On July 31, attorneys for Alabama filed this brief in Hall v Merrill, 18-1362. This is the case over whether Alabama can require a petition of 3% of the last gubernatorial vote in special elections, when there isn’t much time to petition. Alabama asks the Court not to take the case. Alabama’s brief says the issue is “unimportant” even though there have been thousands of special congressional elections in U.S. history, and typically nine or ten every two years.

The U.S. District Court had ruled after the special congressional election that the law was unconstitutional. The state appealed, and the Eleventh Circuit ruled 2-1 that the case was moot, and therefore the U.S. District Court should not have issued an opinion. Therefore, the real issue in the U.S. Supreme Court is whether ballot access cases can be adjudicated after the election is over.

The state puts much emphasis on the fact that in the First U.S. House District, there hadn’t been a special election (until the year this case was filed) in 70 years. But Alabama has had special congressional elections 35 times, and it seems irrelevant how long it had been in one particular district. Various U.S. House districts change their boundaries all the time, and sometimes disappear from one decade to the next.

The U.S. Supreme Court had said in 1969 in Moore v Ogilvie that ballot access cases are not moot just because the election is over. And in 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court discussed its Moore holding, and said that the plaintiffs in Moore did not intend to run again in a future election. But the Alabama brief does not mention that.

On July 30, all three sides in the lawsuit Trump v Committee on Ways & Means and Letitia James, Attorney General of New York, submitted a statement of how to proceed. The case was filed by President Trump to stop New York state from giving a copy of his state income tax return to the Chair of the Ways & Means Committee. The case is in U.S. District Court in D.C.

New York state attorneys say the President should have filed his case in a U.S. District Court in New York state, not D.C. The President asks the court to order the Chairman of the Ways & Means Committee to give at least two weeks notice if he does decide to ask for the return. And the Chair of the Ways & Means Committee argues that it would violate Article One, Section 6, for the Court to enjoin any congressional action. That part of the Constitution says, in part, “They (members of Congress) shall be privileged from Arrest…for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.”

On July 30, Rocky De La Fuente filed a federal lawsuit against the new California law that says no one can be on a presidential primary ballot unless he or she reveals the last five years of federal income tax returns. De La Fuente v Padilla, s.d., 3:19cv-1433. The case is assigned to U.S. District Court Judge Thomas J. Whelan, a semi-retired Clinton appointee. Here is the 18-page Complaint. It says that De La Fuente intends to seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2020. He had filed with the FEC as a candidate for the Republican nomination in May 2019.