U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani on Wednesday lifted an injunction that was the last bulwark against President Donald Trump’s order to let the federal government take over large parts of voting by mail. But the executive order is unlikely to remain unblocked for long.
Talwani wrote that the League of Women Voters’ complaint that led to the now-lifted injunction would likely be shot down by the Supreme Court on the same grounds that it turned back another challenge to the executive order on Monday: The agencies that the executive order directs to act hadn’t yet promulgated final rules based on the order, the conservative justices argued. That meant, they said, that when the complaints were filed, the question of whether the order would be enforced at all was still hypothetical.
The liberal Supreme Court justices — along with Talwani, based on her footnoting of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s scalding dissent — found this position to be so naive as to strain credulity.
But, fine: even playing by the Court majority’s pro-Trump rules, one of the agencies involved — the United States Postal Service — did produce a final rule last Friday. So the Court’s arguments that the challenges are coming too early no longer hold up.
So Talwani lifted her injunction on the League’s old complaint, which was also filed before the final USPS rule. But she did so without curtailing the League’s ability to file a new complaint pointing to that final rule — which it did immediately following her ruling.
The Supreme Court will be the final arbiter on whether Trump gets unprecedented leeway to mess with mail-in voting before the midterms. All of this procedural jockeying is leading up to that point.
Read the order here:
Sorry Johnny, you and the rest of the Calvinball 6 don’t get to hide behind “procedure" anymore. Either you follow the Constitution or ignore it and put your thumb on the scale for the Orange Rapist POS.
It must be infuriating to be a federal judge, know how the law ought to work, and have to constantly rule otherwise because a corrupt Supreme Court majority can pull nonsense out of its ass or simply refuse to justify itself, all in the service of a lawless president. Can’t wait to read that this decades-old restriction on executive power is unconstitutional because of uhh…too many black lesbians, or something.