Breaking from The Post:
A federal judge on Friday ruled in favor of CNN and reporter Jim Acosta in a dispute with President Trump, ordering the White House to temporarily restore the press credentials that the Trump administration had taken away from Acosta last week.
In a victory for the cable network and for press access generally, Judge Timothy J. Kelly granted CNN’s motion for a temporary restraining order that will prevent the administration from keeping Acosta off White House grounds…
In his decision, Kelly ruled that Acosta’s First Amendment rights overruled the White House’s right to have orderly news conferences. Kelly said he agreed with the government’s argument that there was no First Amendment right to come onto the White House grounds. But, he said, once the White House opened up the grounds to reporters, the First Amendment applied.
He also agreed with CNN’s argument that the White House did not provide due process. He said the White House’s decision-making was “so shrouded in mystery that the government could not tell me…. who made the decision.” The White House’s later written arguments for banning Acosta were belated and weren’t sufficient to satisfy due process, Kelly said.
So, Trump’s low-quality hires (H/T: Kay) were unable to cobble together a post-hoc justification for Acosta’s ouster nor file written arguments that passed the smell test, even when the sniffer was a Trump-appointed judge. Quelle surprise!
May this decision be only the appetizer course in a banquet of coming legal reversals for Team Shitgibbon!
Now for the bad news: The manual vote recount isn’t going well for Senator Nelson in Florida. It looks like the under-votes in Broward County (where Nelson had to run up the score to have a shot at edging Scott) really are under-votes and maybe caused by crappy ballot design.
Done in by ballot design. Again. It would be comical if the consequences weren’t so serious. https://t.co/NiLembB6dL
— Jonathan Cohn (@CitizenCohn) November 16, 2018
If indeed it’s a ballot design issue, people are going to crap all over the supervisor of elections (a Democrat), and if what I’m hearing from friends in the area is true, she probably deserves it. Perhaps Broward should elect someone more competent to run its elections.
But the fact is, the overall election system in Florida has been run by Republicans for decades and has been a giant clusterfuck — by design! — for just as long. That’s not going to change any time soon since the party that benefits from the dysfunction has retained its hold on the state’s executive branch and legislature and is on track to take both U.S. Senate seats. Le puke.
Maybe we need a ballot initiative to clean up this fucking mess. That’s how we got voting rights restoration past the wingnut legislature and governor. I see canvassing for signatures in my future…