It’s always a pleasure when some crazy Trump idea is struck down by the courts. Doubly pleasurable when it is the Supreme Court telling Trump no. Which made today’s decision by the court that the postal service can’t go ahead with requiring states to comply with vote-by-mail restrictions so satisfying.
The Supreme Court on Monday blocked a Trump administration plan to dramatically change how Americans vote by mail in the lead-up to the midterm elections, a major loss for President Trump, who has long claimed without evidence that fraud is rampant in mail voting.
The ruling was a resounding win for Democratic-led states and voting rights groups, which had argued that the plan was unconstitutional and an existential threat to the democratic process.
The Trump administration’s efforts, they had said, would introduce chaos and confusion as early voting gears up in many states.
Still, the weekslong legal tussle over the issue may have sown its own kind of confusion, a victory of sorts for Mr. Trump as he seeks to cast doubt on the integrity of the vote in an election his party might lose.
In a one-paragraph explanation, the court’s majority wrote that the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits” at the conclusion of additional litigation on the issue.
The majority’s order was unsigned, which is typical in emergency rulings. It gave no vote count.
Well, the vote count was pretty obvious. Six of the nine justices were on board with the one paragraph ruling. The mention of “merits” seems to indicate that they viewed the postal service scheme as unconstitutional. Which it clearly is, since the constitution says that the states determine the time, place, and manner of elections, not the executive department.
Justice Kavanaugh concurred with the ruling, making seven justices in favor of it. But he said that while the postal service probably was within its rights to regulate mail-in-voting, there wasn’t enough time to do this right.
Justices Thomas and Alito issued a dissent, being Trump sycophants who rarely can admit that he’s in the wrong. The New York Times story says:
In an eight-page dissent, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justice Clarence Thomas, wrote that he would have allowed the Trump administration plan to go into effect for the midterms. Justice Alito called the legal challenge a “Hail Mary” pass that was unlikely to succeed and that he believed the administration would ultimately win the case because the Postal Service has “broad authority to regulate the mail.”
Yeah, right. Alito and Thomas, legal non-geniuses that they are, came up with this lame rationale for allowing the postal service to go ahead with its plan. They said that the rule’s requirements are akin to requiring a stamp on mailed envelopes.
That makes no sense, since the postal service wanted states to upload their list of voters to whom ballots would be mailed, and only ballot envelopes with a matching bar code would be delivered by the postal service — along with other onerous requirements that go far beyond simply sticking a stamp on an envelope.
So for now we here in Oregon, where 100% of ballots are mailed to voters in each election, can rest easy in the knowledge that vote-by-mail will proceed as usual in the November midterm election.
However, Trump probably will try to implement his postal service scheme in the 2028 general election. The good news is that six of the nine Supreme Court justices appear to recognize that the scheme is unconstitutional. The bad news is that three justices seem willing to allow Trump to have his way — which is disturbing given that what he wants to do is clearly unconstitutional.
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