The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s bid to take unprecedented control over federal elections Monday, a massive development ahead of the midterms.
The majority decision was unsigned. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred with the ruling and Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
The executive order would have mandated the creation of citizen lists and almost certainly disenfranchised voters by the thousands.
“The Government is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction. And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay,” the majority wrote.
In his concurrence, Kavanaugh wrote that he would have supported the executive order’s legality but for the compressed timeline, which violated the Administrative Procedure Act “because state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections.”
Alito, joined by Thomas, wrote that the Postal Service has broad authority over the mail, and that Congress gave it the power to impose restrictions. Nodding to a constant right-wing conspiracy theory, he added that the government has a strong interest in enforcing the executive order “to better detect election fraud.”
As to the pre-midterm chaos that perturbed Kavanaugh enough to prod him into siding with the majority, Alito wrote that while he “takes that problem very seriously,” it isn’t enough to sway him. He added that much of the delay was the fault of the plaintiffs, who subjected the government “to months of premature litigation and a series of injunctions that this Court later determined were likely issued without jurisdiction.”
The ruling is a titanic one before the midterms, and a major loss for the Trump administration as it seeks to influence the election by attacking absentee voting. Its other efforts, including trying to force states to hand over their voter rolls and siccing the Department of Homeland Security on supposed noncitizen voters, are ongoing.
Read the ruling here:
