The Week: The Final Stretch

• Lately the president seems obsessed with making Republicans a rump party.

• In Alaska, two-term Republican incumbent faces Democratic former Representative Mary Peltola. Alaska’s unique quasi-jungle primary election system sends the top four finishers from the primaries to a single general election, and another candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan made it to the ballot. He’s ostensibly a Republican but has no apparent reason to run except to drain the votes of confused voters away from the incumbent. This is a dirty tactic, and Republicans are right to cry foul. But the Justice Department has gone one step further, filing a federal lawsuit demanding “an order declaring a certification of an election result prejudiced by Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot unlawful and enjoining defendants from allowing such a certification to occur.” The lawsuit, though not the effort to steal an election that Democrats have predictably labeled it, is meritless. It is patently premature for a court to issue an order before an election about the certification of results that haven’t been tallied yet. Moreover, the suit doesn’t mention any federal law that has been violated. The Sullivan scam is politics at its worst, but it is not against the law.

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• Lately the president seems obsessed with making Republicans a rump party.

• In Alaska, two-term Republican incumbent faces Democratic former Representative Mary Peltola. Alaska’s unique quasi-jungle primary election system sends the top four finishers from the primaries to a single general election, and another candidate named Daniel J. Sullivan made it to the ballot. He’s ostensibly a Republican but has no apparent reason to run except to drain the votes of confused voters away from the incumbent. This is a dirty tactic, and Republicans are right to cry foul. But the Justice Department has gone one step further, filing a federal lawsuit demanding “an order declaring a certification of an election result prejudiced by Daniel J. Sullivan’s inclusion on the ballot unlawful and enjoining defendants from allowing such a certification to occur.” The lawsuit, though not the effort to steal an election that Democrats have predictably labeled it, is meritless. It is patently premature for a court to issue an order before an election about the certification of results that haven’t been tallied yet. Moreover, the suit doesn’t mention any federal law that has been violated. The Sullivan scam is politics at its worst, but it is not against the law.