BREAKING: Supreme Court REJECTS Trump's Mail-In Ballot Restrictions
Bulwark Takes
The Supreme Court has rejected Donald Trump's executive order aiming to impose strict new rules on mail-in ballots, upholding a lower court'
Key takeaways
- The Supreme Court's decision was a decisive rebuke of Trump's attempt to centralize control over mail-in voting ahead of the midterms.
Main topics
- Supreme Court ruling on Trump's mail-in ballot executive order
- Impact of postal service voter list requirements
Notable quotes
"It's a big deal. Like, Trump was really, really... this was the big play he had already unveiled."
Conclusion
While the Supreme Court has blocked Trump's mail-in ballot restrictions, signaling a major victory
Transcript preview
Speaker 3 (0:00) All right. We're live. Big news tonight, Andrew Egger. The Supreme Court has slapped down Donald Trump on mail-in voting. We're here to talk about it. We were hoping for George Conway to join us, but George has bigger thoughts and bigger things. I'm going to get his take tomorrow. But this is like Lou Gehrig subbing in for Wally Pipp. Andrew's going to take over, and he'll never relinquish this throne. Actually, Andrew's been covering this story for a while. So, Andrew. Supreme Court says the stay on this ruling, and we'll get into what Trump was trying to do in a second, but the Supreme Court says this mail-in ballot restriction that Trump had designed for the U.S. Postal Service cannot go into effect. 7-2 ruling. You'd be shocked. The two justices that dissented were Alito and Thomas. We'll get into that, too. But before we get into the specifics, are you surprised? Speaker 1 (0:50) I can't say that I am surprised. I Speaker 3 (0:53) mean, Speaker 1 (0:53) I've basically taken the case all along that... I would be shocked to see anything else from the Supreme Court on this. I wish they had slapped it down sooner. They really did let a lot of the tape run out here. But this was one of those cases, much like the Liberation Day tariffs or much like the birthright citizenship case, where it just seemed like on the merits, Trump was so far out over his skis that he was basically daring the court to do anything other than what we saw tonight, which was... very quietly, without a lot of fanfare, without a lot of explanation, just allowing these lower court rulings to stand and letting that be the last word on this whole mail-in fight ahead of the midterms, at least, if not permanently. Speaker 3 (1:40) All right, let's get to the actual decision in the news. You were right. It was very, very sparse, the ruling itself. Basically, this is the entirety of the majority opinion. I'll read it. It's that little. The government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the district court's preliminary injunction, and the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this court do not favor a stay. So essentially, the Trump administration was hoping that this injunction against its mail-in ballot rules could be stayed, as in could be put aside and the rule could go into effect. Court said no. Brett Kavanaugh. concurred with the majority opinion, but he offered a little bit more in terms of his thinking. And you can see it on the screen here. I'll read it for those who are listening. Kavanaugh writes, in my view, based on the briefing the court has received at this interim stage, there's at least a fair prospect, fair, I want to get back to that in a second, that the final rule falls within the Postal Service's statutory authority. But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary. capricious in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections. For that reason, I concur in the denial of the application for a stay. So before we get to Thomas and Alito, let's talk about Kavanaugh here. He's saying, you know, if you do this again for 2028, I might be a yes vote. That's my read. Speaker 1 (3:08) Yeah, or at the very least, it's not completely implausible that he would find himself convinced. I mean, Kavanaugh really is emerging as the sort of split the baby justice in some of these extremely high, high wattage decisions. He was he was in the same position on the birthright citizenship case that came out earlier this summer, where where he was the one guy who said, yeah, you know, I don't think that I don't think that the White House has the authority to unilaterally change the definition of birthright citizenship. Speaker 1 (3:38) I'm saying that because I think that that would violate current law. I don't necessarily think it would violate the Constitution. Kavanaugh has this sort of reputation as this kind of don't rock the boat style justice, this justice who frequently, even when he is taking a stronger stance than this, he will frequently put down opinions that do this sort of, well, on the one hand, there are some good arguments over here. On the other hand, there are some good arguments over here, style dance, just in rhetorical terms. So I actually don't know. how load-bearing this is. It's a little bit moot as well because, you know, with only two guys in the descent, you could lose Kavanaugh here and it's still a pretty, you know, powerful 6-3 majority. Speaker 3 (4:18) Yeah, it'll be 6-3 at that point. Kavanaugh, it seems like he likes the drama. Is that what you're saying? Speaker 1 (4:23) Yeah, maybe a little bit. Yeah, I think there's Speaker 3 (4:25) a Speaker 1 (4:25) bit of likes the drama, but also doesn't want to like have these big eye popping, you know, theatrical like like earth shaking rulings. I mean, he is he is a little bit more of a slow change guy. So so, yeah, it's a big change. Yeah, I hear you. Speaker 3 (4:39) All right. I want to talk about Thomas. And again, we don't have much from the majority because they kept it very brief. The dissenters, the two conservatives, and I guess it's worth pausing for a moment to note. The three Trump SCOTUS appointees, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coen and Barrett, they all voted against him in this case. It's going to be one of those situations that Trump's going to fume over again. Speaker 1 (5:01) I know. I want to talk about the dissents, and I don't mean to cut you off on that. Before we do that, because I feel like I've seen this on Twitter already, too, where it's like people are digesting this news. I tweeted out something about it, and everybody immediately is jumping to the sour apple of like, you know, Kavanaugh and Alito. Sorry, not Kavanaugh and Alito. Alito and Thomas doing what they always do. I did that. It's Speaker 2 (5:23) true. Speaker 1 (5:24) I get that. I did that a little bit, too. Like, we should dwell on the fact, before we start talking about the sour apple stuff, this is a big deal. I mean, like, Trump was really, really... we kind of glossed over it because like it did seem likely that the Supreme Court was always going to do this. But as far as the monkey business that Donald Trump wants to do ahead of these midterms, there's other stuff that he could theoretically roll out later. But this was the big play he had already unveiled. He was hoping to use this thing to sow a ton of chaos with mail-in ballots in blue states. He's not going to be able to do it. It is one of the bigger rebukes right up there with the tariff stuff, right up there with the birthright citizenship stuff that the Supreme Court. court has given Donald Trump. And it's a really, really important thing that had happened. And we should be glad that it happened, whatever Thomas and Alito have to say. Okay, Speaker 3 (6:12) fair enough. You make a very compelling case. I'm going to put Thomas and Alito to the side for a second. I think it's worth going through what the bill actually would do so people are reminded. This is a CNN summary of the bill. The president's order required states to submit lists of eligible voters to the U.S. Postal Service. The agency would be barred from delivering ballots mailed by states to people not on those lists. It also required states to use tracking barcodes on ballot envelopes, and it prioritized federal prosecution of state election officials who send or receive ballots to non-citizens or others ineligible to vote. Now, the last point was kind of interesting because, and we were talking to a couple legal experts about this, they said that would have been incredibly chilling, right? Like if you're a secretary of state, you're like now thinking, oh my God, if I screw up, I'm going to get arrested. There's also a whistleblower complaint around this stuff that emerged a couple of weeks ago where they're like, The way they are applying this or conceiving of applying this, they're doing batches of ballots. So it's like 10,000 ballots in a batch. If one of those barcodes is off, you're not just eliminating that piece of mail, you're eliminating the entire batch. So one bad barcode could nullify basically 10,000 ballots. If they had allowed this to go in to effect, if it was allowed, it would have been. I mean, it's hard to actually conceive of how chaotic it would have been. I mean, basically, states would have been either forced to completely revamp their election systems on the fly, or I guess, in theory, just not do mail-in balloting and encourage everyone to just go to the polls on election day or drop off ballots in person. It would have been incredibly administratively impossible. Speaker 1 (7:49) Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's been so weird to try to cover this because, again, the odds of that going into effect were always so slight. And like we knew that they were slight. But at the same time, like, yeah, like, like, it's like this AI Doomer thing we're talking about. What are you supposed to not think Speaker 3 (8:05) about the possibility? Exactly, exactly. Speaker 1 (8:07) And like, like, we would be doing reporting, like we were we were going around a lot of the plaintiffs in this suit, who have now won are these these blue states, these democratic