| Todd Blanche had two meltdowns on Sunday in interviews with CNN’s Dana Bash and CBS’ Margaret Brennan. The attorney general struggled to answer questions about the legal basis for the Justice Department’s lawsuit concerning the Alaska Senate race, so he was reduced to sniping, arguing, and insulting them. The performance was as revelatory as the answers — or lack thereof — to the questions. |
| On the merits, the Justice Department’s lawsuit is both legally and factually baseless. If anything, Blanche’s poor performance inadvertently confirmed as much. |
| Every legal complaint requires two fundamental things. First, you need a cause of action — the technical legal vehicle for your claim. That can be as simple as a statute that says, for instance, that it is illegal for an employer to discriminate against you on the basis of your sex or gender. Second, you need to allege facts that support that claim, like the specific acts of discrimination at issue. |
| The supposed legal basis for the DOJ’s Alaska complaint is language in the prefatory section of the National Voter Registration Act that states that Congress passed the law to “protect the integrity of the electoral process.” That language does not create a legal right of action for the DOJ of any sort, and the case can be dismissed on that basis alone. |
| As for the factual argument in support of this supposed legal claim, the Justice Department asserts that the results of the election could be tainted by the presence of two people named Dan Sullivan on the ballot — one of whom is the Republican incumbent, while the other is running (allegedly) solely to confuse voters and take votes away from the incumbent in his race against Democrat Mary Peltola. |
| This was litigated for months in Alaska’s state courts, and the state reached a perfectly reasonable solution for the ballot by distinguishing the two Sullivans. The incumbent is listed as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent,” and the alleged spoiler is “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” That does not seem particularly confusing, as the other Republican senator in Alaska — Lisa Murkowski — has pointed out. |
| The DOJ’s lawsuit is so poorly conceived that even its defenders are struggling to come up with a legitimate reason for the department to have filed it. The Wall Street Journal Editorial Board concluded that “[t]he lawsuit is a legal Hail Mary, but its real purpose before the election is to educate Alaska voters now beginning to pay attention about the Democratic trick.” In other words, the lawsuit is a partisan publicity stunt. |
| Of course, the Alaska lawsuit is just the latest in a monthslong effort by the Justice Department to interfere in the midterm elections in support of the Republican Party — a wide-ranging project that has included, among other things, aggressive and illegal efforts to acquire the states’ voter files; the department’s ongoing lawsuit against California over alleged “noncitizen” voting; threats from top DOJ officials to prosecute state election officials; the search of Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar’s home just weeks before the election; and the sweeping push to prosecute voting by illegal aliens, which, as the department’s own paltry results now seem to confirm, almost never happens (more on this below). |
| With a little over a week to go before Election Day, the Justice Department’s escalating efforts are reason to worry that there is more to come. That could include more threats, investigations, and lawsuits, both before the election and after it. |
| The DOJ is also planning to send about 1,000 election monitors across the country, a group that includes Trump-supporting election denialists and at least one convicted criminal. Some of them could conceivably generate reports that falsely imply that there were irregularities in close races, and the Justice Department could then try to use those reports to support lawsuits or applications for warrants to obtain state voting records after the election. |
| Even if it all comes to nothing — and that of course remains to be seen — this is a historic abuse of the Justice Department’s power for partisan political purposes, and it isn’t over yet. |
