Jonathan Turley.

This week, the Trump administration found itself in a familiar position: facing an injunction from Judge Indira Talwani of the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts. Indeed, it had just secured an order from the Supreme Court on its emergency docket lifting her earlier injunction on the U.S. Postal Service requiring voting lists to confirm U.S. citizenship.

The case against the executive order on mail-in ballots has reasonable arguments on both sides, although (as I have said previously) the challengers are likely to prevail in defeating the rule or at least delaying the policy until after the midterm elections. The Constitution gives states the primary responsibility over “the times, places, and manner of holding elections.”

However, the U.S. Postal Service is a federal agency, and the federal government does have a role in the funding and regulation of federal elections. More importantly, the Trump administration is arguing that it is not barring mail-in voting but merely imposing “modest informational requirements.” Non-citizens cannot vote in federal elections, and the new rule “does not displace a single state election law. And it need not and should not prevent a single voter from voting by mail.”

The controversy over Talwani is not necessarily the merits of her decision that the rule convenes the constitutional framework. Indeed, the Supreme Court did not rule on the merits and could well rule in favor of her interpretation. The controversy is the pattern of sweeping injunctions by Talwani and a few other judges.

Litigants have been accused of forum-shopping by going to liberal, Democratically appointed judges to prevent Trump policies from being implemented in a wide array of areas, including immigration, elections, reduction in government bureaucracies, and foreign aid.

Like her colleague in Boston, U.S. District Court Judge Brian Murphy, Talwani is viewed by many as a one-stop-shop judge for forum-shopping. Both have issued hair-trigger injunctions, and both have been repeatedly reversed.

The Antiplanner.

Nearly five years ago, Congress passed the infrastructure bill, formally known as the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA). Supposedly it was needed to fix crumbling infrastructure, but the crumbling infrastructure that is most heavily used — city- and county-owned streets and bridges — received hardly any money from the law. Instead, most of the money went for new infrastructure that, if built, will probably soon be crumbling because politicians would rather support glitzy new projects than maintain old ones.

Read it.

As reported in last night’s news feed, a young convert to Islam got into an altercation and stabbed several people at the train station in Amsterdam. To be culturally accurate, I should say that he “reverted to Islam”, because according to Islamic doctrine, everyone is actually born Muslim, and the convert is simply returning to his native faith.

According to the following report, the young revert, enthusiastic about his rediscovered religious faith, was a prominent supporter of “Palestine” on social media.

Relevant information: De Ruijterkade is a quay behind the train station. Denk is a Turkish-oriented party, founded by Turks, with a focus on Muslim communities in the Netherlands.