Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has blasted the court’s emergency order allowing Trump to proceed with parts of his vote-by-mail power grab as a “nightmare.”
The conservative-dominated Supreme Court on Monday allowed Trump to proceed with an executive order that gives federal authorities the power to decide who may vote by mail and whose ballots may be withheld, despite the Constitution granting states explicit authority over elections, with oversight from Congress.
Trump’s executive order gave the U.S. Postal Service and the Department of Homeland Security extraordinary roles in election administration as the 80-year-old president moves to restrict mail-in voting despite repeatedly voting by mail himself this year.
The Supreme Court’s unsigned decision gives the Trump administration the green light to move forward with a proposal for the DHS to create state-specific lists of U.S. citizens that the administration says could be used to flag potential noncitizens on voter rolls.
Trump’s executive order also directed the USPS to deliver mail ballots only if they were cast by people whose names appeared on voter-eligibility lists. A lower court has blocked that effort nationwide in a separate case, setting up another potential Supreme Court ruling in the coming days.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices issued scathing dissents from Monday’s decision.
Jackson, 55, wrote that the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty” into the midterms, saying it “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.”
The decision comes just 10 days before North Carolina is scheduled to send the nation’s first mail ballots in the midterms to overseas and military voters, according to the Associated Press.
“This is not a close call,” Jackson added. “When the Government’s obvious goal is to interfere with the Plaintiff States’ practices and prerogatives in a manner that the Constitution does not authorize, it is both a serious legal error and a grave misuse of our equitable emergency powers to let the Executive proceed even one step further.”
In its order, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority sidestepped the question of whether Trump’s order is legal.
“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.
The majority said the Trump administration was ‘likely to suffer irreparable harm’ if the lower-court injunction remained in place.
The Supreme Court did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Trump, whose approval rating has sunk to one of the lowest of any president and whose party is bracing for a rough midterm election, has long attacked mail-in voting while promoting baseless claims of voter fraud.
Yet the president has continued to vote by mail in his home state of Florida, including in this month’s Republican primary, and in a special election in the state legislature in March—even though he was at his Palm Beach golf resort at the time.
