Trump’s Clumsy Plan to Suppress the Vote is Officially Dead

5 min readWhat's he going to do now?That, alas, is the only relevant question left. On Monday night, the Supreme Court gave the president a first-class caning over his clumsy plan to use the Postal Service to suppress the vote. From SCOTUSBlog:As part of his administration’s broader effort to combat alleged voter fraud, President Donald Trump in March signed an executive order that directed federal agencies to take a series of steps on mail-in voting. For example, it required the Department of Homeland Security to send each state a list of the adult U.S. citizens in that state at least 60 days before a federal election and instructed the U.S. attorney general to investigate and prosecute state officials who allow people who are not eligible to vote to cast ballots. A group of 23 states, led by California, and the District of Columbia went to federal court in Massachusetts to challenge the government’s efforts to implement the executive order. They argued that the order clashes with provisions in the Constitution that give states the power to determine voter eligibility and to set the “Times, Places, and Manner” of holding congressional elections.U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani agreed. In an order on June 25, she temporarily prohibited the federal government from implementing parts of Trump’s executive order on or before the upcoming November elections in California, the states joining the lawsuit, or D.C. On Aug. 24, the Supreme Court put Talwani’s order on hold, allowing the Trump administration to begin implementing the executive order. The majority explained that the states’ challenge had come too soon because the order had not yet been carried out – and, therefore, the states had not suffered the kind of injury that would allow their lawsuit to go forward.Three days later, Talwani issued a new order that prohibited the Trump administration, for 14 days, from requiring states to comply with several provisions of a new rule issued by the U.S. Postal Service to implement Trump’s executive order – for example, imposing requirements for the design of the envelopes used to mail ballots and for the submission of voter data into a USPS portal.The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court on Sept. 3, asking the justices to pause Talwani’s second order. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer withdrew that request three days later, after Talwani issued a preliminary injunction, which replaced her Aug. 27 temporary restraining order and barred the Trump administration from requiring states to comply with provisions of the USPS rule indefinitely while the litigation continues.Sauer instead filed a new request with the Supreme Court, seeking to block Talwani’s preliminary injunction. He argued that Talwani’s “continuing prejudgment of the rule is baseless,” and her rationale is “simplistic,” and he rejected any suggestion “that the Postal Service is trying to federalize the rules for mail-in voting.” Instead, he wrote, “the Postal Service’s final rule imposes only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail.” Without a stay of Talwani’s order, Sauer continued, states will be able to mail out ballots that do not comply with the new rule. California and the other states countered that “USPS’ unprecedented experiment with our Nation’s most cherished franchise—the right to vote—is unlawful.” Come Monday evening, the Court issued a brief, but apparently final, ruling that the scheme was not merely dead, but really, most sincerely dead. (Justice Brett Kavanaugh played his concurrence down the middle, writing that the Post Office might have the authority to enforce the Executive Order, but that to do so now would sow disorder too close to the midterm elections.) Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, with Alito chiming in with his usual plaintiffs-have-no-standing riff. And thus did the Department of Justice's losing streak in electoral matters extend to 0-24.So, what's he going to do now?He will, of course, throw eight kinds of tantrums, and he's already had one on his little vanity platform.Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court, one that the Court System took forever to give, and then blamed it, in part, on no time left to implement a solution to our totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-In voting “disaster,” which is a laughing stock all over the World, and where we are the only country that has to endure such a Nation Destroying SCAM. Justices Alito and Thomas, legends both, strongly disagreed with this horrible, highly political, ruling. It is a big loss for Republicans, and America itself, and makes cheating by the Radical Left “Dumocrats,” on Mail-In Ballots, a much easier thing to do - And now they have an open field to do so! The Supreme Court has really let our Country down! Certain Justices are petrified of these crazed and depraved Democrats, and are totally unable to show the courage necessary to save our America. Their horrible decision on Tariffs will be costing the U.S.A., for many years to come, Trillions and Trillions of Dollars. They didn’t even state, “money paid does not have to be paid back,” much to the benefit of entities that truly hate our Country, and have been RIPPING IT OFF FOR YEARS, unnecessarily costing us, immediately, Billions of Dollars. Likewise, the Supreme Court’s Decision on Birthright Citizenship is a complete and total disaster for America, and has already led to massive corruption with respect to “citizenship” in our Country. The damage done to America is incalculable, and they know this, just as everyone else does - It is an irreparable and unrecoverable harm! The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History. This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years. These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal. It is a Court that will go down as having rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history. [Ed. Note: Boy, is that ever true.] It is not easy for me to write this criticism of the United States Supreme Court - it will likely cost me dearly for years to come - but I feel it my obligation and duty, as President, to do so for the America we love! Thank you for your attention to this very important matter. God bless the U.S.A. President DONALD J. TRUMPWhew. If the carefully manufactured conservative majority on the Supreme Court keeps misbehaving this way, Natalie's going to end up with repetitive stress syndrome.Trump might even try to bluff his way past the Court's ruling and hope nobody notices. Kavanaugh may have left a tiny loophole in that individual states can ahem-voluntarily-ahem abide by the rule that the Court rejected. The problem he has there is what happened on Sunday before the Supreme Court. U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols issued a nationwide injunction against the new system. The DOJ could appeal the injunction, but the Supreme Court may have shut down that avenue on Monday. Please, sirs, may he have another?