美最高法院允许邮政新规限制邮寄投票，未裁决合法性

This is [music] Bloomberg Law with June Graasso from Bloomberg Radio.

Nearly one in three voters across the country votes by mail. But President Donald Trump has been railing against mail-in voting for years, saying without proof that it leads to fraud.

Mailin ballots are corrupt. Mailin ballots. You can never have a real democracy with mailin ballots. And we as a Republican party are going to do everything possible that we get rid of mail and bells.

Well, now the Supreme Court's six Republican appointees have given Trump a win on his executive order restricting male voting. They didn't find it legal, but they didn't find it illegal either. Instead, they kicked the can down the road and allowed Trump to go forward with using the postal service to limit the distribution of mail ballots in the November midterms. A renewed challenge to the executive order is almost certain in the coming days, and time is running out to make any changes in the nation's voting procedures.

Joining me is an expert in elections law, Professor Richard Rafalt of Columbia Law School. Rich, what does this decision signify? I mean, what does it actually mean?

That's actually hard to decide. It could be a little or it could be a lot. Frankly, the court basically overturned a lower court order staying the president's executive order, directing the postal service to come up with new rules and restrictions on mail and ballots and also directing the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a a list of US citizens eligible to vote. All the court did was say that the lower court's action was premature.

The lawsuit was brought by 23 states and the District of Columbia saying that in order to comply with any new uh rule governing mail ballots, they would have to start spending money and start preparing and that would be expensive and burdensome to them and so they had a right to sue. The lower court agreed with that as did the court of appeals. Supreme Court said no that's not right. It's not ripe. That is it's not clear whether or not the postal service would issue an order and what the order would do.

Ironically, Friday night, the postal service actually issued that order, issued a final rule, which would impose all sorts of new requirements on state mail-in ballots. But the Supreme Court on Monday following the Friday ruling by the Postal Service said the original suit nonetheless was not right because it was speculative. It wasn't clear what the postal service would do. The suit was targeted at the executive order which only was telling the postal service to do something.

There was no postal service ruling to challenge. So the Supreme Court basically eliminated the injunction that the 23 states in DC had obtained against the postal service from implementing the executive order. There is however a separate case in which there's also an injunction that was brought by the League of Women Voters on behalf of voters who'd be impacted by this which actually would affect all 50 states. That injunction is still in place, at least it was as of first thing this morning.

And in any event, now that the postal service has issued what's called a final rule, presumably all the parties will be back in court, including the League of Women Voters in the ACLU, which still have the other injunction, and try and convert the injunction against implementing a rule to an injunction against the rule itself. And so that's where we are. The Supreme Court basically said this matter of standing. The state sued too soon.

It was a six to3 decision as so many of them are. The majority was very clear to say that this is not a ruling on the merits of any postal service requirements on mail ballots. Literally, the opinion says time will tell. This is a victory for the Trump administration in that they they are allowed to go forward and put out there a rule, but it just really kicks the can down the road in terms of whether and when we will get a ruling on the validity of the postal services rule which will impose new requirements and limitations on state mail-in ballots.

Why even issue that opinion? And why not say, you know, under the Constitution, states and Congress determine voting procedures, not the White House or a federal agency like the post office. I mean, isn't that a glaring problem here?

I mean, the why is an unanswerable question. I mean again technically technically technically the court is dealing almost with a matter of civil procedure of the timing by the states or the timing of any plaintiff when they want to challenge a presidential order and the opinion is written solely in terms of the timing of the suit and as we know in many cases Supreme Court has sometimes said that suits are brought too late if something is too close to an election.

This time the Supreme Court has said the suit was brought too early. Well, it is now timely now that the postal service has issued its final rule on what the envelope should look like, the existence of barcodes and potentially, you know, who can receive these mail-in ballots now that there is actually a final rule. Presumably, the the problem of ripeness or standing goes away and presumably there'll be a lower court decision pretty quickly and this will probably move through the court system pretty quickly.

And my guess is, well, who knows? I mean, oddly, this case actually sat in the Supreme Court for almost a month. The lower court's injunction was issued some time ago. The court of appeals sustained it. Justice Department brought their appeal to the Supreme Court in late July. So, more than 3 weeks. Now, we are roughly um 70 days out from election day. By my count, it's probably 10 weeks. It will be extremely burdensome, if even possible, for the states to comply.

Some states start mailing out their mail-in ballots right after Labor Day. There's also the federal law dealing with uniformed and overseas voters, service men and women who are stationed overseas who have to get their ballots by midepptember by 45 days before the election. So the timing is very very tight. Leaving aside the merits of where does the postal service get the power, the authority to do this? You know, it is a victory for the Trump administration.

It does move them one step closer to being able to regulate mail and balance, but it's only one step and it's a relatively small step. The big steps are ahead of us.

Is it suspicious that they waited so long to issue this decision that just kicks it down the road? In her descent, Katanji Brown Jackson warned that the administration might be trying to game the system.

I don't know. It's suspicious. It's weird. It's almost like why are they even bothering now that there's a rule out there? I mean, I think what what many scholars and observers are concerned about is a kind of a catch 22 happening that the Supreme Court says it was too early for the states to sue because it wasn't clear that it was going to be a rule. And now that there is a rule, it's too late. Invoking something known as the Purcell principle, which is that federal courts don't get involved in challenges to election rules when it's too close to an election.

And that would be the ultimate irony here is if it was too soon to sue before August 22nd and too late to sue afterwards. But hopefully we will not be in that situation. I mean one argument that the plaintiffs will now have and it's going to be both states and I think voting rights organizations is that given the court's decision yesterday, they could not have sued any earlier. So at least there's no argument that they delayed.

Sometimes the concern when suits are brought close to an election is that the plaintiffs waited too long. That's often not the case, but that's the argument that sometimes has been raised by the courts. Here, you couldn't possibly make that argument.

Do you think that any of those six conservative justices actually buy Trump's arguments about mail and voting

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