Supreme Court Sides Against Trump on Election Integrity

President Trump’s efforts to promote election integrity in the midterm voting face a setback after the Supreme Court sided with lower court judges against the commander in chief. Mr. Trump had sought, via executive order, to make sure that mail-in ballots were limited to eligible citizens. Yet left-leaning jurists, pointing to the primary role of states in setting election policies, put a hold on Mr. Trump’s order. The high court on Monday declined to lift the hold.This decision left the president none too pleased, if his remarks on the Truth Social platform are any guide. “The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History,” he said. He reckoned that the high court “is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”Exempted from Mr. Trump’s ire were Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, “legends both” per the president, who dissented from the majority ruling. As for the three justices nominated to the high bench by Mr. Trump — Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett — the president mused that these were “not the people I interviewed.” That said, Justice Kavanaugh did put in a good word for the mail-in voting order.Justice Kavanaugh sided with the majority to keep the hold on Mr. Trump’s executive order and the ensuing regulations issued by the postal service. Even so, Justice Kavanaugh conceded that “there is at least a fair prospect that the final rule falls within the Postal Service’s statutory authority.” The problem, as he saw it, is that “applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious” because the states lack time before the voting on November 3.Justice Alito, meanwhile, skewers the majority decision. “Some of the plaintiffs” who sued to thwart the president’s order “lack standing,” per Justice Alito, “while the remainder are pursuing a claim that this Court has recently called a ‘Hail Mary pass’” that succeeds but rarely. Justice Alito’s football analogy refers to the arguments by Democratic-led states that the president’s order on voting exceeds his powers under law or the Constitution.Yet Mr. Trump had argued that his intervention was needed to prevent what his solicitor general, John Sauer, called the risk that “the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud.” Mr. Trump’s order had cited his authority under federal law to ensure fair elections, as well as to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as the Framers ordained in Article II, Section 3 of the Constitution. Mr. Trump pointed, too, to the requirement of the federal government, per the Constitution, to “guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” Lower court judges, though, objected to the president’s demarche, in part because of the traditional role of the states in setting election policy. Per the Constitution this includes setting “the Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives.” Yet Congress has a role, too, in setting regulations for elections to the federal legislature. It all underscores how the question of ensuring election integrity can be seen, under our federal system, to cross many lines of government jurisdiction. The Supreme Court’s ruling today confines this dispute, for now, to lower courts. Yet as the midterms approach the concerns raised by Mr. Trump over mail-in voting are far from being settled.

Supreme Court Sides Against Trump on Election Integrity

Supreme Court Sides Against Trump on Election Integrity

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