If a mercy rule existed in litigation, it would be invoked to spare the Department of Justice further embarrassment in its futile effort to obtain sensitive voter data from the states. Last year, the DOJ was full of swagger and bravado when it sued 30 states plus the District of Columbia.

Today, the DOJ is 0-15 in those cases and has lost its first appeal. It has lost before judges of varying ideology, including six cases heard by judges nominated by Donald Trump.

As these cases were being filed, I warned that these would be the most important court fights of the election cycle. My law firm went all in — filing in every one of them to defend voters from having their private data turned over to the federal government. We are now undefeated.

It is not just that Donald Trump's DOJ is losing; it is how dismissive the courts are in ruling against the government. To put it bluntly, the courts are not finding these cases difficult to decide.

Indeed, the judges have identified several different defects in the DOJ's position — including that its request for the information was defective from the start. As the judge in West Virginia recently noted, "Given the lack of an adequate basis or purpose [for DOJ's request], one is left to wonder what the real purpose was for the Justice Department to go to the trouble of filing civil actions like this one all around the nation."

Of course, we know the "real purpose." The Trump administration seeks to build a national database of registered voters so that it can remove those it wishes to disenfranchise. It needs the data from the states to build that list. Without that information, it lacks the foundation upon which to build its voter suppression machine.

Recently, courts have dealt the DOJ other defeats in its effort to execute this strategy. A federal judge in Washington, D.C., shut down state access to the SAVE database — an existing federal database that Trump has sought to repurpose to disenfranchise voters. A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked an effort to require states to share voter lists with the U.S. Postal Service in order for their citizens to vote by mail.

Then there is the big Supreme Court case the Republican National Committee lost last month. Its plan, supported by the DOJ, was to force states to discard hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots due to the timing of their receipt by election officials.

With every setback, the Trump administration becomes more desperate. They know they are losing in court and — equally important — they are acutely aware that they look desperate and humiliated.

Looming over all these fights is the calendar. Every day that passes without the administration having the data it seeks is one day closer to Election Day.

At some point soon, it will be impractical for them to execute this strategy in time for the midterms — even if they somehow obtained the data. The so-called quiet period — after which mass removals from the voter rolls are prohibited — is less than two months away...