Black voters have asked a federal court to supervise Donald Trump's legal challenges to a possible election loss in November, and an expert believes they have a strong case.
The lawsuit originally filed in the days following the 2020 election has moved slowly through federal court as an appeals court considered Trump's eventually rejected claims of presidential immunity from civil lawsuits, and the plaintiffs recently asked permission to drop one of their demands, which legal analyst Norm Eisen told CNN should get the case moving forward again.
"This case alleged that Donald Trump and the Republican Party and Trump's allies have been part of a conspiracy in 2020 to attack elections in the swing states based on racial grounds, and that that's a violation of two federal statutes, the Voting Rights Act – that they're impinging on the right to vote on discriminatory grounds, and also another civil rights statute, the Ku Klux Klan Act, passed to limit racially based wrongdoing in the 19th Century," Eisen said.
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The plaintiffs in the case Michigan Welfare Rights Organization v. Trump have asked a court to drop their demands for penalties for past violations of those laws and appoint a judge to monitor to oversee the defendants' conduct to ensure they aren't violating civil rights law, and Eisen said there's plenty of recent precedent for such an arrangement.
"They're asking the court here in the District of Columbia here to oversee and supervise Trump, the Republican Party and Trump's allies so that when they make moves they're not discriminating racially because of this past pattern," Eisen said. "That is not as unusual a remedy as it might sound. For years [from the 1980s until 2017], the Republican National Committee was under a consent decree because of their history of doing just this. We know how disproven and debunked but damaging Donald Trump and his allies' conduct was in 2020, and court supervision was applied in that election, for example, over the movement of postal ballots. There was a judge who oversaw the postal service. So [it] seems the plaintiffs have good grounds for the court to give them the relief they want."
The case ought to be decided in time for the Nov. 5 election, Eisen said, but he's not sure it will.
"It has to, [but] that doesn't mean it will," Eisen said. "By dropping the damages element of the claim they have taken this totally out of the scope of Trump v. U.S. [ruling on presidential immunity]. As you know, that case is about official conduct being protected and immune, but unofficial conduct is not protected, is not immune and Trump v. U.S. says that you can proceed, and what is the example that that case gives? When a president is acting as a political candidate. That is what this is about."
"The Republican National Committee is not a government operation," Eisen said. "This would apply to Donald Trump's conduct in 2024 and that of his allies. He's not in office. I think there's sound grounds to give the plaintiffs the relief they want, but we know this Supreme Court has not always been honest. They have bent over backwards to favor Donald Trump. They have terrible financial and other conflicts, and so we're going to see what happens both in the trial court and if there are emergency appeals."
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