{"id":935,"date":"2026-08-26T19:50:29","date_gmt":"2026-08-26T19:50:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=935"},"modified":"2026-08-26T19:50:29","modified_gmt":"2026-08-26T19:50:29","slug":"the-supreme-court-is-helping-trump-rig-the-midterms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=935","title":{"rendered":"The Supreme Court Is Helping Trump Rig the Midterms"},"content":{"rendered":"<article>\n<p>There\u2019s a scene in <em>The Shawshank Redemption<\/em> where the wrongly convicted prisoner, Andy Dufresne, is trying to convince Warden Norton to act on new evidence that could exonerate him. The warden, who is using Dufresne\u2019s accounting skills to hide his own illegal dealings, offers a bunch of reasons for ignoring the new evidence. Dufresne exclaims, \u201cHow can you be so obtuse?\u201d The line sends the warden into a rage, and he throws Dufresne into solitary confinement.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=933\">Dolly Parton Was a Proud Union Sister<\/a><\/p>\n<p>The warden, of course, is not being obtuse. He understands the implications of what Dufresne is saying perfectly well. He just doesn\u2019t want to lose his bookkeeper, and certainly doesn\u2019t want to risk Dufresne\u2019s exposing his illegal operation. The warden is not dense; he is evil.<\/p>\n<p>So it is with our Supreme Court, which ruled on Monday to allow Donald Trump to move forward with one of his own illegal schemes. In an emergency decision, issued through the shadow docket, the Republican supermajority gave Trump permission to limit voting by mail in the upcoming midterm elections. In doing this, the six GOP justices well understand that the president is trying to give himself the ability to manipulate the vote. They\u2019re not confused by his plan. They\u2019re not being obtuse. They\u2019re simply aiding and abetting Trump\u2019s assault on democratic self-government.<\/p>\n<p>The origin of this particular assault is an executive order, issued in March, titled \u201cEnsuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections.\u201d It does three things:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Instructs the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a list of US citizens it thinks are eligible to vote. The list would be independent of state voter rolls, yet sent to the states to supersede their own voter registration lists.<\/li>\n<li>Instructs the Department of Justice to investigate and prosecute state and local officials who provide ballots to those who are \u201cnot eligible\u201d to vote. <\/li>\n<li>Prohibits the US Postal Service from delivering mail-in ballots to those the administration deems not eligible to vote.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The entire executive order is unconstitutional. Voter registration and the maintenance of voter rolls is handled on the state level, not the federal level. The Trump administration has no constitutional authority to tell the states whom can be sent a ballot. It has no constitutional authority to tell the Postal Service whom it can deliver mail to. It has no legal authority to prosecute state officials who follow their own state\u2019s procedures for producing that mail.<\/p>\n<p>A group of 23 states sued the Trump administration and, in July, US District Judge Indira Talwani blocked Trump\u2019s unconstitutional executive order. But then Trump appealed to his Supreme Court\u2014and, on Monday, the Republican supermajority dutifully stayed the district court order and allowed Trump to proceed with his election-rigging plans.<\/p>\n<p>The unsigned Republican majority opinion says that Trump\u2019s order is not \u201cripe\u201d for judicial review. <em>Ripe<\/em> is a legal term that means an issue cannot be adjudicated because it has yet to produce harm. The court is saying that the states haven\u2019t (yet) been hurt by Trump\u2019s executive order, so they can\u2019t sue to stop him.<\/p>\n<p>That argument is every bit as preposterous as it sounds. State election officials are being harmed, right now, by the threat of prosecution should they follow their state\u2019s procedures for issuing mail-in ballots. Voters in those states are being harmed, right now, by the confusion Trump is causing over whether they can expect to receive a ballot. Either the court thinks that such harms can be stopped at some point in the future or, more likely, they think that Trump\u2019s attempts to suppress the vote and rig the election aren\u2019t \u201charms\u201d at all.<\/p>\n<p>Moreover, the executive order violates a critical Supreme Court precedent: the Purcell Principle. This doctrine holds that changes to the administration of any election cannot be made \u201ctoo close\u201d to an election. Reasonable people can debate how close is \u201ctoo close,\u201d but we should be able to agree that late August is (or should be) too close to an early-November election to change <em>which government agency<\/em> gets to determine who is eligible to vote by mail.<\/p>\n<p>Ironically, the fact that we\u2019re still in August, coupled with the fact that the Republicans have rested their decision on ripeness, does give the Supreme Court time to reverse course. It is possible that over the next few weeks, once the Trump administration orders the states to use the list of voters Homeland Security provides, that the court will find a \u201charm\u201d to the states. Should two of the Republican justices allow themselves to see the harm, it\u2019s possible that they will also see that the harm is unconstitutional.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=931\">If Democrats Want to Win, They Have to Drain the SWAMP<\/a><\/p>\n<p>But even a late-game restoration of mail-in voting will allow Trump and the Republican justices to accomplish their central aim: to sow confusion, uncertainty, and distrust in mail-in voting. We are just over two months away from the election and a mere six or seven weeks away from the start of early voting in some states. The fact that I cannot tell you how mail-in voting will work accomplishes much of what Trump wants.<\/p>\n<p>And we can assume that this executive order is only the first shot across the bow. The Supreme Court has emboldened Trump (as if he needed any more emboldening). Even if the court eventually rules on the merits that this EO is unconstitutional, Trump will simply issue another one, and then another one. If he\u2019s not allowed to prevent the post office from sending mail-in ballots to voters, his next move will be to order the USPS not to return the ballots from people who are not on his preapproved list of voters. Then he\u2019ll order elections officials to not count the ballots once they\u2019re received and threaten them with lawsuits if they do. Every one of those executive orders will be challenged by states, but the Supreme Court has given Trump every reason to believe that one of these unconstitutional, antidemocratic orders will hold up in court and that he can keep muddying the procedures for running elections\u2014potentially right up to Election Day.<\/p>\n<p>In a 23-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said as much:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>This suspect scenario appears tailor-made to weaponize this case as a means of destabilizing the nation\u2019s vote-by-mail systems through court-assisted procedural maneuvers.\u2026 Rather than swallow the Government\u2019s gamesmanship whole, the Court should have given this empty, strategic, and bad-faith stay bid the swift rejection it deserves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Justice Jackson is right about this. She is wrong, however, about something else. She writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>In the end, though, what makes today\u2019s ruling so off-base is the Court\u2019s lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment. It treats the Government\u2019s stay application as if the whole point is merely to demonstrate that the Plaintiff States\u2019 claims are not justiciable. Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government\u2019s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>The Republican justices are <em>not<\/em> taking their eye off the ball. Again, they know exactly what Trump is doing. They are helping him do it, on purpose, with a full and complete understanding of the likely results. They are situationally aware, and they support the situation Trump is causing.<\/p>\n<p>The only people being obtuse in this moment are those who insist that the Supreme Court is a reasonable actor, committed to maintaining American-style democracy against the threats posed by the Trump administration.<\/p>\n<p>If you don\u2019t believe me, just do what Mr. Rogers told all of us of a certain age to do: \u201cLook for the helpers.\u201d The Republicans on the Supreme Court are the helpers. They\u2019re just helping evil.<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=929\">\u2018This Man Will Almost Certainly Die\u2019<\/a><\/p>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Nation Magazine<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":934,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-935","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Supreme Court Is Helping Trump Rig the Midterms - Atlas Living Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/atlaslivingmedia.com\/?p=935\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Supreme Court Is Helping Trump Rig the Midterms - 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