Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor tried to gotcha a Republican National Committee lawyer on mail-in ballots.
Republicans and conservatives have long maintained that the widespread use of mail-in ballots, especially during and following the COVID-19 pandemic, puts the integrity of elections at stake. The issue is finally being heard by the Supreme Court of the United States and predictably, one of the left-leaning justices had to get some digs in.
Watch:
🚨 LMFAO! Liberal Justice Sotomayor tries GOTCHA on GOP lawyer, gets CALLED OUT
“Maybe we should have another president NOW, wasn’t FL counting ballots after [election day 2000]?” 🤡
LAWYER: “With all due respect, that is the REDDEST of RED HERRINGS!” 🔥pic.twitter.com/04M2Rya2ZN
— Eric Daugherty (@EricLDaugh) March 23, 2026
“You believe that absentee voting by the military and overseas voters, the various federal laws under which states have proceeded with respect to those votes, are illegal? Or they’re not saying what everybody has understood them to say—that states can accept absentee ballots after the election? Military and overseas voters,” she asked during Monday’s oral arguments.
“I don’t think any vote is unlawful. Let me try to address how I think you would reconcile UOCAVA (The Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act) with the Election Day statutes,” RNC lawyer Paul Clement responded. “And to start, I think it’s important to recognize that UOCAVA is not limited to the federal general election. So UOCAVA applies to primary elections, to runoff elections, and special elections, and federal general elections. The Election Day statutes only apply to the general federal election. So the way I would reconcile the two is to say that all the references in UOCAVA to state deadlines are perfectly fine, not preempted at all, not displaced at all, not even anomalous with respect to the primaries, the runoffs and the special elections.”
“Then the court has a job to do in the federal general election—to say, like, which is the specific and which is general. I think the more logical way to do it would be to say that with the understanding in this court, if you decide in our favor, that for the federal general election, the ballots have to be in by Election Day,” he concluded.
“Maybe we should have another president now, because wasn’t it in Florida that they were counting military votes after receipt?” Sotomayor snipped, recalling former President George W. Bush’s 2000 electoral victory.
“So with all due respect, that is the reddest of red herrings. Because what happened in the 2000 election in Florida is that pursuant to a consent decree that was entered by a federal court because Florida was violating the principal provision of UOCAVA—which says you have to give the absentee ballots to the overseas voters 45 days in advance—because Florida was violating that, there had to be a consent decree to create a remedy that was not provided under state law,” Clement stated.
“What happened was that the judge made up the deadline, not the state,” the justice concluded.
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Sierra Marlee is a millennial whose hunger for the truth in a world of fake news has led her to write. Marlee also contributes to BizPac Review.
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