No Fund Allowed

This Week in Democracy

• Acting U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the Justice Department’s $1.8 billion fund to pay Trump’s allies was “not moving forward,” in compliance with a judge’s order from last week. (Blanche said the president and his family would remain immune from tax-related investigations, however.) A federal judge in Florida also reopened the president’s case against the IRS that the president settled to create the fund, following a request from a bipartisan group of 35 former federal judges.
• A group of conservative and libertarian legal experts represented by States United filed a brief in the Justice Department’s case against the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights-focused nonprofit that has long been critical of Trump. The brief supports the SPLC’s motion to dismiss the case on the grounds that the charges are politically motivated.

  “When prosecution is deployed as an instrument of pressure and political strategy, our democracy suffers as a whole,” the experts write.

  ➡️ MORE: About the brief

• The U.S. Postal Service proposed changes to its rules for how it handles mail ballots. The proposals align with President Trump’s March executive order that seeks to illegally limit mail voting.

  A federal judge in Massachusetts heard arguments in state officials’ case against the president’s order this week. The officials urged the judge to block the administration from implementing the order because the Constitution gives states—not the president—the power to run elections.

  ➡️ MORE: About the executive order

• The Trump administration proposed new policies that would allow it to deny federal grants to programs that don’t align with the president’s policy priorities. The proposal specifically bans federal funding for voter registration programs. The administration has attempted to hold up or cut federal funding in similar ways since Trump returned to office but has been partially blocked from doing so by courts.

  ➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Coercive Funding Demands

• Six states held primary elections this week. No Election Deniers running for statewide office won, but one is advancing to a runoff election. States United Action is tracking other candidates running for office who have denied the results of the 2020 presidential election at ElectionDeniers.org. You can check your voter registration status at CanIVote.org.

  Election workers are still counting votes in California. Trump and other Election Deniers claimed that the long counting process was a sign of irregularities in the election process, but in fact it’s a sign that the process is working. Officials make sure every eligible vote is counted before they announce a winner.

  ➡️ MORE: Sharing the Facts About Finalizing Election Results

State of the States

In Alabama, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the state to implement a congressional district map from 2023 that eliminates one of the state’s two majority-Black districts.

The justices issued a similar ruling last month, but the voters and voting rights groups who brought the case sued again, asking a lower court to issue a new order blocking the state from using the map. The lower court agreed to do so last week, leading Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and Secretary of State Wes Allen to appeal to the high court once again.

States United represented three former Republican governors—former California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld, and former New Jersey Gov. Christine Todd Whitman—in filing a Supreme Court brief in the case in 2022.

➡️ MORE: About the brief

In Wisconsin, the FBI interviewed several Milwaukee police officers, questioning them about the ballot-counting process during the 2020 election. The bureau reportedly told the officers that they are not part of any investigation.

The Trump administration has continued to investigate the 2020 election in Arizona, Georgia, and Michigan, despite repeated audits and court rulings uniformly showing no widespread fraud or irregularities.

➡️ MORE: What’s Breaking Through About the Trump Administration’s 2020 Election Investigation

The States United newsletter will be on hiatus next week. We’ll be back the week of June 15.