a little more interest in Star Trek: Picard, which will begin streaming on CBS All Access on Thursday.

That’s it for this week. Next weekend is the Super Bowl, but that’s not gonna stop the releases of Gretel and Hansel(U.A. Releasing) and Blake Lively’s The Rhythm Section (Pararamount).

[madisonlawblog]

This year, Madison Law is participating in the City of Irvine’s Holiday Toy Drive that benefits military families. Our office’s donation box keeps growing every day. We will drop off donations at Irvine City Hall on December 12. 🎁 • • • #madisonlaw #madisonlawapc #law #lawfirm #attorney #lawyer #california #irvine #orangecounty #losangeles #holiday #holidays #military #toys #kids #children #family #christmas (at Madison Law, APC) https://www.instagram.com/p/B580sP-pYh3/?igshid=1r8evge1yglih

[day0one]

Trump encounters broad pushback to his suggestion to delay the Nov. 3 election   3 hrs ago

President Trump drew immediate rebukes from across the political spectrum Thursday after proposing a delay to the November election and claiming without evidence that widespread mail balloting would be a “catastrophic disaster” leading to fraudulent results.

The suggestion represented Trump’s latest, and most dramatic, attempt to undermine public faith in the Nov. 3 election, a trend that has grown more frequent and emphatic as polls have shown his political fortunes declining. The president has attacked mail voting nearly 70 times since late March in interviews, remarks, and tweets, including at least 17 times this month, according to a tally by The Washington Post.

Thursday’s tweet came on the heels of a devastating report showing that the economy shrank nearly 10 percent from April through June, the largest quarterly decline since the government began publishing such data 70 years ago.

The president does not have the authority to change the date of the general election, which is set by Congress. Trump encountered unprecedented pushback to his idea from senior Republicans on the Hill and conservative leaders outside government, as well as legal scholars, historians, and Democrats.

Former President Barack Obama, speaking at the funeral of the late civil rights icon John Lewis in Atlanta, alluded to the intensifying war over voting rights, saying that “even as we sit here, there are those in power who are doing their darndest to discourage people from voting.” Obama, who has avoided public comments on much of Trump’s presidency, did not specifically cite his successor’s latest suggestion or mention him by name.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was among many Republican senators who quickly and unequivocally rejected Trump’s idea. “Never in the history of the country, through wars, depressions, and the Civil War, have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time,” McConnell said in a television interview with WNKY of Bowling Green, Ky. “We’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3.”

Click to expand Trump gave no indication that he would launch a serious push for the date change, or that he thinks he has the power to do so without congressional approval. But he appeared unfazed by the criticism.

He “pinned” the tweet in which he first floated the idea Thursday, fixing it to the top of his Twitter feed.

“With Universal Mail-In Voting (not Absentee Voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history,” he wrote in the message. “It will be a great embarrassment to the USA. Delay the Election until people can properly, securely, and safely vote???”

At a news conference late in the day, Trump said does not want to delay the election, but said the alternative is a “crooked election” that could take months or even years to resolve — suggesting he is prepared to contest the results if he loses.

“I want to have the election,” he said. “But I also don’t want to wait for three months and find out that all the ballots are all missing and the election won’t mean anything. That’s what’s going to happen, and everyone knows it.”

Several Trump advisers said no internal discussions were underway within the White House about moving the date. The tweet caught aides by surprise, said one senior adviser who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal conversation. “He is just trolling,” said another.

a man wearing a suit and tie: President Trump stops to talk to reporters as he walks to board Marine One and depart from the South Lawn at the White House on Wednesday.© Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post President Trump stops to talk to reporters as he walks to board Marine One and depart from the South Lawn at the White House on Wednesday. The U.S. Constitution gives the power to regulate the “time, place, and manner” of general elections to Congress, while states control the dates of primary elections. Nowhere is the president granted such power.

In addition, the Constitution’s 20th Amendment spells out a hard end to a president’s and vice president’s four-year terms on Jan. 20, whether an election is held or not.

“The President has no power to change the date of the election,” said Richard L. Hasen, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine. “This is yet another statement by the President which undermines voter confidence and that seeks without evidence to undermine the legitimacy of voting by mail.”

No president has ever before tried to postpone a federal election, said historian Michael Beschloss. The idea was floated to President Abraham Lincoln in 1864, during the Civil War, and to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942, during World War II.

Lincoln said at the time that postponing an election because of the “Southern rebellion” would mean “our system has been defeated,” while Roosevelt said doing so while fighting the fascists would mean “we have become fascists ourselves,” Beschloss said.

“That tweet claims powers that he does not have, period,” he said. “He is not a dictator.”

One of the most dramatic critiques of Trump’s tweet came from Steven G. Calabrese, a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society, who wrote in an opinion piece published in The New York Times Thursday that the idea was “fascistic” and “grounds for the president’s immediate impeachment.”

Trump has enjoyed full-throated support from conservatives and nearly all congressional Republicans; the Federalist Society, for instance, has cheered on and even helped select his Supreme Court nominations. That backing appeared to wobble on Thursday, with many Republicans not only alarmed by the president’s apparent disregard for the limits of his power but emboldened to say so in public.

“Election Day is and will be Nov 3, 2020,” said Republican Ari Fleischer, a former press secretary to George W. Bush. “Mr. President — please don’t even pretend to mess with this. It’s a harmful idea.”

Added Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) on Twitter: “We are not moving the date of the election. The resistance to this idea among Republicans is overwhelming.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) weighed in similarly.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), meanwhile, simply tweeted the relevant passage from the Constitution granting Congress the power to set election dates. Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, told supporters at a virtual fundraiser Thursday that Trump was probably trying to steal attention away from Lewis’s funeral.

Other Democrats suggested that Trump’s suggestion reflected a realization that he could lose to Biden, who has been leading in national and many battleground state polls.

“Donald Trump is terrified,” tweeted Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.), who is among those being considered as a running mate for Biden. “He knows he’s going to lose to @JoeBiden. It will require every single one of us to make that happen. We will see you at the ballot box on November 3rd, @realDonaldTrump.”

Some Democrats used the occasion to promote how-to instructions on mail balloting.

“President Trump is talking about delaying the November election because he is afraid of people voting by mail,” Rep. Donna Shalala (D-Fla.) said in a tweet, in which she included a link to a Florida government website with instructions on how to do so. “You know what to do,” she added.

The president of the American Postal Workers Union, Mark Dimondstein, also rebuked the president for undermining confidence in the U.S. Postal Service. He noted that there is “essentially no fraud” in mail balloting.

“It’s a tremendous insult for the president be railing against vote by mail over and over and over and over, railing against the post office,” Dimondstein said. “It’s an insult to every postal worker and every customer who trusts the post office.”

Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, said on Fox Business that “obviously” the president understands that he doesn’t have the authority to move the election.

A Justice Department spokeswoman declined to comment on Trump’s tweet. Earlier this week at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, however, Attorney General William P. Barr told Rep. Cedric L. Richmond (D-La.) he had not studied the question of whether the president could move the election date.

“I’ve never been asked the question before. I’ve never looked into it,” Barr said.

Biden suggested in April that Trump might try to move the election date. At the time, Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh accused Biden of “incoherent, conspiracy-theory ramblings” and said the president “has been clear” that the election will happen on Nov. 3.

Another Trump campaign spokesman, Hogan Gidley, said in a statement Thursday that the president was merely “raising a question about the chaos Democrats have created with their insistence on all mail-in voting.”

In fact, most Democrats are pushing for mail balloting in addition to early in-person and Election Day voting — not universal mail balloting, as Trump has alleged — because even though many voters have expressed a new preference for voting by mail because of fear of infection, many other voters remain more comfortable casting their ballots in person.

Trump has argued that mail-in voting tends to hurt Republicans at the ballot box, but some Republicans worry that the president’s own rhetoric is what’s turning their own voters off of mail balloting.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll conducted this month shows that 51 percent of Democrats prefer voting by mail this fall, compared with 20 percent of Republicans. A recent study by Stanford University researchers found no partisan impact of expanding voting by mail.

At the congressional hearing, Barr repeated his concern that he felt there was a “high risk” that mail-in voting would lead to fraud but said he did not believe the election would be rigged — seeming to break with Trump.

“I have no reason to think it will be,” Barr said.

Even if Congress voted to delay the general election, the electoral college is still required to elect a president under federal law. If lawmakers changed that, too, Trump and Vice President Pence would still be required to leave office by noon on Jan. 20. With no successor, the speaker of the House of Representatives, currently, Pelosi, would be next in line.

[orendrasingh]

John Roberts sided with the court’s liberal bloc in two notable recent cases, but critics say he’s no swing voter on voting rightsTo an outside observer, it might seem like the US supreme court is having a liberal moment, mostly thanks to one justice.Chief Justice John Roberts – the court’s swing vote – surprised many this term by siding with the court’s left-leaning bloc and casting the deciding vote in two of the most high-stakes cases, with rulings that ensured abortion access in Louisiana and rejected Donald Trump’s bid to end protections for young undocumented immigrants. He also sided with the liberal justices, and Neil Gorsuch, to expand LGBTQ rights in the workplace and ruled against Trump in a closely watched case over his tax returns.But many court watchers doubt that Roberts, a reliable conservative voice on the supreme court since he joined in 2005, is really moving in the direction of colleagues like Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Sonia Sotomayor.“There’s absolutely no indication John Roberts has become a moderate or even a liberal,” said Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.In fact, Roberts has been a critical justice in dismantling fundamental democratic protections in the US around access to the voting booth, which could have profound implications for the 2020 election. Several disputes about voting restrictions amid the Covid-19 pandemic have already reached the supreme court, and many more are expected to in the coming months.One closely watched case, for example, will decide whether nearly three-quarters of a million Floridians with felony convictions can vote in the election. The case is already pending before the court.Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who specializes in elections, has described Roberts as a “solid fifth vote” against expanding voting rights, along with the four other conservatives on the court.“He’s no swing voter in these cases, for sure,” Hasen wrote in an email.The supreme court is expected to weigh in on voting cases as the United States still struggles with significant inequities in access to the ballot box. Many policies in place today can make it more difficult for young people and minority voters to cast a vote.Over the last decade, Roberts has authored what many understand to be two of the most damaging rulings to voting rights in a generation. In 2013, he wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v Holder, a decision that gutted a law mean to prevent voting discrimination against minorities. Roberts opined that the kind of racism and voting discrimination that existed in 1965, when the law was originally enacted, has been curbed.> Because of Roberts’ ruling, many fear that the next round of redistricting in 2021 will be more extremeLast year, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in another 5-4 case, Rucho v Common Cause, saying that federal courts could do nothing to stop extreme partisan gerrymandering – the practice of grouping voters in certain electoral districts to give one party an advantage over the other in elections.Because of Roberts’ ruling, many fear that the next round of redistricting in 2021 will be more extreme, as lawmakers now know they can gerrymander for partisan gain without being sued in federal court. Justice Elena Kagan issued a scathing dissent to the ruling, saying gerrymandering could “irreparably damage our system of government”.A handful of voting rights cases that have reached the supreme court this year related to whether limitations on voting should be eased owing to the dislocations of Covid-19, but Roberts has sided in favor of keeping restrictions in place in all of them.Earlier this month, he sided with the court’s conservative bloc in a 5-4 decision to allow three counties in Alabama to continue to require voters to provide copies of their voter ID, and to have witnesses or notaries, in order to vote by mail. The supreme court also blocked a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed local officials to offer curbside voting, something that could have helped facilitate social distancing at the polls.And in April, hours before the polls opened for a Wisconsin’s spring election, Roberts again sided with the court’s four conservative justices to uphold several key voting restrictions in the state. The court shortened the deadline by which voters had to put their ballots in the mail to have them counted, even though a surge of mail-in voting was expected owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.“The majority resolved the dispute as if we are not living through a once in a lifetime global pandemic and voters are not facing unprecedented challenges in casting ballots,” Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California who studies elections, wrote in an email. “If that was their posture in April, it is unlikely to change by November.”Many of the upcoming cases are likely to deal with restrictions around absentee voting, and on seemingly technical disputes that could have huge practical implications, such as over prepaid postage, ballot receipt deadlines, and signature matching practices. Roberts is unlikely to side with liberal colleagues in such disputes, said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan.“I see absolutely no chance of that, given his votes in the Wisconsin and Alabama cases, as well as his history in voting rights disputes,” she said.Despite Roberts’ record on the issue, Deuel Ross, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said he was still hopeful the court would recognize the need to expand voting rights owing to the unique obstacles posed by Covid-19.“Justice Roberts has not shown himself in the past to be particularly sympathetic to voting rights claims,” he said. “My hope is the court will be more sympathetic to those voters who are put it in a really impossible choice between choosing to go to a crowded polling place and having the option to vote at home without having to jump through additional hurdles.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/3iQ1t9H

[lovehardenemycollector]

John Roberts sided with the court’s liberal bloc in two notable recent cases, but critics say he’s no swing voter on voting rightsTo an outside observer, it might seem like the US supreme court is having a liberal moment, mostly thanks to one justice.Chief Justice John Roberts – the court’s swing vote – surprised many this term by siding with the court’s left-leaning bloc and casting the deciding vote in two of the most high-stakes cases, with rulings that ensured abortion access in Louisiana and rejected Donald Trump’s bid to end protections for young undocumented immigrants. He also sided with the liberal justices, and Neil Gorsuch, to expand LGBTQ rights in the workplace and ruled against Trump in a closely watched case over his tax returns.But many court watchers doubt that Roberts, a reliable conservative voice on the supreme court since he joined in 2005, is really moving in the direction of colleagues like Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Sonia Sotomayor.“There’s absolutely no indication John Roberts has become a moderate or even a liberal,” said Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.In fact, Roberts has been a critical justice in dismantling fundamental democratic protections in the US around access to the voting booth, which could have profound implications for the 2020 election. Several disputes about voting restrictions amid the Covid-19 pandemic have already reached the supreme court, and many more are expected to in the coming months.One closely watched case, for example, will decide whether nearly three-quarters of a million Floridians with felony convictions can vote in the election. The case is already pending before the court.Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who specializes in elections, has described Roberts as a “solid fifth vote” against expanding voting rights, along with the four other conservatives on the court.“He’s no swing voter in these cases, for sure,” Hasen wrote in an email.The supreme court is expected to weigh in on voting cases as the United States still struggles with significant inequities in access to the ballot box. Many policies in place today can make it more difficult for young people and minority voters to cast a vote.Over the last decade, Roberts has authored what many understand to be two of the most damaging rulings to voting rights in a generation. In 2013, he wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v Holder, a decision that gutted a law mean to prevent voting discrimination against minorities. Roberts opined that the kind of racism and voting discrimination that existed in 1965, when the law was originally enacted, has been curbed.> Because of Roberts’ ruling, many fear that the next round of redistricting in 2021 will be more extremeLast year, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in another 5-4 case, Rucho v Common Cause, saying that federal courts could do nothing to stop extreme partisan gerrymandering – the practice of grouping voters in certain electoral districts to give one party an advantage over the other in elections.Because of Roberts’ ruling, many fear that the next round of redistricting in 2021 will be more extreme, as lawmakers now know they can gerrymander for partisan gain without being sued in federal court. Justice Elena Kagan issued a scathing dissent to the ruling, saying gerrymandering could “irreparably damage our system of government”.A handful of voting rights cases that have reached the supreme court this year related to whether limitations on voting should be eased owing to the dislocations of Covid-19, but Roberts has sided in favor of keeping restrictions in place in all of them.Earlier this month, he sided with the court’s conservative bloc in a 5-4 decision to allow three counties in Alabama to continue to require voters to provide copies of their voter ID, and to have witnesses or notaries, in order to vote by mail. The supreme court also blocked a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed local officials to offer curbside voting, something that could have helped facilitate social distancing at the polls.And in April, hours before the polls opened for a Wisconsin’s spring election, Roberts again sided with the court’s four conservative justices to uphold several key voting restrictions in the state. The court shortened the deadline by which voters had to put their ballots in the mail to have them counted, even though a surge of mail-in voting was expected owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.“The majority resolved the dispute as if we are not living through a once in a lifetime global pandemic and voters are not facing unprecedented challenges in casting ballots,” Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California who studies elections, wrote in an email. “If that was their posture in April, it is unlikely to change by November.”Many of the upcoming cases are likely to deal with restrictions around absentee voting, and on seemingly technical disputes that could have huge practical implications, such as over prepaid postage, ballot receipt deadlines, and signature matching practices. Roberts is unlikely to side with liberal colleagues in such disputes, said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan.“I see absolutely no chance of that, given his votes in the Wisconsin and Alabama cases, as well as his history in voting rights disputes,” she said.Despite Roberts’ record on the issue, Deuel Ross, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said he was still hopeful the court would recognize the need to expand voting rights owing to the unique obstacles posed by Covid-19.“Justice Roberts has not shown himself in the past to be particularly sympathetic to voting rights claims,” he said. “My hope is the court will be more sympathetic to those voters who are put it in a really impossible choice between choosing to go to a crowded polling place and having the option to vote at home without having to jump through additional hurdles.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/3iQ1t9H

[sneaksite]

John Roberts sided with the court’s liberal bloc in two notable recent cases, but critics say he’s no swing voter on voting rightsTo an outside observer, it might seem like the US supreme court is having a liberal moment, mostly thanks to one justice.Chief Justice John Roberts – the court’s swing vote – surprised many this term by siding with the court’s left-leaning bloc and casting the deciding vote in two of the most high-stakes cases, with rulings that ensured abortion access in Louisiana and rejected Donald Trump’s bid to end protections for young undocumented immigrants. He also sided with the liberal justices, and Neil Gorsuch, to expand LGBTQ rights in the workplace and ruled against Trump in a closely watched case over his tax returns.But many court watchers doubt that Roberts, a reliable conservative voice on the supreme court since he joined in 2005, is really moving in the direction of colleagues like Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Sonia Sotomayor.“There’s absolutely no indication John Roberts has become a moderate or even a liberal,” said Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.In fact, Roberts has been a critical justice in dismantling fundamental democratic protections in the US around access to the voting booth, which could have profound implications for the 2020 election. Several disputes about voting restrictions amid the Covid-19 pandemic have already reached the supreme court, and many more are expected to in the coming months.One closely watched case, for example, will decide whether nearly three-quarters of a million Floridians with felony convictions can vote in the election. The case is already pending before the court.Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who specializes in elections, has described Roberts as a “solid fifth vote” against expanding voting rights, along with the four other conservatives on the court.“He’s no swing voter in these cases, for sure,” Hasen wrote in an email.The supreme court is expected to weigh in on voting cases as the United States still struggles with significant inequities in access to the ballot box. Many policies in place today can make it more difficult for young people and minority voters to cast a vote.Over the last decade, Roberts has authored what many understand to be two of the most damaging rulings to voting rights in a generation. In 2013, he wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v Holder, a decision that gutted a law mean to prevent voting discrimination against minorities. Roberts opined that the kind of racism and voting discrimination that existed in 1965, when the law was originally enacted, has been curbed.> Because of Roberts’ ruling, many fear that the next round of redistricting in 2021 will be more extremeLast year, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in another 5-4 case, Rucho v Common Cause, saying that federal courts could do nothing to stop extreme partisan gerrymandering – the practice of grouping voters in certain electoral districts to give one party an advantage over the other in elections.Because of Roberts’ ruling, many fear that the next round of redistricting in 2021 will be more extreme, as lawmakers now know they can gerrymander for partisan gain without being sued in federal court. Justice Elena Kagan issued a scathing dissent to the ruling, saying gerrymandering could “irreparably damage our system of government”.A handful of voting rights cases that have reached the supreme court this year related to whether limitations on voting should be eased owing to the dislocations of Covid-19, but Roberts has sided in favor of keeping restrictions in place in all of them.Earlier this month, he sided with the court’s conservative bloc in a 5-4 decision to allow three counties in Alabama to continue to require voters to provide copies of their voter ID, and to have witnesses or notaries, in order to vote by mail. The supreme court also blocked a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed local officials to offer curbside voting, something that could have helped facilitate social distancing at the polls.And in April, hours before the polls opened for a Wisconsin’s spring election, Roberts again sided with the court’s four conservative justices to uphold several key voting restrictions in the state. The court shortened the deadline by which voters had to put their ballots in the mail to have them counted, even though a surge of mail-in voting was expected owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.“The majority resolved the dispute as if we are not living through a once in a lifetime global pandemic and voters are not facing unprecedented challenges in casting ballots,” Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California who studies elections, wrote in an email. “If that was their posture in April, it is unlikely to change by November.”Many of the upcoming cases are likely to deal with restrictions around absentee voting, and on seemingly technical disputes that could have huge practical implications, such as over prepaid postage, ballot receipt deadlines, and signature matching practices. Roberts is unlikely to side with liberal colleagues in such disputes, said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan.“I see absolutely no chance of that, given his votes in the Wisconsin and Alabama cases, as well as his history in voting rights disputes,” she said.Despite Roberts’ record on the issue, Deuel Ross, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said he was still hopeful the court would recognize the need to expand voting rights owing to the unique obstacles posed by Covid-19.“Justice Roberts has not shown himself in the past to be particularly sympathetic to voting rights claims,” he said. “My hope is the court will be more sympathetic to those voters who are put it in a really impossible choice between choosing to go to a crowded polling place and having the option to vote at home without having to jump through additional hurdles.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://news.yahoo.com/us-supreme-court-having-liberal-100008183.html

[7newx1]

John Roberts sided with the court’s liberal bloc in two notable recent cases, but critics say he’s no swing voter on voting rightsTo an outside observer, it might seem like the US supreme court is having a liberal moment, mostly thanks to one justice.Chief Justice John Roberts – the court’s swing vote – surprised many this term by siding with the court’s left-leaning bloc and casting the deciding vote in two of the most high-stakes cases, with rulings that ensured abortion access in Louisiana and rejected Donald Trump’s bid to end protections for young undocumented immigrants. He also sided with the liberal justices, and Neil Gorsuch, to expand LGBTQ rights in the workplace and ruled against Trump in a closely watched case over his tax returns.But many court watchers doubt that Roberts, a reliable conservative voice on the supreme court since he joined in 2005, is really moving in the direction of colleagues like Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Sonia Sotomayor.“There’s absolutely no indication John Roberts has become a moderate or even a liberal,” said Jessica Levinson, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles.In fact, Roberts has been a critical justice in dismantling fundamental democratic protections in the US around access to the voting booth, which could have profound implications for the 2020 election. Several disputes about voting restrictions amid the Covid-19 pandemic have already reached the supreme court, and many more are expected to in the coming months.One closely watched case, for example, will decide whether nearly three-quarters of a million Floridians with felony convictions can vote in the election. The case is already pending before the court.Richard Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine who specializes in elections, has described Roberts as a “solid fifth vote” against expanding voting rights, along with the four other conservatives on the court.“He’s no swing voter in these cases, for sure,” Hasen wrote in an email.The supreme court is expected to weigh in on voting cases as the United States still struggles with significant inequities in access to the ballot box. Many policies in place today can make it more difficult for young people and minority voters to cast a vote.Over the last decade, Roberts has authored what many understand to be two of the most damaging rulings to voting rights in a generation. In 2013, he wrote the majority opinion in Shelby County v Holder, a decision that gutted a law mean to prevent voting discrimination against minorities. Roberts opined that the kind of racism and voting discrimination that existed in 1965, when the law was originally enacted, has been curbed.> Because of Roberts’ ruling, many fear that the next round of redistricting in 2021 will be more extremeLast year, Roberts wrote the majority opinion in another 5-4 case, Rucho v Common Cause, saying that federal courts could do nothing to stop extreme partisan gerrymandering – the practice of grouping voters in certain electoral districts to give one party an advantage over the other in elections.Because of Roberts’ ruling, many fear that the next round of redistricting in 2021 will be more extreme, as lawmakers now know they can gerrymander for partisan gain without being sued in federal court. Justice Elena Kagan issued a scathing dissent to the ruling, saying gerrymandering could “irreparably damage our system of government”.A handful of voting rights cases that have reached the supreme court this year related to whether limitations on voting should be eased owing to the dislocations of Covid-19, but Roberts has sided in favor of keeping restrictions in place in all of them.Earlier this month, he sided with the court’s conservative bloc in a 5-4 decision to allow three counties in Alabama to continue to require voters to provide copies of their voter ID, and to have witnesses or notaries, in order to vote by mail. The supreme court also blocked a lower court’s ruling that would have allowed local officials to offer curbside voting, something that could have helped facilitate social distancing at the polls.And in April, hours before the polls opened for a Wisconsin’s spring election, Roberts again sided with the court’s four conservative justices to uphold several key voting restrictions in the state. The court shortened the deadline by which voters had to put their ballots in the mail to have them counted, even though a surge of mail-in voting was expected owing to the Covid-19 pandemic.“The majority resolved the dispute as if we are not living through a once in a lifetime global pandemic and voters are not facing unprecedented challenges in casting ballots,” Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California who studies elections, wrote in an email. “If that was their posture in April, it is unlikely to change by November.”Many of the upcoming cases are likely to deal with restrictions around absentee voting, and on seemingly technical disputes that could have huge practical implications, such as over prepaid postage, ballot receipt deadlines, and signature matching practices. Roberts is unlikely to side with liberal colleagues in such disputes, said Leah Litman, a law professor at the University of Michigan.“I see absolutely no chance of that, given his votes in the Wisconsin and Alabama cases, as well as his history in voting rights disputes,” she said.Despite Roberts’ record on the issue, Deuel Ross, an attorney at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, said he was still hopeful the court would recognize the need to expand voting rights owing to the unique obstacles posed by Covid-19.“Justice Roberts has not shown himself in the past to be particularly sympathetic to voting rights claims,” he said. “My hope is the court will be more sympathetic to those voters who are put it in a really impossible choice between choosing to go to a crowded polling place and having the option to vote at home without having to jump through additional hurdles.”

[ecogoth1]

and while you're at it would you bring my wife to be in so we can talk about matters of the heart as I really could care less about what either side have going on I just try to forget what everybody does I'm both sides because all I do is get pissed and you know this always always my entire life I've been between both sides with you people. do you feel safe. Hi my name is Kathy the City attorney of canyon Lake hi I'm the City attorney of Temecula is checking on you at work at Jack In The box really who does that. too bad I ruined your gigantic cocaine bust. back in the 90s. but you know some of those cops are dirty like most of them I look at things from I don't know how to explain it I look at people's spirits in their hearts money what you do your drugs whatever I don't care I care how you treat me and how you act and how you treat the people I actually care about I don't care if none of you like each other but one thing's for damn sure you're all Americans... and I know none of the sides in America you're all creative to o I think I proved when I was younger than a bunch of screwed up creative people could do something Good. who get the whole school together every high School in Irvine together convince the authorities then it was possible. you know we called ourselves degenerates but you know I'm not stupid I'm very intelligent and amount a of things that I noticed. and the fact that everyone was in the military in my family and all had a high-level security. wow I learned this from Carl I'm sure a bunch of people that passed away are not actually dead. quite sure about a lot of things but I really don't care. the only thing I cared about was staying alive and finding one person to love and Mary had to do God's work through the work of our ancestors. you all want to keep playing your games that we can draw that be more fun. personally I like crash bandicoot every want to play games. the fact is I am actually in love with a woman just holy on because I pretty much gave up on women all the other and I'm pretty much like a virgin I'm not in lust with her I don't even think of her in that way I'm thinking of her in a loving way. love man (at Lake Henshaw Camp Site.) https://www.instagram.com/p/B0OuVt_HzAG/?igshid=t6flojnqs0md

[alanafsmith]

Jones Day faces £150 million sex discrimination claim over ‘fraternity culture’

Six female former associates launch group action

Jones Day’s office in Irvine, California

US titan Jones Day has found itself facing a multi-million-pound legal claim after six female former associates accused it of sex discrimination, court papers reveal.

In their group action, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the six lawyers allege that their former firm’s “black box” compensation model is used to pay female partners less than their male counterparts. Moreover, the women claim that the best work goes to the firm’s male lawyers and that they are paid better and promoted more often “even when their legal skills are notably deficient”.

The claim is being brought by Nilab Rahyar Tolton and Andrea Mazingo, who were both based in Jones Day’s office in Irvine, California (pictured top), until last year, along with four other unnamed women. They are seeking $200 million (£150 million) in damages.

“Jones Day’s fraternity culture presents female attorneys at Jones Day with an unpalatable choice”, the explosive claim reads. “Participate in a culture that is at best inhospitable to women and at worst openly misogynistic or forego any hope of success at the firm.”

It goes on to allege that for a female associate to succeed at the firm, “she must at least tolerate the stereotyped expectations of the firm’s male power brokers. To challenge these expectations by word or deed, even in settings ostensibly provided for ‘honest’ feedback, is career suicide.”

The complaint describes how at one unidentified office, “male partners allegedly kick off the firm’s holiday party by encouraging drinking in the office, followed by alcohol-fuelled dancing, during which male managers ‘gawk’ at dancing female associates for amusement”, Law.com reports. In another alleged incident, a male summer associate was “applauded and high-fived” by senior members of staff after he pushed a female summer associate into a swimming pool during a party held at a partner’s home.

Jones Day, which has 43 offices around the world, including London, is yet to respond to the claims.

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Jones Day faces £150 million sex discrimination claim over ‘fraternity culture’

Six female former associates launch group action

Jones Day’s office in Irvine, California

US titan Jones Day has found itself facing a multi-million-pound legal claim after six female former associates accused it of sex discrimination, court papers reveal.

In their group action, filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, the six lawyers allege that their former firm’s “black box” compensation model is used to pay female partners less than their male counterparts. Moreover, the women claim that the best work goes to the firm’s male lawyers and that they are paid better and promoted more often “even when their legal skills are notably deficient”.

The claim is being brought by Nilab Rahyar Tolton and Andrea Mazingo, who were both based in Jones Day’s office in Irvine, California (pictured top), until last year, along with four other unnamed women. They are seeking $200 million (£150 million) in damages.

“Jones Day’s fraternity culture presents female attorneys at Jones Day with an unpalatable choice”, the explosive claim reads. “Participate in a culture that is at best inhospitable to women and at worst openly misogynistic or forego any hope of success at the firm.”

It goes on to allege that for a female associate to succeed at the firm, “she must at least tolerate the stereotyped expectations of the firm’s male power brokers. To challenge these expectations by word or deed, even in settings ostensibly provided for ‘honest’ feedback, is career suicide.”

The complaint describes how at one unidentified office, “male partners allegedly kick off the firm’s holiday party by encouraging drinking in the office, followed by alcohol-fuelled dancing, during which male managers ‘gawk’ at dancing female associates for amusement”, Law.com reports. In another alleged incident, a male summer associate was “applauded and high-fived” by senior members of staff after he pushed a female summer associate into a swimming pool during a party held at a partner’s home.

Jones Day, which has 43 offices around the world, including London, is yet to respond to the claims.

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The post Jones Day faces £150 million sex discrimination claim over ‘fraternity culture’ appeared first on Legal Cheek.

from Legal News https://www.legalcheek.com/2019/04/jones-day-faces-150-million-sex-discrimination-claim-over-fraternity-culture/