The 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked Trump from implementing an order about mail-in voting. Several Democratic-led states got an injunction from a lower court. Trump's team asked to lift it. The appeals court said no.
Mail-in voting. The thing that works fine. The thing that has worked fine for decades. The thing that military personnel have used since the Civil War without anyone losing their f*cking minds about it.
But here we are. Courts spending time and resources on whether the executive branch can unilaterally change voting procedures that nobody with a functioning prefrontal cortex thinks are broken. The 1st Circuit looked at this request and presumably wondered what timeline they had wandered into where this was considered a reasonable use of judicial bandwidth.
Democratic-led states had to sue to prevent changes to a system that already functions. They won at the lower court level. Then they had to win again at the appeals court level. All to preserve the status quo. All to keep doing what we were already doing. It's like hiring a lawyer to prevent your neighbor from breaking into your house to rearrange your furniture for your own good.
Retail traders saw this headline and immediately started scanning for tickers. Maybe they could short voting machine manufacturers. Maybe they could go long on stamp futures. Maybe they could find a penny stock courthouse construction company that would 47x because courts are busy now. They will find nothing. They will lose money on something else instead.
The appeals court rejected the request. Trump cannot implement the order. Mail-in voting continues exactly as it did before. We spent months of legal wrangling to arrive at the same place we started, which is the most efficient possible outcome when you let people solve problems that do not exist.
Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash
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