Attorney General Todd Blanche spent much of his weekend shrieking and sweating on national television in response to straightforward questions about the legal basis for the Justice Department’s lawsuit seeking to pre-emptively block certification of the senate race in Alaska and the president’s stated involvement. “I will never, ever, ever talk about communications that I have with the president,” he said. But, despite all the rage and spittle, Blanche is simply wrong on the Constitution and federal law. It’s not a close call.

The Alaska Senate race features three candidates relevant to this dispute: the incumbent Republican Senator Daniel S. Sullivan (we’ll call him the “Incumbent Dan Sullivan” for clarity here); the Democratic challenger Mary Peltola; and then another guy named Daniel J. Sullivan (we’ll call him the “Other Dan Sullivan”), a retired schoolteacher who has never previously sought public office. Republicans charge that the entry of the Other Dan Sullivan was intended to confuse Alaska voters and siphon votes away from the Incumbent Dan Sullivan, while the Other Dan Sullivan has said he ran for office because he wanted a “megaphone” to speak out on public issues. 

The DoJ argues in its lawsuit that, if Incumbent Dan Sullivan ultimately loses the Senate race to Peltola by a margin smaller than the number of votes cast for the Other Dan Sullivan, then Alaska should not be permitted to certify the results. (Peltola’s campaign has requested permission to intervene and seek a quick dismissal). But the Justice Department’s legal claim is dead on arrival. 

The Constitution gives us a straightforward framework. Article I provides unambiguously that the procedures around voting and elections – “times, places, and manner of holding elections” – are up to (1) the individual states, or (2) Congress if it chooses to legislate on a given election-related issue. The Constitution gives neither the president nor the federal Executive Branch any power over elections. 

The State of Alaska already has fully litigated the issue of the two Sullivans, and has reached its own conclusion. The Alaska Supreme Court ruled in June that both Dan Sullivans can remain on the ballot, with specific markings to differentiate them; one is now listed as “Sullivan, Dan S. (Registered Republican) Incumbent” while the other is “Sullivan, Daniel J. Jr.” Alaska therefore has definitively decided how it wants to carry out its own election, and that should settle the issue. 

Instead, Blanche and the Justice Department now claim that Congress actually did pass a statute authorizing its lawsuit to block certification of the Alaska Senate race. Here’s where DOJ’s legal argument gets downright ridiculous. 

DOJ invokes a federal law passed in 1993 that has nothing to do with the issues at play in the Alaska dispute. Rather, the law invoked by the Justice Department governs the nuances of voter registration procedures; it has zero bearing on ballot design or potential voter confusion. Moreover, the Justice Department relies entirely on a snippet of text taken from the preamble to that statute – generic, gauzy “whereas”-style boilerplate about the importance of “protect[ing] the integrity of the electoral process.” But, as any novice lawyer knows, the language in a law’s preamble is merely table-setting and has no legal effect. And even if it did, the cited language here does not create any enforceable legal right of action for the Justice Department.

Blanche’s lawsuit also suffers from fatal practical deficiencies. First, the scenario about which the Justice Department frets – a narrow loss by the Incumbent Dan Sullivan by fewer than the number of votes cast for the Other Dan Sullivan – has not yet happened, and might never happen. As a basic jurisprudential principle, our federal courts do not issue advisory opinions about hypotheticals that might or might not ever come to pass. The lawsuit is not yet “ripe,” in legal parlance. 

And even if (in some alternate universe) the Justice Department’s suit had legal merit, there’s simply no way to determine what Alaska voters intend, beyond the actual markings they make on their Alaska Supreme Court-approved ballots. Imagine if, for example, the Incumbent Dan Sullivan receives 100,000 votes and loses to Peltola by 3,000 votes – but the Other Dan Sullivan receives 4,000 votes. How, then, could anybody determine whether those Other Dan Sullivan voters actually meant to vote for him, or for the Incumbent Dan Sullivan? Voter names are not attached to individual ballots, so it would be impossible to tell who cast which specific vote to begin with. And even if election authorities could somehow identify the 4,000 Other Dan Sullivan voters, how would they then proceed? Thousands of individual interviews about whether the voter actually meant to vote for one Dan Sullivan or the other? It’s a non-starter, a practical impossibility.    

Blanche’s lawsuit is entirely a showpiece, a bullhorn through which Trump and his Justice Department rail about a speculative harm that has not yet come to pass. And for all the bluster, they’ve got absolutely no support in the actual law. Yet Blanche’s conduct here, and his subsequent rage-fueled defense of it, is an ominous sign that the administration fully intends to do all in its power, and more, to disrupt and dispute the midterms.