Honestly, I thought the drama surrounding the elections on Tuesday in Wisconsin where, for the purpose of keeping a state supreme court seat, the Republicans in the legislature forced voters to choose between voting and breathing, had ended on Monday with the state supreme court blocking Governor Tony Evers’s order to postpone the election to a later date. I truly believed the shenanigans were over for the day. Ah, but I had not reckoned with the Federalist Society All-Stars in Washington, whose contempt for the franchise remains unbounded. After the Wisconsin supreme court had blocked Evers’s order to postpone the election, the Nine Wise Souls in D.C. arranged so that thousands of people wouldn’t be able to vote in it anyway. From the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel:

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A little over an hour later, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a second blow to the Democratic governor by tightening limits on which absentee ballots can be counted. Under that 5-4 order, voters will have to mail back their absentee ballots by Tuesday, go to the polls that day or give up their opportunity to vote.

The Republican legislators in Wisconsin read the room. They brought their petition straight to Justice Brett Kavanaugh, and P.J. and Squi’s pal joined in the now customary 5-4 decision that effectively disenfranchises thousands of Wisconsin voters. The absentee ballot process in Wisconsin is a mess, largely due to the pandemic, which is keeping various town clerks and election officials at home. People haven’t been getting their absentee ballots, which is why Evers wanted to extend the period in which absentee ballots would be counted. The J-S reports that 45,000 absentee ballots in Milwaukee alone haven’t been returned, and that 10,000 absentee-ballot requests were submitted last Friday alone in the state’s biggest city—which, by the way, will have a grand total of five—five—polling places open on Tuesday. Green Bay will have two. Anyone who gets a ballot after election day—who, given the scrambled logistics of the moment, could number in five digits—was effectively disenfranchised by the U.S. Supreme Court, which ran out their clock on them, even though the extension by which ballots postmarked by election day but received by April 13 would be accepted was left intact.

Governor Tony Evers came awfully close in his attempt to do the right thing. Nuccio DiNuzzo Getty Images

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(Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear—most notably, the year 2000, when a different Supreme Court handed down an even more egregious bit of legal ratfcking called Bush v. Gore. Back then, the Supreme Court issued a stay, blocking the Florida recount until the case could be argued before it. Then, when it handed down its ruling, it said that, because the recount had missed its previous deadline, there wasn’t time to complete it. This was the connective tissue between the 7-2 equal-protection ruling and the 5-4 no-remedy ruling that made up Bush v. Gore. Republicans know how to run out a clock.)

This is not an election. It is a farce, where it is not simply a bag job by the Republicans to keep a conservative named Dan Kelly on the state supreme court. Given the current circumstances, it is a particularly indecent farce and a particularly inhumane bag job. Or, as Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg said in dissent:

The question here is whether tens of thousands of Wisconsin citizens can vote safely in the midst of a pandemic. Under the District Court’s order, they would be able to do so. Even if they receive their absentee ballot in the days immediately following election day, they could return it. With the majority’s stay in place, that will not be possible. Either they will have to brave the polls, endangering their own and others’ safety. Or they will lose their right to vote, through no fault of their own. That is a matter of utmost importance—to the constitutional rights of Wisconsin’s citizens, the integrity of the State’s election process, and in this most extraordinary time, the health of the Nation.

Like any of that matters, right?