The pitched battle over the voter list in one of the nation's most important 2020 battlegrounds is only growing more intense.
A group of conservative voters on Thursday asked a judge to hold the Wisconsin Elections Commission in contempt of court and fine the panel $12,000 every day until it removes 209,000 names from registration rosters. Democrats are fighting to keep those people on the rolls.
The fight is particularly important for two reasons. The size of the potential purge is nine times bigger than Donald Trump's margin of victory in the state (23,000 votes) four years ago. And the effort to cull the lists represents one of the right's most aggressive legal challenges to voting rights ahead of this year's presidential election.
Two weeks ago the judge in the case, Paul Malloy of Ozaukee County in the Milwaukee suburbs, ordered deactivation of the registrations of those who did not answer a notice the election commission sent in October to people suspected of moving out of state. The mailing told those people that state law required them to confirm their addresses within 30 days as a condition for staying on the rolls. Otherwise, they would have to reregister.
The panel, with three members from each party, has since deadlocked on attempts by the Republicans to carry out the purge immediately while an appeal is pending.
"Court orders are not suggestions and they're not rendered inoperative by the fact that you've filed an appeal," Rick Esenberg of the conservative Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which brought the lawsuitand asked for the commission to be penalized, said on WISN.
"This case should not effectively be ended before the appeals process plays out," replied Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul, who is representing the elections commission.
Trump is counting on the state's 10 electoral votes again this fall, but Democrats are intent on winning the state for what would be the eighth time in nine elections.
Doing that, however, will require a strong turnout from urban areas that are home to most of the people on the potential purge list.
Esenberg's group wants the state Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, to hear the commission's appeal. The commission wants an intermediate appeals court to take the next step and to put the judge's ruling on hold in the meantime. And the League of Women Voters of Wisconsin has sued in federal court to stop the purge, arguing the state's system violates the due process rights of voters.
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.