SCOTUS Strikes Down Block On Trump Mail-In Voting EO [Op-Ed]

In yet another instance of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority bending the knee to the Trump administration, the court ruled that certain portions of President Donald Trump’s executive order limiting mail-in voting can proceed.

According to the Washington Post, the court struck down a ruling by a lower court that blocked the Trump administration from implementing an executive order that, among other things, ordered the United States Postal Service (USPS) to create a rule that would allow it to hold mail-in ballots in states that refused to send the federal government their unredacted voter rolls. The ruling didn’t focus on the legality of the executive order; instead, it argued that the states had no legal right to challenge it. 

“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful. On that score, time will tell,” the majority wrote.

So basically, even if the order is clearly pushing something unconstitutional, they can only rule it unconstitutional if it winds up sowing chaos in the midterms. We all know that Trump’s push for “election integrity” is based on unproven claims of voter fraud. It’s not about election security; it’s about limiting who can vote so Republicans can maintain control of Congress. 

This ruling goes to show that the court’s conservative majority has no true ideological mooring, and instead is solely concerned with maintaining right-wing power. Several of the justices, including Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch, have proudly touted their “originalist” bona fides, meaning they interpret the Constitution as it was originally written. The Constitution explicitly limits the president’s control over elections, placing that control with the states and Congress. 

You would think that the Supreme Court would’ve upheld the block simply because the ruling comes so close to the midterms. The court chastised a Texas circuit court for ruling that the state’s redistricting effort was a racial gerrymander because it came several months before the primary election was to take place. Yet, that same energy didn’t apply to Louisiana, where they allowed the state legislature to redraw the congressional maps as the early voting period was already underway. 

Now, they’re potentially allowing the Trump administration to impose new restrictions on mail-in voting when states are already preparing to send out early and absentee ballots.

David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research, told the Post that the court “seemed to create complete chaos leading up to the midterm elections, waiting weeks after an administration filing, and just days before mail ballots go out, to completely rewrite the rules of the election.”

The court’s liberal minority called out the ruling’s hypocrisy and the inevitable chaos that will ensue.

“This ruling violates well-established precedents concerning this Court’s equitable discretion and needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in an opinion. “It also lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”

All I know is this: should our next president be a Democrat, they’d better take advantage of the precedents created by the Supreme Court to pass universal healthcare, tax the ultra-wealthy, and expand the court. If the Supreme Court wants to place so much power with the executive, then you may as well flaunt that power in their faces. 

SEE ALSO:

Federal Judge Strikes Down Trump’s Mail-In Voting Exective Order

Federal Judge Sides With NAACP In Mail-In Voting Lawsuit

Supreme Court Strikes Down Block On Trump’s Mail-In Voting Executive Order [Op-Ed] was originally published on newsone.com