This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

On Tuesday, October 6, Justice Samuel Alito released So Ordered, his addition to the Supreme Court’s library of vanity books written by justices who decided that their $306,600 salaries are not enough. Alito’s book is particularly unnecessary because most of it is not even original content, but a collection of adapted speeches he’s given since his confirmation in 2006. As it turns out, a lesser-known perk of being a Supreme Court justice is that you can get paid to publish old talking points thrown together by clerks whose names you forgot long ago.

Much of the coverage of Alito’s book is due to ongoing speculation that he could retire soon, ensuring that a Republican president and a Republican-controlled Senate can nominate and confirm his successor. While promoting So Ordered, though, Alito has said that he plans to “serve for a certain number of additional years,” and “intends” to “stick around through this term.” On the one hand, I understand why this is a story; on the other, given that Alito is a lifelong Republican with an alarming history of flying January 6-adjacent flags over his homes, if Democrats take the Senate in the 2026 midterms, I will not be shocked if he changes his mind.

This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

For months, President Donald Trump has been coping with his myriad failures and plummeting approval ratings by trying to make it harder for people to vote his party out of power in the 2026 midterms. To that end, in March, he issued an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to draft a rule that would upend vote-by-mail procedures in dozens of states, and effectively block the agency from processing ballots that do not comply with the rule’s exacting requirements. Trump did not attempt to hide his motives for doing so: Legal restrictions on mail-in voting, he told Republican lawmakers, would “guarantee the midterms” for a party that is otherwise in danger of losing them badly.