This article is part of\u00a0TPM Cafe,<\/a>\u00a0TPM\u2019s home for opinion and news analysis.<\/em>\u00a0It was originally published at\u00a0Balls and Strikes<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n A key component of President Donald Trump\u2019s plan for preserving the Republican Party\u2019s power and influence is making it as difficult as possible for Democrats to vote. As the 2026 midterms approach, he is still pushing the unhinged lie that widespread fraud both cost him the 2020 presidential election and also explains every Republican loss in every election since.\u00a0<\/p>\n This delusion is partially responsible for his obsession with mail-in voting. In March, Trump\u00a0told<\/a>\u00a0Republican lawmakers that passing legal restrictions on mail-in voting would \u201cguarantee the midterms.\u201d Their failure to do so, he continued, would mean \u201cbig trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n That same month, Trump did his part, issuing an\u00a0executive order<\/a>\u00a0that would impose onerous requirements on states that allow their residents to vote by mail. And in an unsigned\u00a0opinion<\/a>\u00a0on Monday, the Supreme Court did him yet another favor, turning away a legal challenge that had temporarily blocked the order from taking effect.<\/p>\n The result in\u00a0Trump v. California<\/em>\u00a0does not give Trump everything he wants. But it shows just how far this six-justice conservative supermajority is willing to go to help its favorite president\u2019s political movement\u2014all while reserving for itself the right to decide how much of the Constitution remains in place for the midterms, and how much Trump gets to rewrite as he sees fit.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s order seeks to do three main things. First, it requires the Department of Homeland Security to provide states with lists of voters whom the federal government has \u201cconfirmed\u201d as eligible to vote. Second, it directs Attorney General Todd Blanche and the Justice Department to \u201cprioritize\u201d investigations of state officials who provide ballots to anyone who is\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0eligible to vote. Finally, it orders the U.S. Postal Service to propose a rule that would require states to send mail ballots in a particular type of envelope and with a special barcode, ostensibly for the purposes of \u201ctracking\u201d the ballot. Trump\u2019s order specifically requires that the Postal Service\u2019s rule prevent the agency from processing a ballot\u2014as in, submitting it for counting\u2014unless a voter has been \u201cenrolled\u201d by the Postal Service first.\u00a0<\/p>\n This is admittedly confusing, because the order is kind of an executive power matryoshka doll: Instead of directly requiring the Postal Service to refuse to deliver certain mail ballots, it adds a step, requiring the Postal Service to come up with an administrative rule for when it will refuse to deliver those ballots. Perhaps even the Trump brain trust understood that a president ordering an agency with a\u00a0statutory obligation<\/a>\u00a0to provide \u201cprompt, reliable, and efficient services\u201d to \u201call communities\u201d to simply ignore votes in blue states would be, legally speaking, not a good look.<\/p>\n That said, given that Trump\u2019s order prescribes the content of the Postal Service\u2019s \u201cproposal\u201d in exacting detail, the real-world impact is the same. Under the Constitution, states have the power to administer elections. If Trump gets his way, his federal government would be deciding who does and does not get to vote.\u00a0<\/p>\n I am not speculating here: In June, Postmaster General David Steiner\u00a0confirmed<\/a>\u00a0to Congress that under the rule, which was still being drafted at the time, the Postal Service would not deliver ballots in states that refuse to hand over their voter rolls to the Trump administration\u2014a move that, if the rule were to take effect, would effectively disenfranchise tens of millions of people for the crime of living in a state Trump does not like. Sure enough, last Friday, the Postal Service\u00a0released<\/a>\u00a0a proposal that does exactly as Steiner promised.<\/p>\n Earlier this year, a coalition of voting rights groups and a coalition Democratic-led states filed separate legal challenges to the executive order in federal court. In the states\u2019 case, in July, Massachusetts District Court Judge Indira Talwani\u00a0blocked<\/a>\u00a0the order from taking effect before the 2026 midterms, basically preserving the status quo while legal challenges continue to wind their way through the federal court system.<\/p>\n In its ruling on Monday, the Court decided that Talwani went too far. The thrust of the majority opinion is that because Trump\u2019s order doesn\u2019t impose obligations on states, states are not \u201charmed\u201d in any meaningful sense. For example, the opinion casts the Department of Homeland Security\u2019s creation of Trump-approved voter eligibility lists as a mere \u201cinternal directive from the President to a subordinate\u201d that does not affect states one way or the other. The requirement that the Justice Department focus its attention on certain state officials, the Court says, is within Trump\u2019s Article II power to set \u201cprosecutorial priorities.\u201d The provision that requires the Postal Service to draft a restrictive mail-in balloting rule merely \u201cinitiates\u201d a \u201cprocess\u201d that \u201cmight bind the States in the future,\u201d but \u201cimposes no legal requirements\u201d on them now.<\/p>\n The Court allows that the Postal Service\u2019s rule\u2014again, a rule the Postal Service issued at Trump\u2019s direction and according to his specifications\u2014will not \u201cnecessarily\u201d be lawful, and that states are free to challenge it. But at this stage of litigation, the majority concluded, blocking the executive order would cause Trump \u201cirreparable harm,\u201d because it improperly \u201cinterferes with the internal operations of the Executive Branch.\u201d<\/p>\n This framing only tracks if you possess the critical thinking skills of a goldfish. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out in a dissent joined by Justice Elena Kagan, the order must be read as a \u201cunified whole.\u201d By simultaneously mandating the creation of Trump-approved eligibility lists and targeting state officials who allegedly issue ballots to ineligible voters, the White House is sending a clear message to its political enemies: Use its list, or else. The Court\u2019s treatment of these provisions as independently innocuous is roughly analogous to arguing that because a bank robber hasn\u2019t actually opened fire, the teller staring down the barrel of his gun should not understand \u201cempty the safe\u201d as a threat.<\/p>\n In a separate dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson highlighted a different, equally silly aspect of the majority\u2019s argument: that Trump will be \u201cirreparably harmed\u201d if a court prevents him from infringing on states\u2019 power to administer elections. \u201cThe President is only conceivably harmed by an injunction barring executive action if that court order is preventing him from doing something\u00a0the law permits him to do<\/em>,\u201d she wrote. Given that nothing in the Constitution empowers him to prescribe the form of mail-in ballots in California or anywhere, Jackson concluded, the holding in\u00a0Trump v. California<\/em>\u00a0is tantamount to asserting that \u201cthe President must be injured whenever he is prevented from doing something as he wishes.\u201d<\/p>\n In her opinion\u2019s most important section, Jackson took aim at what she (graciously) called the Court\u2019s lack of \u201csituational awareness.\u201d State officials have been preparing for the 2026 general election since the 2024 general election ended. They have spent time and money buying equipment, printing ballots, checking voter rolls, and training staff to work at polling places. Eight months before Election Day, Trump issued an illegal executive order that would disrupt all that careful preparation, and only on Friday did the Postal Service unveil its plan for implementing that order. Now, with just\u00a0ten weeks<\/em>\u00a0to go until Election Day, the Court is essentially telling states,\u00a0so sorry, you actually sued too early, better luck next time<\/em>.<\/p>\n The government\u2019s strategy\u2014slow-rolling a rule while fast-tracking a demand for the Supreme Court\u2019s preemptive blessing\u2014is \u201ctailor-made to weaponize this case as a means of destabilizing the nation\u2019s vote-by-mail systems through court-assisted procedural maneuvers,\u201d Jackson wrote. Trump\u2019s actual objective, she continued, is to \u201cfoment chaos.\u201d<\/p>\n Trump v. California<\/em>\u00a0does not guarantee that the Postal Service\u2019s rule will take effect before November. Thanks to a separate injunction in the case brought by the voting rights groups, Trump\u2019s executive order is still on ice. And now that, as of four days ago, the parties have an actual, concrete Postal Service rule to deal with, it would not be especially complicated for Talwani to block it, too, on the grounds that the proposal is as cartoonishly unconstitutional as the half-baked executive order that gave rise to it.<\/p>\n The basic problem, though, is that by kicking the can down the road, the Court is reserving for itself the option to overrule lower court rulings that are not as deferential to Trump as the justices would like. In recent years, the Court has urged judges not to allow officials to make last-minute changes to election rules, ostensibly in order to prevent \u201cvoter confusion.\u201d In practice, the conservative supermajority has\u00a0selectively invoked<\/a>\u00a0this concept, known as the \u201cPurcell<\/em>\u00a0principle,\u201d to uphold election rules that Republican politicians want. To give you a sense of just how flexible\u00a0Purcell<\/em>\u00a0is, the opinion in\u00a0Trump v. California<\/em>, a case about whether the Trump administration can\u00a0take over mail-in voting nationwide<\/em>, does not even mention it.<\/p>\n In the context of the shrinking timeline,\u00a0Purcell<\/em>\u00a0remains a dire threat to the integrity of the 2026 midterms. No matter how quickly lower courts move on the Postal Service\u2019s proposal, as the calendar changes over to September and then to October, it is not hard to imagine this Court suddenly rediscovering the virtues of\u00a0Purcell<\/em>\u00a0and declaring that with Election Day so near, it is too late for judges like Talwani to intervene.<\/p>\n The cool thing about being on the Supreme Court is that as long as you have\u00a0five votes<\/a>, you can do anything you want. If the conservative justices wanted to put an end to Trump\u2019s mendacious, embarrassing efforts to hijack the democratic process, I promise you they could cobble together a legal justification for that result. By declining to do so, they are once again demonstrating that they do not give a shit about the \u201cintegrity\u201d of the election. They just want to give their fellow Republicans a better shot at winning it.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n\n
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