Politics

Court Blocks California's Attempt To Ensure Ballot Transparency

This will be an interesting showdown at the Ninth Circuit.

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Yesterday, a district court granted an injunction blocking California’s Presidential Tax Transparency and Accountability Act. The bill requires Presidential and Gubernatorial candidates to release five years worth of tax returns, and other financials, in order to appear on California’s primary ballot.

If you think this is about forcing Donald Trump to release his tax returns, you’re not wrong.

But U.S. District Judge Morrison England Jr., a Bush appointee, said that he was concerned that the state was overstepping ethics guidelines, and granted Trump and the Republican National Committee a temporary injunction.

If you take Trump out of the equation, there’s actually an interesting discussion about “ballot access” to be had here. In general, you don’t want individual states messing with the Presidential primary process by putting all kinds of ballot requirements on that may favor one type of candidate or another. This bill came up in 2017 in California, and then-Governor Jerry Brown vetoed it. He said, I think quite reasonably, that this bill could be a gateway into all sorts of other kinds of ballot access requirements. Health records and birth certificates could be what some other state requires next.

Under normal circumstances, I’m inclined to agree with Brown. But these are not normal circumstances. If you put Trump back into the equation, I mean screw it. Either Trump is a uniquely dangerous criminal president, or he’s not. Either we’re going to meet that unique threat with unique laws and strategies designed to protect ourselves from him, or we’re going to keep pretending that he is a “normal” person and base our strategies on what we think will come next. Trump is running around throwing eggs in people’s faces, and I’m getting fed up with the fact that every time I reach for my own eggs some (usually white) liberal telling me “be careful, you don’t want to break it.”

Does my strategy leave everybody covered in yoke? Maybe. WE’LL CLEAN IT UP WHEN HE’S GONE. I would use anything, any goddamn thing, in our social and legal arsenal, to defeat this man. If he’s living off the land, I’d burn the land. If he draws power from the Sun, I’D BLOT OUT THE SUN. If he creates the Matrix, I will jack into the Matrix and learn Kung-Fu.

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I’m in full on Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs territory. The problems with the bill are way up on the pyramid, somewhere around “esteem” needs. The problem of Trump is physiological. Burn it. BURN IT ALL. We’ll build something new and better over the ashes.

We’ll see if the Ninth Circuit agrees.

Judge Blocks California Law Requiring Trump Tax Returns [Courthouse News]

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and a contributor at The Nation. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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