“History demonstrates that democracy can be lost in a generation.”
Two federal judges blocked Donald Trump’s Justice Department from seizing vast swaths of voter data in California and Oregon, an effort that one described as “unprecedented and illegal.”
U.S. District Judge David O. Carter from the Central District of California reflected in a 33-page ruling that the government’s voter data grab shows how precarious democracy is.
The introduction begins:
“Even after 250 years, the American experiment in democracy remains fragile. It has always been so. When asked after the Constitutional Convention what form of government he and his colleagues had created, Benjamin Franklin famously replied, ‘A Republic, if you can keep it.’ History demonstrates that democracy can be lost in a generation.
The foundation upon which American democracy has been built is the right to vote. Brave Americans have given their lives for more than two hundred years to protect this right. Now it seems the Executive Branch of the United States government wants to abridge the right of many Americans to cast their ballots. This is what this case is grounded in—the right to vote and the government’s obligation to protect that right. The United States Department of Justice (DOJ) seeks an unprecedented amount of personal information related to California voters from California’s unredacted voting rolls. The requested information includes the names, social security numbers, home addresses, voting history and other sensitive information of nearly 23 million Californians. The people of California resist this effort.”
Now the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, Trump’s former campaign lawyer Harmeet Dhillon parroted his voter fraud lies, and she has been behind a nationwide effort to seize vast amounts of voter data.
The Justice Department has sued 23 states in that campaign, and the first two judges to rule delivered blistering rebukes.
In a Substack Live, Allison Gill and I discuss the significance of this ruling by Judge Carter, who found in 2022 that Trump and attorney John Eastman “more likely than not” violated federal law in a conspiracy to subvert the election. The judge reached that conclusion during an evidentiary battle, finding that the crime-fraud exception overcame Eastman’s assertions of attorney-client privilege.
Read Judge Carter’s full ruling here.
During our conversation, Allison and I also discuss the latest in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and preview the evidentiary hearing that I will be covering toward the end of the month.
