Some Republican-led states say they they will block Justice Department’s election monitors from going inside polling places on Election Day, pushing back on federal authorities’ decades-long practice of watching for violations of federal voting laws.
Yeah yeah I know something something republicans don’t give a shit, but assuming we lived in a somewhat normal world and Donald Trump never existed, can they do that? I thought federal officials superseded state ones?
Are they basically just pulling the “I dare you to try to do something about it” because they know the shit that will go down if so won’t really make them look bad, even if they lose in court?
It’s a bit of a win-win situation for these nuts. If the election officials force their way in, they’ll get to shriek about how corrupt Biden-Harris officials are trying to force their way into polling sites to steal the election. If it goes to court, they’ll declare victory before the lawsuit is decided, and then Trump-loving muppets will start spamming lawfare, psy-op, or whatever the new word of the day is for trying to dismiss everything that would prevent them from illegitimately seizing power as the result of an insidious Democratic plot all over social media again once the lawsuits turn out in favor of the feds. Wild what you can get away with when you’ve got this rabid a death cult going for you.
Federal law supercedes state law. That doesn’t mean federal officials can go where they want.
IIRC, the issue is that the Voting Rights Act gave DoJ the power to observe elections, but the SCOTUS partially nuked the VRA. So now it’s not clear whether the DoJ still has that power, and the usual suspects are taking advantage of this ambiguity. Possibly hoping to give the SCOTUS a chance to nuke more of the VRA.