The Supreme Court appears to have rescued voting by mail from Donald Trump’s weird plan to have the US Postal Service decide who gets to vote. In another of those one paragraph emergency “shadow docket” decisions, the Court left in place a Massachusetts federal judge’s temporary restraining order preventing the Postal Service from putting Trump’s scheme into operation.
As usual with “emergency” orders, the Court’s majority didn’t explain its reasoning because it doesn’t have to. But Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, two of Trump’s best buddies in fascism, submitted a dissent making clear they were all in on letting the vote purge plan go into effect, and Brett Kavanaugh wrote a concurrence saying he thinks “there is at least a fair prospect” that the Postal Service has the legal authority to fuck around in elections (it does not), but that trying to do it this close to Election Day wouldn’t give state and local authorities enough time to comply with Trump’s otherwise awesome ratfucking scheme.
The decision was a big win for democracy, and for the eight states that conduct almost all their voting by mail. But Trump and his allies will continue to lie that voting by mail is fraudulent (except when Trump does it), and the Supremes have already indulged Trump’s fetish for election fuckery far too much.
Still, the upshot is that voting by mail should go forward as normal for the roughly one-third of Americans who vote by mail, at least during November’s midterm elections. That will in turn improve the chances that voters can elect Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the bare minimum needed to curb Trump’s sloppy deranged authoritarianism.
You can also use the button below to donate an amount of your choice at Paypal.
In March, Trump issued an executive order telling the Postal Service to only mail out ballots to people on lists of voters that states would provide to USPS, after the states compiled lists of voters who were definitely US citizens. Anyone not on the official list would not receive a ballot, and would have to find other ways to vote. States that refused to submit the lists, or didn’t conform to new USPS rules for ballot envelope design — which would have matched each envelope to a bar code to a voter, goodbye secret ballot, hope nobody’s a loudmouth Democrat — simply wouldn’t be allowed to send ballots out by mail.
This was supposedly meant to prevent non-citizens from voting, which is already a felony and is already extremely rare. But adding more hoops to jump through is a classic Republican strategy for voter suppression, so Trump and his minions insisted this Rube Goldberg apparatus would improve “election security.”
After some delay, the Postal Service issued rules in August for how that would supposedly work. But almost immediately, a whistleblower report made clear that USPS had developed shitty, rushed computer systems that would likely cause a “foreseeable catastrophic disruption” of the midterms. (Again, that was the point.)
Trump’s order was challenged in federal court in two major lawsuits, one led by state attorneys general, and another by the League of Women Voters and other voting-rights groups. Both challenges argued, correctly, that the Constitution leaves the conduct of elections to the States, and that the president has no power to interfere in elections. They also argued that with just weeks ahead of the midterms, states wouldn’t have time to comply, leading to chaos and confusion in the election (which again was the point of Trump’s order). Also, the Postal Service’s job is to deliver mail, not to decide who gets to vote.
Yesterday’s Supreme Court order didn’t address the merits of the case, because again, “shadow docket.” Kavanaugh’s concurrence is worrying enough, with his suggestion that sure, maybe the USPS rules are within the agency’s authority, but it’s too close to the election to do it this year. Going forward, he might be happy with letting Trump ratfuck voting by mail as long as it’s an orderly ratfuck.
Alito’s dissent, joined by Thomas, fussed that the plaintiffs might not have standing, and called the state plaintiffs’ claim — that the Postal Service lacks authority to fuck around with ballots — merely a “Hail Mary pass” that “rarely succeeds,” meaning Alito saw at least a plausible legal fig leaf to allow the fuckery.
More insanely, Alito dismissed states’ concerns that the new rules come too close to Election Day to implement without disruptions to the vote, since some states have already mailed out absentee ballots. He said that he took those concerns “very seriously,” but blew them off anyway, saying the problem “is not enough to convince me to deny the application.” Besides, hadn’t the states caused the delay by suing to stop the rules from going into effect? If they had simply obeyed, they wouldn’t be in this mess, arguing that the rules are unconstitutional. Stop resisting and comply.
Donald Trump knows exactly what a blow to his election rigging dreams the Court’s decision is; he ranted on social media this morning that “these are not the people I interviewed, they are merely a shell of their original selves.” While he was at it, Dear Leader also whined about other Court decisions that blocked him from changing the Constitution on birthright citizenship, and keeping him from slapping tariffs on other countries at whim.
It’s really disappointing when you interview people and they reassure you that they’ll let you do anything you want, and then they turn around and betray you by saying some of your shit is too illegal even for them. Why, not letting him rig the elections with less than 50 days to go simply proves that the loyal rightwing Federalist Society stooges he picked for the Court have been “bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back by at least a hundred years.”
Golly, we’d sure like to know how the radical Left managed to bully the poor rightwing majority on the Court to do our bidding. We have a whole list of their own decisions we’d love to just bully and cajole them into fixing.
[NBC News / Law Dork / NYT (gift link) / AP]
Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please become a paid subscriber, or if you’d like to make a one-time (or recurring) donation, you can click this here button.
Didn't mention it in this piece, but of course there are also a lot of Twitter posts (some from rightwing loony influencers, many from bots amplifying them) insisting that the Supremes have been compromised and can't be trusted, so Trump has no choice now but to declare martial (or marshall, or marital) law and start holding military tribunals for all who get in his way.
Plus the occasional call for patriots to take the law into their own hands, but then, that's every fucking day on Twitter.
This whole shadow docket thing... I don't like it.