The Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that candidates for office have standing to challenge how a state counts votes—in a major blow to mail-in voting, a particular target of Donald Trump’s.

In a 7–2 decision, all six of the court’s conservative justices and one liberal justice sided with Representative Michael Bost, a longtime Trump ally, who alleged that the Illinois State Board of Elections had violated federal law by counting mail-in ballots received within two weeks of Election Day.

In the majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the court agreed counting ballots after Election Day threatened election integrity. “Rules that undermine the integrity of the electoral process also undermine the winner’s political legitimacy. The counting of unlawful votes—or discarding of lawful ones—erodes public confidence in election results and the elected representative,” Roberts wrote.

In a concurring opinion, conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett warned that the ruling wrongly lowered the bar for candidates to challenge state laws.

“By holding that a candidate always has an interest in challenging vote counting rules, even if those rules do not impose a competitive disadvantage on him, the Court today relieves candidates of having to show any real harm,” Barrett wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the court had undermined the democratic process and opened up a can of worms by creating a harm-free, status-based standing. She was joined in her opinion by liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

“By carving out a bespoke rule for candidate-plaintiffs—granting them standing ‘to challenge the rules that govern the counting of votes,’ simply and solely because they are ‘candidate[s]’ for office, ibid.—the Court now complicates and destabilizes both our standing law and America’s electoral processes,” she wrote.

The recent anti-mail-in-ballot push has clearly been influenced by Trump’s whims. Despite having voted by mail in the past, Trump has railed against the practice as part of his baseless claims of sweeping election fraud.

This story has been updated.

Senator John Kennedy shared some revealing information about his fellow GOPer Lindsey Graham in his new book, confirming Graham’s hawkish sensibilities and his penchant for alcoholic beverages.

“If you want to stump Lindsey, just ask him to name a country he wouldn’t bomb,” Kennedy wrote in his book, How to Test Negative for Stupid: And Why Washington Never Will.

Then Kennedy moved on to the drink.

“Invite him to dinner, and you don’t know if he’ll sit down for an intelligent conversation or get drunk and vomit in the fish tank. But that’s why I like him.”

This isn’t the first time Graham’s drinking has come up. In 2015, New York magazine wrote that Graham “likes a drink so much he thinks drinking more might just solve the problems in Washington.” And just last month, he appeared visibly drunk while answering questions at a news conference in Charleston, South Carolina.

Senator Elissa Slotkin said Monday that she has learned federal prosecutors are investigating her for a video she made in November, along with other congressional colleagues, urging members of the military to disobey illegal orders.

Slotkin said she found out about the investigation from Jeanine Pirro, appointed by President Trump as the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. Pirro had emailed the Senate’s sergeant at arms requesting an interview with Slotkin or her personal attorney, according to The New York Times. Pirro’s office declined to confirm or deny the investigation to the Times.

Slotkin, a former CIA analyst, helped to organize the video, along with five other Democratic members of Congress who served in the military: Senator Mark Kelly and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan. They each urged service members to refuse illegal orders, drawing anger from President Trump, who accused them of sedition and suggested they be executed.

The investigation of Slotkin follows Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s attempts to target Kelly, censuring him and going after his military pension. In response, Kelly has

© New Republic