You’ve now probably seen news that Trump plans to use the U.S. Postal Service as a key part of his war on the 2026 midterm. Specifically, according to testimony Wednesday from Postmaster General David Steiner, if a state doesn’t hand over its absentee and/or voter list to the federal government, the post office simply won’t deliver that state’s ballots. This morning a court blocked aspects of the policy.
Lets start by saying this is blatantly anti-constitutional, though of course it’s possible that the corrupt Supreme Court will allow it.
But this front in Trump’s war against the 2026 election is illustrative of a number of critical factors in the challenge before us.
First, this very roundabout line of attack is precisely because states run elections and control them subject to statutes passed by Congress, which can set national standards under which elections are administered. Laws, not executive orders, not presidential whim. This isn’t just aspiration, the kind of thing where the law doesn’t really mean what it says because of the corrupt Supreme Court — the way, for example, presidents can’t fire members of independent executive branch agencies, except now the Court says they can because it’s an activist and corrupt Court. This is different. The states are independent sovereignties. So it’s not just a matter of what the president can get away with, what the Court decides is okay. It’s more analogous to possession being nine-tenths of the law. The states own not only that sovereign authority but literally the apparatus of power that runs elections.
Presidents can’t fire governors or mayors or anyone else in state governments — not just because it’s not “permitted” in a sense that can change on a dime when the corrupt Court says so. It’s because there is simply no connective tissue binding these separate sovereignties together. The president can’t fire a governor any more than my neuromuscular system can make your leg move as opposed to mine. Not because it wouldn’t be fair or right but for lack of tissue connecting my brain to your muscle tissue.
That’s why Trump has almost universally chosen the path of extortion. He’ll cut off federal grants unless you play ball on election rigging. He’ll indict people on spurious charges. Here he’s using the fact that the Postal Service is under executive control to deny its use to states and voters who don’t play ball.
Trump has gotten shot down in most of these cases. Because even with a fairly corrupted judiciary, these questions are simply too open and shut. But this is where the real battle is going to be. It may seem like, well, Trump found a workaround. What can we do? But it’s not quite like that. All of these efforts are demonstrably not only unconstitutional but anti-constitutional because it is the most elemental principle of constitutional interpretation that the president cannot do what the Constitution expressly forbids him to do by using extortion or other means.
So for instance, it cannot be the case that the Constitution places election administration in the hands of the states but the president can take control of them by attacking the states with other presidential powers. Otherwise, the original prohibition is meaningless.
I’m very much not saying, “Oh, don’t worry. This is how it is and the Court will totally back us up on this.” The Court is itself now an anti-constitutional body, though there’s a decent chance this will be too much even for them. But it’s important for the good guys to understand how the Constitution works, how it’s supposed to work, the anti-constitutional and criminal nature of the president’s actions. Who has authority in these cases and who doesn’t.
This is where the battle is going to be joined in the next few months. States have the power to resist this, even though it may force them to make accommodations they might not want to make. They may have to shift away from vote by mail in some cases. I don’t know. I don’t think that will be necessary. But it’s got to be one of the menu of options.
My main point here is to illustrate the nature of states’ powers, the importance of their subordinate but separate and distinct sovereignties. Because this is the Free States’ key power and advantage under the Constitution and any good strategy has to be based on understanding the nature of that power and that advantage.