Why it no longer should be referred to as the “Roberts” Court

First Thing: Supreme Court threatens midterms mail-in voting as it backs Trump plan

Martin Belam

 Good morning. The US Supreme Court has sided with Donald Trump in his effort to crack down on mail-in voting, though it is unclear whether or not his administration will be able to take action before the midterm elections in November.

The court’s justices voted 6-3 along ideological lines to lift an injunction that a judge in Massachusetts had placed in June on an executive order issued by the president.

But a second injunction remains in place, and the ruling leaves room for legal challenges.

Trump has repeatedly likened voting by mail to cheating, despite his own use of it and overwhelming evidence that the system is secure.

In March he ordered the government to create a “state citizenship list” of eligible voters, requiring that mail-in ballots only be delivered to people on that list. He also directed the justice department to prioritise investigations and prosecutions of state and local election officials who issue ballots to people deemed ineligible to vote in federal elections.

What did the dissenting judges say? In a blistering dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections”.

This was yesterday’s decision, Trump v. California, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a remarkably sharp 23-page solo dissent. 

The majority’s basic position was procedural: the states had challenged parts of Trump’s March executive order concerning mail voting too soon. Because some of the administration’s proposed actions had not yet been implemented, the states had not yet demonstrated the concrete injury necessary to sue. Importantly, the majority expressly did not decide that Trump’s directives were lawful.

Jackson’s response, stripped of the legalese, was essentially:

You’ve created an impossible Catch-22. The states are in the middle of preparing the November elections. The President has ordered federal agencies to take actions that could interfere with how those states distribute mail ballots. Yet the Court tells the states:

You can’t challenge this yet because nothing has happened.

Jackson’s problem was that election cases have also repeatedly been told: You can’t challenge this now because the election is too close and changing the rules would cause disruption.

She described the resulting situation as a “Kafkaesque nightmare”: sue early and you’re too early; wait until implementation and you risk being told you’re too late.

She was particularly scathing about what she regarded as the contradiction in the government’s position. The administration argued that its planned mail-voting changes were too speculative and distant for the states to challenge—but simultaneously told the Supreme Court that it needed emergency relief immediately so that it could implement them.

Jackson wrote that the majority was: “Taking its eye off the ball” and was missing what she considered the government’s actual objective: obtaining the Court’s approval for an effort to “foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”

Her larger objection was practical as much as constitutional. States have the constitutionally assigned responsibility of administering elections. They’re already preparing the 2026 election. In her view, telling them they haven’t been injured sufficiently to challenge federal directives aimed directly at those election procedures was artificial reasoning disconnected from what was actually happening.

And she ended with the point that probably best summarizes her dissent: “States administering elections and the voting public that relies on them to do so deserve clarity, not caginess or confusion.”

Her conclusion was that the Court’s ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty into the upcoming midterm elections.”

One important qualification: Jackson did not merely disagree with the majority about mail voting policy. Her central complaint was about the Court’s use of standing, ripeness, and its emergency equitable powers. She thought the Court was using procedural doctrines in a way that prevented states from obtaining a timely judicial answer to an extraordinarily important constitutional question.

And the constitutional question remains unanswered: Does the President have the authority to impose these election rules on states in the first place? Even the six-justice majority explicitly said its decision did not establish that measures implementing Trump’s order would be lawful.

How have rights organisations reacted? The president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Derrick Johnson, said: “Let this ruling be a reminder that democracy is never, ever guaranteed. We have to fight for it, we have to fight to keep it and we have to protect the rights we do have within it … they are trying to do everything they possibly can to make it difficult for you to vote.”

Henceforth, it should be referred to as:

The Trump Court

The six, right-wing, political toadies on the Court observe only Trump. Chief Justice John G. Roberts is irrelevant and virtually non-existent, except as an obedient servant of Donald Trump.

Rodger Malcolm Mitchell