Defenders of democracy breathed a sigh of relief this week after the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration’s effort to restrict vote by mail this fall.
An executive order signed by President Donald Trump this spring gave the U.S. Postal Service unprecedented authority to screen and reject mailed-in ballots, based on voter lists that states would have been forced to supply. In a one-paragraph ruling, the Court upheld a lower-court injunction preventing the Postal Service from implementing such a system for the upcoming midterms.
Yet plenty of damage has been done. Nor is the threat to vote by mail over.
The Supreme Court’s decision was a single paragraph that did not address the merits. Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s concurrence also laid out a roadmap for the administration to follow in case it wants to try again (which of course it will). In Kavanaugh’s view, the new process failed to pass muster only because “state and local election officials [did] not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the elections”—not because the Postal Service lacks the authority to regulate vote by mail. Given the absence of a full opinion by the Court, it’s impossible to know if other conservative justices find this reasoning plausible (with the exception of Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, whose dissent makes clear they would have given the green light).
Advocates of vote by mail (or “voting at home”) have worked for decades to expand the practice as a way to encourage voter participation. Eight states and the District of Columbia now conduct their elections exclusively by mail (so-called “universal vote at home” states), and research shows that turnout in these states outpaces that of states without this approach. This is true even for primaries, where turnout is notoriously low.
All this progress is now in jeopardy. Vote-by-mail expert Phil Keisling—who served as Oregon’s Secretary of State and is a Monthly contributing editor—worries that the confusion spawned by this legal wrangling will lower turnout this fall among voters now uncertain about their options. “It has so put a cloud over mail ballots that people have not been signing up,” he said.
Trump’s unrelenting claims of widespread fraud have also eroded trust in vote by mail—despite the utter lack of evidence that fraud is a problem. (And never mind that Trump himself trusts vote by mail enough to be an avid practitioner himself.) The Pew Research Center finds that public support for early and absentee voting has fallen sharply since 2018, especially among Republicans but also more broadly.
Yet another casualty of the battle over vote by mail is the reputation of the U.S. Postal Service, an agency that Americans have long taken for granted as a reliable, neutral service provider. “The Postal Service, for its 250 plus years of existence, has operated under a simple premise: universal delivery,” says Barbara Smith Warner, senior advisor at the Center for Responsive Government and the former executive director of the National Vote at Home Institute. “So the idea that the Postal Service was going to be an arbiter of what ballots could be mailed is mind-blowing … This is a foundational change in how the Postal Service works.” Americans have never had reason to distrust the mail. Now, unfortunately, they may.
All this drama, of course, might be the point. Keisling in fact believes that the administration never truly believed that its proposal to limit mail-in voting would make it past the courts. “I think instead it was a psy-op operation that sadly has had success because of the chaos, the confusion, and the doubt that was sown,” he said.
In the meantime, the Trump administration is proceeding on other fronts to undermine free and fair access to the polls this fall. Earlier this week, FBI Director Kash Patel suggested he was “open” to the idea of sending federal agents to polling places—in direct contravention of the law.
There is, of course, a simple way to bypass this concern: vote by mail.
For more on vote by mail, watch my full interview with Phil and Barbara, available on our Substack and in this week’s podcast, out Wednesday.
Don’t miss at the Monthly…
Putin is steamrolling Europe. Over the last six weeks, Russian and Russian-aligned forces have launched dozens of hybrid attacks in Europe, including massive cyberattacks in Sweden and Norway, acts of arson at factories in Poland and Slovakia, and multiple Russian incursions into European airspace. Europe’s response? Paralysis, reports Kyiv-based correspondent Tamar Jacoby. “Much of the public, particularly in southern Europe, still doesn’t grasp the nature of the Russian threat—doesn’t see how far Putin’s ambitions reach or what he’s willing to do to achieve them,” she writes. Will Europe survive Putin’s aggression? Read here.
All the king’s men. Broad economic and cultural forces aligned to bring about Trump’s rise to power. But he also got a boost from a handful of powerful enablers, eight of whom are the subject of journalist Jacob Weisberg’s new book, Profiles in Cowardice. Among the shameful eight are champion capitulators like super-lawyer Brad Karp of the firm Paul Weiss, Dartmouth College President Sian Beilock, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. But “the book’s intellectual and emotional center is Weisberg’s takes on Mitch McConnell and John Roberts,” writes journalist and Monthly Contributing Editor Ed Kilgore. “Unlike the other subjects of Profiles in Cowardice, Weisberg believes these two men could arguably have stopped Trump 2.0 in its tracks.” Read Ed’s review here and ponder what could have been.
A scenario too scary to contemplate. What if Democrats win the House this fall but aren’t allowed to take power? That’s what would happen if the clerk of the House—a position appointed by the speaker—refuses to swear in the new members. It’s a nightmare scenario that’s not only possible in the future but has happened twice in America’s past, writes Legal Affair Editor Garrett Epps. “Both times it brought American democracy to the brink of collapse, and indeed on one occasion brought federal troops into the Capitol itself on a mission to block a conservative coup,” Garrett writes. What could happen January 3, 2027? Garrett explains the stakes here.
Plus…
- I review the late Congressman Barney Frank’s posthumous book, The Hard Path to Unity: Why We Must Reform the Left to Rescue Democracy. The provocative title speaks for itself.
- Politics Editor Bill Scher argues that because we never learned the most important lessons of 9/11, Trump is on the same path to repeating them.
- Bill and Garrett also offer two contrasting views on the performance of the Supreme Court. In his second column for the week, Bill makes the case that the Court is, in fact, working as the Founders intended. Garrett, meanwhile, reviews Julie Suk’s new book, which proposes an intriguing idea for checking the power of the Supreme Court: a “shadow court” appointed by Congress to offer a non-binding alternative interpretation to the Court’s decisions.
Parting notes…
You’ve likely heard by now of Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish nuptials, which were allegedly partially bankrolled by a Russian oligarch with close ties to the Kremlin. According to ProPublica’s investigation, Don Jr.’s wedding expenses included the rental of a private island in the Bahamas ($100,000 a night) and a fireworks display ($70,000). And all this for only 50 guests.
Meanwhile, two studies released this week show the worsening precarity of many Americans’ lives. The Capital Area Food Bank’s Hunger Report finds that a whopping 38 percent of D.C.-area residents experienced “food insecurity” in the last year—the highest level since 2019. This is a result of the federal government’s massive layoffs over the last 18 months, coupled with devastating cuts to food assistance benefits included in the “One Big Beautiful Bill” passed by the GOP Congress last fall. The Commonwealth Fund also released a survey finding that nearly a third of Americans with insurance are struggling with medical debt. Among these patients, more than a third have drawn down savings, and nearly a third have skipped or delayed needed care.
The massive needs created by the Trump administration’s policies could be mitigated by greater involvement from philanthropy. But another analysis, from the Institute for Policy Studies, finds that many foundations and wealthy individuals are sitting on the sidelines. ISP’s study, “Philanthropy Under Oligarchy,” concludes that many “elite” philanthropies are disbursing the bare minimum required by law, perhaps out of fear of the scrutiny that their giving might draw. As a consequence, nonprofits reliant on philanthropic funding are slashing their budgets, while the nation’s wealthiest foundations pile up even greater mountains of assets.
Please consider donating to your local food bank.
And as always, thanks for reading. Have a great Sunday!
Anne Kim, Senior Editor
