A slight easing of access to absentee ballots in Louisiana was ordered by a federal judge Wednesday. But even if her ruling survives a possible appeal, the state's voters will still face some of the strictest restrictions on voting by mail.
A purported compromise for the general election — requiring voters to produce a signed doctor's note before claiming poor health or exposure to the coronavirus makes it unwise to go to the polls — was struck down as an undue burden on voting rights by Judge Shelly Dick of Baton Rouge.
Instead, she said, the state must take voters at their word if their application cites illness, quarantine, caring for a sick relative or high susceptibility to Covid-19. That rule is still more restrictive than what's now been put in effect, at least for the presidential contest, in 45 states.
Nonetheless, the ruling was hailed by Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards. He had reluctantly agreed to the doctor's note plan a few weeks ago when he could not persuade the Republicans in control of most of the state government to continue relaxing the absentee rules for November (and the state's unique December runoffs) the way they had for a pair of primaries this summer.
"Simply put: Covid-19 remains a serious problem in Louisiana and voting should not be a super spreader event," the governor said.
"Bumbling attempts to fix what was not broken have brought us to today," the judge wrote in her opinion. She likened the need to find (and presumably pay) a doctor for an opinion to an unconstitutional poll tax.
The state's top GOP officials, Attorney General Jeff Landry and Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin, said they were considering asking the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals to reverse her. But the timetable is tight for playing out such a legal fight. Early in-person voting, the option many will presumably choose if they cannot claim an absentee ballot, begins in four weeks.
President Trump seems assured of extending the GOP's record of winning Louisiana to six elections in November. He took its 8 electoral votes by 20 points last time.
Less than 1 percent of the absentee ballots cast in the primaries were from voters who cited the coronavirus as their excuse. The number was that low because voters older than 65, who are some of the likeliest victims of the pandmeic, are not required to give a reason to vote by mail.
The individual voters who brought the lawsuit were joined by the Louisiana branch of the NAACP and the Power Coalition for Equity & Justice, a voter rights group.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.