The Supreme Court allows Trump to move ahead with his plan to eliminate Democratic votes

Friends,

Today, in an emergency order, a divided Supreme Court allowed Trump to move forward with his plans to restrict mail-in voting before the midterm elections.

They didn’t express a view on whether Trump’s restrictions are constitutional. That question is now in a lower court. Presumably the high court will get to it eventually — but by then most states will have begun to send out absentee ballots, or not. Can you imagine the chaos?

Trump’s March 31st executive order directed federal agencies to create “state citizenship lists” of people who will be 18 or older as of Election Day, which would then be sent to state election officials who administer the vote, ostensibly to purge voter registration lists of anyone who is not a citizen. The order also instructed the Postal Service not to mail ballots on behalf of anyone whose name is not on the approved list.

This order would allow the Trump regime to rush out a voter-verification and ballot-interception program that would likely compromise votes from mostly Democratic cities and districts. It would give the U.S. Postal Service responsibilities it’s in no way prepared to fulfill. It would usurp the powers of the states to determine voting rules. And it would give voters little or no time to challenge the regime’s decisions about who can and cannot vote.

Bad enough for the Supreme Court to allow Trump to proceed with his ballroom while lower courts decide on its constitutionality. A ballroom can always be razed. But to allow Trump to move forward with his plan for who can vote in our democracy poses a more extreme threat; voters who fail to vote because they’re confused or intimidated cannot be resurrected.

Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees, along with John Roberts (appointed by George W. Bush), Samuel Alito (also appointed by George W. Bush), and Clarence Thomas (George H.W. Bush), agreed with the Trump’s regime’s fatuous argument that unless it’s able to move forward with its plan, the regime was “likely to suffer irreparable harm.”

Let me ask you: Why in heaven’s name should the Supreme Court be concerned about whether an administration suffers “irreparable harm?” Shouldn’t it be far more concerned about whether the American public suffers irreparable harm if Trump’s plan moves forward?

And clearly the public will suffer irreparable harm — at least by the plan causing confusion over whom can vote in the midterms, and by enabling Republican at the state level to bar some American citizens from voting. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson warned, the majority “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

For years, Trump has made baseless claims that mail-in voting is “cheating,” “corrupt” and “horrible.” During his prime-time address in July he claimed, without evidence, that “mail-in ballots are inherently corrupt.”

Utter horseshit. Research has turned up zero evidence of widespread fraud. Even the rightwing Heritage Foundation — the organization responsible for the Project 2025 blueprint for Trump’s second term — has found no widespread fraud. Its election fraud database includes fewer than 300 cases of proven “fraudulent use of absentee ballots” over 43 years, from 1982 to 2025.

The smoking gun here is Trump’s own admission in March when speaking to Republican lawmakers that combating fraud is not the only reason to target mail-in votes. He told them that passing a strict voter identification law cracking down on mail ballots would “guarantee the midterms” for the Republican party.

We still have a chance of electing a Congress that will stand up to this petty dictator. The stakes are sky-high. Every one of us has a responsibility to ensure that we elect senators and representatives who do what’s necessary to constrain the madman and the enablers around him.

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