Dem
47
GOP
53
Last Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz ruled that the federal government must release pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil by last Friday. Then, last Friday, he caved to the administration and re-ruled that it was fine to keep Khalil locked up in Louisiana. The only thing that changed is that the excuse the government is using. Now the charge is not that he is subverting U.S. foreign policy (which the judge found to be absurd), but that he didn't list all his former employers and memberships in his green card application.
The Judge even noted that people are rarely detained for small errors in filling out a government form. And this is certainly not a reason to hold someone in prison without trial far from where they live for 4 months. But these aren't normal times. Khalil also disputes the argument that he filled out his green card application incorrectly. He did an unpaid internship with the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, which was part of his graduate studies, but it was not employment, so he did not list it on the part of the form asking about previous employment.
Farbiarz clearly gets it that Khalil is being kept in prison because Trump doesn't like pro-Palestinian activists and it has nothing to do with the trumped-up charge of omissions on his green card application. Nevertheless, he refused to order Khalil's release. However, the Judge did note that Khalil can seek a bond hearing from an immigration judge.
Trump won that one, for the time being, but he got another ruling that went against him and is potentially more important. On March 25, Trump signed an XO on elections. One part of it said that absentee voters must show proof of citizenship to register to vote. That lasted a month, until Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, a Bill Clinton appointee, struck it down as unconstitutional. In a 120-page ruling, she stated that since elections are run by the states, not the federal government, the president cannot order federal officials to do anything concerning election procedures. That is the exclusive province of the states. It seems to us that a one-sentence ruling ("The states run elections so the president has no authority to intefere with them") would have done the job and 120-pages is kind of overkill, but what do we know?
Now a second judge, Denise Casper, a Barack Obama appointee in Massachusetts, not only affirmed Kollar-Kotelly's opinion, but also struck down a second part of Trump's XO on voting. This one stated that absentee ballots postmarked before or on Election Day but received after Election Day may not be counted. Many states have a grace period of up to a week to allow ballots delayed in the mail to be counted. Casper based this on the same reasoning as Kollar-Kotelly: The states regulate elections and the president has no authority to dictate election procedures to the states.
Casper's decision also affected overseas voters, both military and civilian. The XO said that when anyone living overseas filed the official postcard to register to vote, they had to supply proof of citizenship along with it as well as proof of eligibilility to vote in the state they last lived in. Again, Casper ruled the president has no power to tell the states how to run their elections. She also noted that the XO runs counter to the express wishes of Congress, which created the postcard registration form to make it easier for overseas Americans to vote. Congress did not impose Trump's requirements on the voters. It just standardized the form used and no states objected to the standardized form.
After Trump issued the XO, many state election officials immediately saw it as overreach, since they already knew that the states run elections, not the federal government, and Trump had no business butting into state affairs. Something about federalism, a concept foreign to Trump's view of a unitary executive, where the president runs the country by fiat. (V)