Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! I hope you enjoyed a joyful and rewarding Labor Day weekend. Your post-holiday roundup includes: the Supreme Court worked straight through the holiday on a three-alarm election docket, with Missouri trying to swap congressional maps after the primary, ballot envelopes already in the mail under a postal rule a federal judge just blocked, and a Friday-night rescue of the GOP's TV-ad discount; Treasury proposes the first tax-exemption rule in forty years to treat racial discrimination as racial discrimination, and the professors are livid; and a senior immigration officer in Dallas stands charged with running his own private green-card window for six years —cash, WhatsApp, same-day service— while nobody upstairs noticed a thing.
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We are closely watching two 2026 emergency election cases pending at the U.S. Supreme Court this week. The Justices have been working overtime.
🍿 First, as you may recall, our old friend Judge Indira Talwani enjoined President Trump’s new USPS ballot-envelope standard, blocking it for the midterms. But the rule is clinging to life support, even as North Carolina early ballots continue streaming out. By some kind of election miracle, last week North Carolina abruptly announced it would use the new USPS standards voluntarily, so it didn’t give Democrats an automatic win.
Today, an emergency appeal —the third SCOTUS appeal in the case— is ripe at the Supreme Court. The government filed its brief on Saturday. Justice Jackson fast-tracked the briefing schedule, with California’s response due by tomorrow (Wednesday) at 4pm. We shall see.
This case is off the map. At this point, nobody is even pretending to predict what happens next.
🍿 Last week, Missouri Democrats dreamed up a citizen referendum petition that would scrap this year’s newly gerrymandered maps —maps favoring Republicans— even after the primaries had been run using the new maps. At first, it didn’t work. Cole County judge Daniel Green properly rejected their request to suspend the new maps until “voters decide” the referendum. Democrats then filed an emergency appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court, which reversed the trial judge 7-0 and ordered the old maps to be restored and used instead in the general election. Cue chaos.
Supported by the national GOP and the State of Florida, Missouri’s Secretary of State Denny Hoskins filed an emergency appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The SCOTUS case was fully briefed yesterday and now awaits the Court’s decision.
It’s hard to imagine SCOTUS endorsing Missouri swapping its maps after the primary election. It’s like Ruth’s Chris changing menus after everyone has ordered and finished eating their appetizers. Under their long-standing Purcell Rule, the Supreme Court has cautioned courts against causing chaos, though the rule generally applies to federal courts. Well?
🍿 In good election news, late last week, the Supreme Court rescued Republicans’ campaign ad budget. The Associated Press reported, “Supreme Court grants Republican emergency appeal on TV ad rates before midterms.” Four Democrat candidates, Sherrod Brown, Jon Ossoff, Roy Cooper, and Kristen McDonald Rivet, had gone to the Fourth Circuit and won a ruling that the mandatory candidate discount belongs only to candidates. That would not have stopped the GOP from advertising. But it would have made the party committees pay full freight for the same spots, and stations were already canceling the cheap rates.
The DNC is broke and in debt. The RNC, NRSC, and NRCC have hundreds of millions teed up. The Fourth Circuit’s decision would have drastically limited the Republican committees by making them spend much more on ads for the same airtime.
On Friday, the Supreme Court stayed the Fourth Circuit, restoring the status quo ante for the midterm elections. Roy Cooper’s campaign complained the Court gave “a massive TV ad discount to billionaires.” Um. Billionaires are the only people who don’t get the discount, since only party committees qualify, not super PACs. The discount goes to the party, which is to say, to small donors. But never mind.
🍿 How unusual is this blizzard of last-minute elections litigation at the Supreme Court? Very. Emergency election applications aren’t strange anymore; they’re practically a legal sub-specialty. What is 2026-bizarre is the order of operations. Missouri voters have already nominated candidates in districts the state supreme court just erased. Absentee envelopes are already in the mail under a postal rule a federal judge has blocked, and the administration is racing to restore it before Wednesday afternoon.
This is as close to a high-stakes, Hollywood-style legal drama as you get in the world of injunction litigation. Somewhere, a deputy solicitor general is living off caffeine and Ritalin.
We used to litigate elections after they happened. In 2026, we are now litigating them between the primary and the general, with the ballots already in the stream. November 3rd is starting to look less like a finish line and more like a filing deadline the lower courts keep missing.
With less than eight weeks to go, the only thing I can forecast is that things will probably get even stranger before then. Race to the stores. We need to stock up on popcorn.
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There’s much more happening than election litigation. On Friday, Fox News reported, “Trump administration proposes stripping tax-exempt status from schools using race-based programs.” It’s big. The subheadline explained, “Proposed Treasury rules could impact 18,000 schools and 750,000 students who may qualify for race-based scholarships.”
“Schools rebranding race-based preferences as equitable, inclusive, or diversity-enhancing does not change their discriminatory nature,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said.
In other words, Secretary Bessent explained that calling a race preference “equitable” does not make it nondiscriminatory, just as calling a raccoon “an outdoor cat” does not make it safe near the trash cans.
The new Treasury rules would revoke the tax-exempt status of private schools and colleges if they use race at all in admissions, athletics, scholarships, loans, or whatever the DEI office renames it before the lunch break. Treasury stressed that its proposal would not stop schools from using religious criteria or helping disadvantaged students using race-neutral criteria, like income, geography, first-generation status, or preference for Asian cuisine in the school commissary.
The American Association of University Professors is furious. The professors want to keep racist preferences. They are “considering” a lawsuit. “This is not neutral enforcement of civil-rights law. It is an affirmative attempt to turn civil-rights law against the very people it was enacted to protect,” AAUP President Todd Wolfson said. “For half a century, federal policy recognized that measures intended to dismantle entrenched racial exclusion are not equivalent to policies designed to preserve it.”
Naturally, civil-rights laws become dangerous the moment they protect the wrong person.
The proposal turns the entire debate into one childishly simple question: may a school treat an individual differently because of race and still call itself racially nondiscriminatory? Academics support equality so strongly that they have developed several hundred pages of guidance explaining when it must not be used.
Back in 1983, the IRS pulled Bob Jones University’s tax exemption over racial rules, and the Supreme Court approved it as fundamental public policy. Treasury is now running Bob Jones in the other direction, and the same people who cheered back then are now’ considering’ a lawsuit. Consider away.
To be fair, the old rule was also easy to understand: racial discrimination was not discrimination whenever the discriminators had good intentions and virtue-signaling lanyards. Treasury’s proposal threatens the great administrative innovation of our age: accomplishing exclusion through the vocabulary of including people.
Some pigs are more equal than others. The proposal is now open for public comment. Ironically, it closes on November 3rd— election day.
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We have learned the foxes were hired to administer the immigration henhouse. Yesterday, Newsweek reported, “Senior USCIS official arrested in green card crackdown issues denial”
Meet Lukman Owolabi Ganiyu (fake name alert), a former Senior Immigration Services Officer with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS handles most immigration-benefit decisions inside the United States, including adjustment to lawful permanent residence (“green cards”), removal of conditional-residence status, and naturalization. The word “Services” in USCIS can, apparently, have a flexible definition.
Ganiyu is a dual US-Nigerian citizen. Last week, the DOJ said Ganiyu oversaw a six-year pay-to-play immigration bribery scam stretching from December 2019 through March 2026, and was promoted to Senior Officer in 2024— four years into the fraud. (His closing rate was terrific.) The DOJ’s complaint assigned about $671,438 in payments to Ganiyu through Zelle, Cash App, and similar channels, plus about $287,830 in cash deposits that investigators alleged were intended to conceal the source— roughly $959,268 combined.
I probably don’t need to say this, but $959,268 —just the ones they’ve confirmed— is not just a side gig; it’s a parallel economy. (The FBI’s internal estimate is north of $1.7 million.)
According to the DOJ affidavit, Ganiyu also earned about $407,838 in federal salary between 2020 and 2025. That’s a lot, but his side-hustle was better. The investigation began promptly in May, 2025, out of the FBI’s Dallas field office, based on an “internal tip,” presumably from a person who felt that finally someone would listen. He “resigned for personal reasons” in March of this year.
The DOJ connected many of the payments directly to specific immigration approvals, many of which were plainly ineligible. It said Ganiyu repeatedly bypassed interviews, supervisory reviews, jurisdictional limits, criminal background checks(!), and other normal processing protocols like the antiquated notion of eligibility. Some applicants were approved on the same day as the bribes.
From his apparently unsupervised position at USCIS, Ganiyu ran private immigration premium lane. For the right price, he offered same-day service. (At least it shows government can move fast when it has an incentive. Legal immigration applicants wait years.)
Investigators also discovered extensive communications between Ganiyu and many applicants whose immigration cases he handled, totaling thousands of messages and hundreds of calls. The communications weren’t through the government portal or his official phone line. They came through encrypted WhatsApp texts and calls.
Thousands of messages. At some point, it stops being clandestine communication and becomes a customer-service department. Additional red flags floating over his desk included the startling fact that from his Dallas office, Ganiyu routinely assigned cases from distant offices to himself, including Houston, Charlotte, and Minneapolis, which is about 1,000 miles away.
This demonstrates the USCIS’s rigid internal security controls, provided that nobody clicked the “Assign to Me” button.
🔥 DOJ arrested him last Wednesday. (The judge approved his bail bond but, in a rare triumph for judicial wisdom, took both his passports away and ordered an ankle bracelet.)
The complaint said Ganiyu, a co-defendant, and immigration applicants repeatedly exchanged money in a confusing flurry of transactions— reflecting their attempts to route, reconcile, and obscure the payments. If convicted, he and his co-defendant, ‘associate’ Adeniyi Akeem Somoye, the bagman, face up to five years in federal prison and a possible $250,000 fine for conspiracy to receive illegal gratuities by a public official. (In simpler words, bribes.)
Cunning, perhaps, but not particularly smart. Investigators reportedly found personal bank statements showing payments in Ganiyu’s government email account. This is the public-corruption equivalent of leaving a signed confession in the folder marked “Inspector General—Start Here.” He must have felt pretty comfortable that no one was watching.
“Selling immigration benefits for cash is a blatant abuse of public trust,” said U.S. Attorney Ryan Raybould. “When a federal official puts a price tag on lawful status, we will intervene immediately. Public corruption will never be tolerated in the Northern District of Texas.” Immediately in this case means sixteen months. But we’ll take it. Wheels of justice and so forth.
Now, all the immigrants who bribed Ganiyu could be prosecuted criminally and/or denaturalized. One hopes. America is still a land of opportunity, although we assume selling lawful status to people who can’t pass a criminal background check was not originally meant to be a franchise opportunity.
🔥 Six years. And nobody clocked him. As interesting as this case may be for a variety of reasons, it summons the specter of a much more profound problem. What happened to oversight? In other words, how could he get away with it for six years— including the entire Autopen Administration? This is shocking evidence of an institutional blind spot roughly the size of that hexagon on Saturn.
Green cards are not like fishing licenses. Immigration vetting is a core national-security function. But USCIS’s software apparently allowed one officer to assign himself a customer’s application and approve it the same afternoon. That is less an ‘internal control’ and more like a self-checkout lane with the camera turned off.
While you are noodling on that one, ask yourself this: how did the applicants know where to find him? And how did they learn they could get same-day turnaround on WhatsApp without getting in trouble? Presumably he didn’t advertise on TikTok or put up a website. Was it just word-of-mouth? Yelp reviews? Was his ‘associate’ Samoye out beating the bushes for business? And all that time, nobody noticed?
How many preparers, activists, or immigration lawyers knew about the ‘easy way’ to get a difficult case approved through CashApp and the Dallas office? Somebody was sending him customers. The complaint names applicants from Minneapolis; it does not yet name who told them to call Dallas.
We can only speculate why previous Administrations were so lax that someone like Ganiyu felt comfortable enough to check his bribe receipts using his official email account. He must have believed that nobody cared.
Part of the problem is that these kinds of prosecutions are politically embarrassing. It is, apparently, easier to look the other way than to look closely at what senior immigration officers are doing.
Well, the Trump 2.0 Administration doesn’t seem too worried about the optics. Or else the permission structure has changed enough that it is now politically possible to do the one basic job everyone assumes the federal government is always doing: stopping Nigerian scammers from being installed in key agency positions and selling our national security to the highest bidder.
I’m adding this story to the TAW list.
Have a terrific Tuesday! Come on back tomorrow, for more delicious essential news and caffeinated commentary.
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The scourge of DEI has reached even the smallest colleges in the country. My friend worked for a very small school on the Oregon Coast, and the school was RELENTLESS about getting Spanish-speaking students to enroll. They didn't care what happened to them after they got accepted, the mere fact these students appeared on the registry was enough to unlock those sweet federal funds the administrators desperately wanted.
It's a good example of how screwing up incentives screws up the whole system. (MAID in Canada is another perfect example.)
Wow, reading about the USCIS bribery story just hurts my head and my heart. Why are "dual citizens" ever allowed to perform these jobs for our country? And, why are naturalized US citizens allowed to do this? Seems like there should be some jobs that are only allowed to be US citizens from birth. Bizarre that a dual-citizen was ever allowed.