SCOTUS Denies Stay on Ruling Blocking Trump Mail-In Ballot Restrictions
Alito and Thomas dissented: “Some of the plaintiffs lack standing, while the remainder are pursuing a claim that this Court has recently called a ‘Hail Mary pass’ that ‘rarely succeeds.’”
The Supreme Court denied the Trump administration’s request to stay a ruling that blocked the USPS from implementing new mail-in ballot rules before the 2026 midterms.
The majority found the Trump administration unlikely to succeed on the merits.
“But applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and 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,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, claiming the administration would succeed on the merits.
“The Court incorrectly denies the Government’s application for a stay of a universal injunction that bars implementation of a final rule concerning election ballot mail,” wrote Alito. “Some of the plaintiffs lack standing, while the remainder are pursuing a claim that this Court has recently called a ‘Hail Mary pass’ that ‘rarely succeeds.’”
Alito and Thomas took on the APA claim, saying that the “statutory claim is not subject to APA review.”
“It is a challenge to the scope of the Postal Service’s general rulemaking authority and therefore exempt from the APA,” stressed Alito.
Trump has said that the restrictions are needed to fight against fraud.
After the USPS finalized its new rule, the coalition of 23 states and the District of Columbia returned to U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Massachusetts, arguing the USPS exceeded its authority and inserted itself into federal elections.
Talwani determined the plaintiffs will likely succeed on the merits and face irreparable harm. She also said the balance of harms and the public interest warrants the temporary restraining order.
The judge blocked:
- a. DMM Section 705.24.3.1, to the extent that the section makes Ballot Mail Envelope Standards mandatory;
- b. DMM Section 705.24.3.2, to the extent that the section makes Return Federal Ballot Mail Envelope Standards mandatory;
- c. DMM Section 705.24.4.1; to the extent that the section makes Postal Service Federal Ballot Mail Portal registration mandatory;
- d. DMM Section 705.24.4.2; to the extent that the section makes voter enrollment in the Postal Service Federal Ballot Mail Portal mandatory
e. DMM Section 705.24.5.1; - f. The first two sentences of DMM Section 705.24.5.2; and
g. DMM Section 705.24.5.3(a), (b), (c).
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Comments
When all else fails, run out the clock … and THEN blame it on the administration.
Beneath contempt.
Meh. The plaintiffs getting the benefit of their own actions to seek delays in finalizing, issuing and implementing the USPS regulation b/c the plaintiffs complain ‘we don’t have time between now and the election’ to follow it is absurd.
I’m totes sure these States will be more than happy to comply with the rule after the election or a least the requirement to send their voter registration lists over without any delay. /S
Given the refusal of these blue States to cooperate with the Feds re cleaning up voter registration lists and get ineligible/legally insufficient registrations removed one wonders exactly what they may be reluctant to have come to light.
Oh, we know what they’re hiding. We just don’t know how much of it they’re hiding.
Yep. Given the lawsuits by PILF, Judicial Watch and others (now including the DoJ) which have forced some blue jurisdictions to perform their duties under ‘Motor Voter’ to conduct voter registration list maintenance and yielded tens of thousands of names struck from the rolls in some places. LA County stands out with 1,200,000+ bad voter registrations removed by settlement of lawsuit forcing them to do what they NLT only failed to do proactively but continued to refuse to do when provided clear evidence of bad registrations.
This is the target area and exactly why these jurisdictions are so resistant to disclose their lists in usable format with addresses and partial SSA or DL # for easy cross reference with other data bases …like SSA death data, IRS data/USPS data for physical address, INS data, bureau of prisons data ect.
Their shoddy practices created lots of legally insufficient and/or ineligible registrations. They know it and don’t want the names removed. Whether the ‘powers that be’ in those largely one party rule States is using these bad registrations for election shenanigans is another question …though it isn’t hard to see very plausible scenarios where it may have been done. Particularly with mail in ballots and combined with lack of ID requirements and/or poor/non existing signature matching verification. Or worse where one Voter is allowed to ‘vouch’ for others.
Anyone telling us the ‘honor system’ still functions or other arguments that boil down to ‘trust us’ (blindly) is either deliberately up to no good or is so foolishly naive as to be incompetent and ineffective.
Note there was no problem telling Missouri to revert to its previous electoral map in spite of the fact that the primaries were held under a new map. That’s not just “not enough time” it’s actually “late.” But “late”? No problemo.
Similarly though the substance of both those cases will be settled prior to ’28 and IMO both applied to the ’28 elections. We’re gonna see a bunch more issues resolved prior to ’28 that the leftist/wokiestas managed to delay that will, on balance, be favorable to the Trump 2.0 Admin.
Not with this SC group
One way or another they will get ruled on. There’s all sorts of lawfare delay tactics that have employed by d/prog, wokiesta NGO and often facilitated by ideological Judges.
Eventually though the can can’t be kicked indefinitely and these wayward Judges get procedural rulings and TRO reversed. Meanwhile the merit based arguments get heard and move their way towards appeal and/or to SCOTUS.
While I’d love to see a higher ‘win’ % the fact is SCOTUS is ruling against goofy woke leftist shenanigans a high proportion of the time. Don’t give in to the depressing kool aid of doom and gloom/everything is negative.
In Missouri there was no other choice. There is no “new map”. the state supreme court, which is the final authority on state law, ruled that there is no new map. There is literally no law that authorizes the new map, so it’s obviously illegal for the secretary of state to hold an election under it! It’s not in SCOTUS’s power to change that.
Then the federal court said, well you can’t use the old map either, because that wouldn’t be fair. So the only possible path was not to hold the election at all until after the referendum is decided. That’s what SCOTUS stayed. The only other thing it could have done would have been not to stay the order, and say “Yes, obey the federal court and postpone the election”. Is that what you want?! Is that what you think it should have done?
Here we’re talking about USPS regulations that are under legal challenge; that nearly half the states claim are illegal, and go beyond the USPS’s authority. There’s no telling who will win on the merits; but allowing the regulations to stand in the interim would impose a huge burden on the plaintiffs, especially given the time constraints. So the sensible thing is to stay the regulations and let the courts sort out the dispute next year.
The voting system in the US is completely broken. Period. But please do get out and vote! What a disgrace.
The real people just have to vote “harder” than the fake ones. Therefore, it’s all our fault.
SCOTUS has guaranteed several more cycles of corrupted “elections” – assuming, of course, the elections occur at all. The Left would like nothing more than to scrap elections and coronate their own corrupt puppets.
They should really watch what they wish for. Doing so would likely get them killed.
They really are so stupid
Well the people can propose at the State Level to change the law and get it on the ballot 2028. House and Senate screwed us.
In states that allow citizens to propose legislation by referendum. The majority of states do not. (Assuming you’re talking about the SAVE Act.)
Seems like this paves the way towards full implementation for 2028….
What judge wants corrupt voting systems in their own government? Democrats /!ex slave owners
and John Roberts,…pas time to impeach that SOB
In the near term it matters not. Launching a completely unnecessary offense war with Iran and the entirely predictable inflation and rate increases we are seeing as a result have doomed the GOP in the midterms and quite possibly for 2028.
What on earth was Trump thinking when he made this massive mistake.
Throw in the gross corruption of his day trading, crypto fiascos and grifting family and its a complete shit show.
Hopefully they all go away (with bags full of ill-gotten gains).
It’s never the right time to do the right thing, as far as politics is concerned.
Do you think the Iranian regime would have just sat pretty and done nothing all this time? Their sponsored terror plots would have been more numerous and effective if they were still at full strength, and a few may have even reached US soil. Then the retaliation would have led us mostly to where we are now, only on the back foot. A “mistake” if we go first and a “mistake” if we let them go forst. The kind of heads I win/tails you lose situation that deep state propagandists love.
I’ll pay the higher gas prices without complaint (they’re still cheaper than when Biden was in, by the way) and my vote won’t change.
Iran was 0 threat to the United States, none. Remember we destroyed their nuclear ambitions last summer.
I never paid $130 to fill my tank under Autopen but I have the last 2 times. Add in diesel, 5% on the 10 year treasury note and 30 mortgage rates above 7% and its a debacle.
We put a major kink in their nuclear ambitions, though we didn’t destroy them. But that’s not the point. The Iranian threat has never been limited to nuclear. That was just the worst of it, in the long term. Iran has been engaging in international terrorism, both directly and by sponsoring others, for decades — just as Saddam Hussein did. It’s been attacking our forces for decades, and it’s also been a threat to us domestically. Hussein had to be taken down, and so do the mullahs. The only question has ever been the timing, and with your attitude it would never get done.
SOMEONE sounds butthurt. You might want to put some ice on that.
Hey, don’t go away unhappy. Hunter’s back!
Hunter is a despicable human who grifted off the family name for decades. The Trump kids are 1o0x worse and far more open about their grift.
“Trump has said that the restrictions are needed to fight against fraud.”
Poor marketing.
“Trump has said that the restrictions are needed to make sure our elections remain secure.”
Better marketing.
So mush fire and noise over something that doesn’t go all that far.. Not “secure”:
“become secure”
“become secure-ish”
“make some kind of progress toward probably secureness, eventually”
“take more work to subvert.”
“no more secure, but we can see some shenanigans better”
Mail voting fraud is back on the menu
“because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Same Justice less than a week ago declined to stay a lower court ruling on the Missouri redistricting that requires the State to figure out how to have Congressional elections using a map that is different than the map used for the primaries. Literally changing the districts back to a previous map in between the primary and general election.
Now, suddenly, no time to implement something for an upcoming election.
The district court ruling in Missouri would have left the state with no option but to postpone the election altogether.
It can’t use the new map, because the state supreme court says there is no new map. It doesn’t exist. The proposed law that enacted it is on hold pending the referendum, so there is no law authorizing it. There’s nothing any federal court can do about that; the state supreme court is the highest authority on the matter. So using the new map is not an option.
And yet the federal district court enjoined the state from using any other map. So the only alternative it left was to use no map at all, and to postpone the election. And that’s what SCOTUS stayed, because it’s all it could do.