☕️ TOSSED UP ☙ Saturday, September 26, 2026 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

The Supreme Court gives and takes away: the inglorious end of the dramatic Missouri show, and a win the media is calling a “major victory” for Trump’s election integrity initiative, plus more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! Your Weekend Edition roundup focuses on midterm election news: SCOTUS takes away a potential GOP seat but hands Republicans another critical election integrity tool that is driving triggered Democrats completely bonkers, and an explainer of why predictions of midterm doom are premature.

🌍🇺🇸 ESSENTIAL NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🇺🇸🌍

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Yesterday, the Supreme Court took some and gave some. Let’s start with the “taking.” Corporate media was beside itself in delirious glee. The New York Times reported, “Supreme Court Once Again Blocks Republican-Backed Voting Map in Missouri.” The wildest election litigation roller coaster in US history has finally pulled into the station. Probably. Unless it starts up again.

After Monday’s terrific Eighth Circuit decision that found rolling back to the Democrats’ 2022 Missouri maps after holding primaries using the Republicans’ 2025 maps would “cause chaos,” yesterday the Supreme Court found the exact opposite and, somewhat snippily, reversed.

“In an unsigned decision with no noted dissents,” the Times reported, “the justices warned of ‘electoral chaos’ if the state were to change course so close to the election and use the 2025 map.” The Democrats outplayed the GOP by rushing out 2022-map ballots to early and overseas voters. Thus, said the Supremes, it is too late to go back to the 2025 version.

I’ve already covered this saga at some length, so refer to last week’s roundup if you are late arriving to this story. The significance is less than the Times’s breathless celebration suggestions. Republicans stood to pick up +1 House seat, and now they won’t. That’s it. So the GOP didn’t lose anything. After all that litigation in about twenty courts, it failed to win one.

The 2026 Gerrymandering Wars still heavily favor the red team.

🔥 SCOTUS’s ‘give’ —which was much more significant news— triggered Democrats and socialists everywhere. CNN reported, “Supreme Court says states can use controversial citizenship data tool for voter audits in win for Trump.” Just wait till I tell you what the “controversial tool” is. Remember that: controversial.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court, 6-3, handed Donald Trump what even corporate media is calling a major victory in his ‘war on non-citizen voting.’ States may now voluntarily use a revamped, long-standing federal database called SAVE to check voters’ citizenship ahead of November’s midterms.

This is a crisis.

SAVE, a name that is not at all confusingly similar to the SAVE America Act, but is completely unrelated, stands for Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, which sounds less like a voter-integrity tool and more like the department that processes paperwork at Area 51’s alien retirement warehouse. It is forty years old.

For forty years it has been gathering moss, largely forgotten and mostly unused. SAVE was originally built to stop government benefits from going to non-citizens —and you can see how well that worked— but last year the Trump administration picked it up, dusted it off, and taught it some new tricks.

First, it is now free. Previously, election officials could only search the system one name at a time. Even then, DHS charged them for access— two “features” that were not at all meant to discourage its widespread use. How dare you. Now it costs nothing. And thanks to DOGE’s geniuses, it now includes all citizens, not just aliens, and most importantly, allows convenient bulk searches by name, birthday, and Social Security number.

Meaning, election officials can now upload their entire voter database and immediately get back a list of suspected non-citizens. It’s not conclusive, but it lets them promptly send out postcards requiring those suspect voters to show they are citizens or get taken off the list.

That could not stand. Cue lawfare and Sparkling Soonananans.

🔥 In August, 2025, progressive voting NGO Protect Democracy published a 17-page anti-DOGE white paper warning of the dire risks the upgraded citizenship verification system posed to our democracy, although your confusion is understandable about how confirming voters are valid somehow threatens our entire civilization:

But it was the very last data point —the Social Security number link— that was the innovation that got the program sued, because it made the database actually useful. Election officials have Social Security numbers. They don’t usually have DHS immigrant IDs, which was previously the only way to search the database.

Thus, back in June, D.C. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan —a name that belongs on a glitter pen— ruled the whole thing was profoundly illegal and must stop. (Biden appointee.)

Her order scolded that “Congress put protections in place to prevent precisely this type of centralized data bank,” and accused the administration of having “haphazardly combined and repurposed the private information of millions of Americans, including citizenship data that they knew to be unreliable,” thereby allowing states to “actively remove United States citizens from voter rolls based on inaccurate information.”

Note the adverb. Haphazardly. That’s not in any statute. Nor does it seem to well describe this carefully designed election integrity plan. That was Sparkle’s take (and here I will forbear from making an obvious joke about her own parents’ haphazard way of naming their children). The three laws she actually cited in her morbidly obese, 75-page opinion were the Social Security Act, the Privacy Act of 1974, and the Administrative Procedure Act— all based on privacy and procedure and not actually haphazardness. But never mind.

🔥 Yesterday, the Supreme Court disagreed with Sparkle. In an unsigned opinion joined by the six conservative justices, they explained that, under federal law, “the federal government has an obligation to respond to requests from state and local election officials seeking to verify the citizenship of voters.” In short: the Administration must provide this information. The 1996 law they cited was a provision literally titled “Obligation to respond to inquiries.”

The 1996 statute says DHS shall respond to any inquiry from any state or local agency “seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual.” Not may respond. Shall respond. It wasn’t a suggestion. But till Trump 2.0, the federal government carefully followed the law by not providing any easy way to do it. Good luck, chumps.

Unsurprisingly, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, wordily writing that “the harm caused by burdening or disenfranchising even a few lawful voters outweighs the nonexistent harm that the government experiences when it is prevented from taking an action that it likely lacks the authority to take.” She expressed concern and deployed a confusing metaphor.

Likely lacks authority. The entire “this is illegal” claim —screamed across corporate media coverage all day yesterday— rests on that word “likely,” penned by three liberal justices who lost the vote 6-3. The six who won said the law requires DHS to answer the phone when states call. So, if you read somewhere that the ruling lets Trump do something unlawful, remember: “unlawful” is the minority’s conclusion.

The six-justice majority concluded the exact opposite, and said it was the government’s duty.

🔥 What nobody in the hysteria crowd wants to discuss is that the “haphazard” program is practically obsessed with due process. It’s right in DHS’s own rulebook. The USCIS “Voter Registration and Voter List Maintenance Fact Sheet” says, and I quote, that “SAVE prohibits agencies from rejecting a voter registration or removing an individual from a voter roll based on a SAVE response until the agency has completed all SAVE-required steps.”

Any signal other than “United States Citizen” gets automatically escalated to additional (manual) verification. States must give every non-verified voter “the opportunity to provide proof of U.S. citizenship” plus “any right to notice, a hearing, and other due process available under applicable law.” A no-match on Social Security data “is not a final SAVE response and cannot be used to deny registration or remove someone from a voting roll.” And the most important line: “SAVE provides verification information but does not determine an individual’s eligibility to register to vote, stay on a voting roll, or vote.”

And the whole thing is completely voluntary. States and local elections offices can use SAVE if they want to, or not. But that hasn’t stopped Democrats’ breathless claims about purges. Republicans were somewhat more elated.

🔥 If SAVE is a purge machine, as Democrats claim, it’s one that, by its own operating manual, is not allowed to purge anyone. SCOTUS even ruled out mass purges— the majority pointed out it’s already too late in this cycle for systematic list maintenance, since the National Voter Registration Act’s 90-day blackout window is in effect. Participation, as noted, is voluntary. Maine’s Democratic secretary of state, Shenna Bellows, who refuses to use SAVE, even noted that yesterday’s ruling “does not force states to change the way we run our elections.”

Still, it’s a crisis for democracy. A crisis of haphazardness. And, according to the Times, a controversial one.

Notwithstanding that NVRA forbids mass purges this close to election day, and despite the fact that it’s purely voluntary, lawyers for the League of Women Voters emotionally called the ruling “profoundly disappointing,” warning it puts “millions of Americans at risk of being unlawfully targeted by the administration’s unreliable voter purge database.”

Millions at risk! Unlawfully targeted. By a database that cannot remove anyone without manual review, in an election where federal law already bars systematic purges, in a program states can simply decline to join.

Sure, okay.

A better way to describe this dustup is that the blue states tried to block DHS from deploying a tool that easily (and for free) helps verify citizenship for voting purposes. Now the Supreme Court’s six-page order has overridden Judge Sparkle’s 75-page opus. For now, election officials in red counties can use the database to vet their voters one-by-one.

But after the midterms, they can use SAVE to help with bulk list maintenance.

What we are watching come together is a network of new tools --like the SAVE database and the USPS ballot envelope standards— that are arriving too late to offer significant help in 2026, but will almost certainly come fully online for 2028. One begins to wonder whether that wasn’t the plan all along.

🔥 Try to follow me here. I’m not minimizing the importance of the midterms. If we lose Congress, the next two years will be a painful slog through Democrat impeachments, investigations, commissions, and made-for-streaming grandstanding events that will make the January 6th Committee’s televised hearings look like the warm-up comedian. Nobody wants that.

But, and here I tread carefully, even if that does happen, it will still never be as awful as what we endured during 2018-2020. During the second half of Trump 1.0, when Democrats clawed themselves a narrow House majority, they enjoyed the deep state’s full support. They simply won’t have that this time. They’ll be on their own. They will face further disadvantages, which I could list for you; for the sake of time, I will set them aside for now.

We do not want to lose the midterms, but we would survive it. We’d be fine. Trump’s ambitious agenda would be limited but not stopped. Progress would continue, albeit slowly and painfully, and not at the breakneck pace we yearn for. Still— this president has already accomplished more in two years than in most 8-year presidential terms.

True, his many executive orders will not become laws, leaving them vulnerable to the next Democrat president’s autopen. But those laws are not guaranteed to pass even if Republicans do keep Congress. And Trump’s team is proving delightfully capable of repurposing existing laws— like it did with tariffs, asylum seekers, and the SAVE database. Those will be harder for a new administration to unravel.

There’s more to consider. Even though corporate media is running Trump’s “low” approval polls wall-to-wall, those polls will have almost nothing to do with the outcome. Midterm congressional elections are a different beast than presidential elections. It’s not really a national election. Thanks to the way Congressional districts are drawn, there are only a very few real toss-up seats.

The Cook Political Report’s latest ratings —updated yesterday, September 25— put 22 House seats in the Toss Up column: 17 currently held by Republicans and 5 by Democrats. Cook noted that, even if those 22 split evenly, Democrats would land at 219 seats, a bare majority, and only +4 over where they are now. It would take a ‘blue wave’ to get them to 230, which would be their absolute best day.

The Senate is nearly impossible for Democrats. Everything would have to go their way, and that assumes stroke victim John Fetterman (D-PA) doesn’t flip. Media barely mentions the Senate anymore.

And those 22 toss-up House seats —a mere handful— will not be decided by Trump’s popularity, the price of gas, or the masked fake lesbians currently boycotting the Last Ditch dive bar. These contests will be decided by one thing and one thing only: Turnout. Midterm elections are historically low-turnout elections where the out-of-power party holds an advantage, thanks to the aggravation factor.

In low-turnout elections, the party that hauls the most souls to the polls wins. Period. Here is the entire list of toss-up races:

That’s it. That’s the whole list that will decide the fate of the House, and Republicans hold a structural advantage in terms of incumbency and the Trump 2024 margin. Nobody is predicting a blue wave. Polls are useless at this point, not just because the pollsters lie, but because they can’t accurately predict who’ll actually go down and vote on November 3rd.

You still with me? To hold the House and prevent The Democrat Circus, Round Two, we need only hang onto a little over half of those 22 toss-up seats. Readers in those districts, take note. Readers outside those districts, take note if you want to help by throwing a few donation dollars one way or another.

Meanwhile, the GOP can focus on 22 House races and about six Senate races. That job is much more manageable than the corporate media keeps telling everybody. (Of course, Democrats face a similarly concise target zone, which is why no one is sanguine.)

Now, back to the big picture.

🔥 I began with the bold claim that Trump’s many election-integrity initiatives are less important for 2026 than for 2028, when they will become operational. Now you can see why I said that. Without minimizing the importance of the midterms, winning the presidency in 2028 is far more important, when the various national election integrity initiatives will have a scope and effect far beyond 22 House races.

Meanwhile, regardless of who controls Congress, Republicans will have two more years to use the SAVE database to prune voter lists. The new USPS tracking system for mail-in ballots will be online in plenty of time for befuddled clerks to get ready. We’ll enjoy two more years of DOJ election fraud prosecutions. We might even get the SAVE America Act, which will tighten up voter registration, finally ending the motor-voter loophole.

So there is no reason to get anxious or depressed, like the corporate media wants. True, we have plenty of work to do. But we are defending strong ground that we already control, with reserve troops and supplies marching toward the battlefield. We should stay energized and optimistic. And turn out on November 3rd.

Have a superlative Saturday! C&C will return as usual on Monday morning, with a brand-new installment of essential news and caffeinated commentary.

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