美最高法院驳回特朗普政府邮件选票新规禁令申请

This is Bloomberg Law with June Graasso from Bloomberg Radio. The Supreme Court has refused to allow the postal service to enforce new restrictions on mail-in ballots for the midterms. The justice's decision on Monday night came after North Carolina and Alabama already began mailing thousands of ballots to voters and after election officials warned that latebreaking changes would inject chaos into the elections. The court held that the Trump administration was unlikely to win the merits of its challenge to a lower court's injunction and that officials failed to show they had a stronger case for immediately reviving the rules ahead of the midterms.

It was a brief unsigned order with Justice Brett Kavanaaugh writing a concurrence and justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissenting. President Donald Trump denounced the decision in a social media post, calling it a horrible, highly political ruling, but praising Alo and Thomas as legends. My guest is an expert in election law, Richard Rafald, a professor at Columbia Law School. So, this is an unsigned three sentence order.

Tell us what the justices decided. The majority rejected the government's effort to lift the stay that the district court in Massachusetts had imposed on the postal services implementing its new mail ballot regulation. As you know, driven by the president, the postal service has proposed to adopt new and very restrictive rules, very burdensome rules on the use of mail-in ballots that were supposed to take effect for this current midterm election.

Various groups of states and and voting groups including League of Women Voters tried to block that process. Supreme Court ultimately said they came too early. The postal service should be allowed to finish its rulemaking. Soon as they issued the rule, these same groups went back to court. The district court in uh Massachusetts issued a first a temporary restraining order and then a preliminary injunction which was sustained by the first circuit, the appeals court that oversees Massachusetts. partly on the theory that they're really on the merits the law could not be sustained that it was inconsistent.

It was really beyond the authority of the postal service to do anything like this and also on the equities on the fairness that it's so close to the election that uh it would be highly unlikely that the postal service could effectively and efficiently implement this rule in less than 60 days before the election. and as a result it would result in the denial of the vote to potentially millions of people. And so that's where things stood.

Uh the administration brought this matter to the Supreme Court last week, I think right right after right around Labor Day. The court's order basically very briefly said deny the administration's effort to um undo the stay in a brief very short opinion but in a brief phrase of the court's opinion suggesting that they thought that even on the merits the government would lose. They didn't give a reason. They didn't give a justification.

They didn't say whether it was a a statutory problem or an administrative procedure problem or a constitutional problem. All of which had been raised in the litigation. Arguments had been raised that the postal service didn't go through a proper process that it was beyond the scope of its authority under the statutes and that as a matter of federalism and of the right to vote this would be unconstitutional. Basically three different levels of arguments have been raised.

The courts just said that on the merits the case against it was strong but that in any event as a matter of equity given the closeness to the election they would not lift the stay. There was a brief concurring opinion by Justice Kavanaaugh saying he thought there was a plausible case on the merits for the postal service rule, but that he agreed that it would be in his language arbitrary and capriccious to allow that rule to go forward given that it's so close to the election.

I was surprised that there was any disscent. The states said that they couldn't get this done in time and ballots have already gone out in two states. It just shows you how in the tank for the Trump administration Alto and Thomas are. I agree with you. There was both on the merits and Kavanagh's focus on the equities. It would be impossible. Alto had a kind of a snarking line that the reason it would be so hard is if the states had fought this for so long that it delayed the postal service ability to get the rule out.

But as some of the briefing noted on this matter, the postal service still has not opened the portal that it would be necessary for the states to send their their ballots or their ballot envelopes to which the postal service said we would have to review what you're doing before we can handle them. They hadn't even open the portal that would allow them to do that reviewing. So as of I mean now there's no rush but as of close of business yesterday at that point we were within what 7 weeks of the election it would have been impossible and indeed some of the states had already begun to send their ballots out

and if the Supreme Court had decided this issue on the merits when it first came to them instead of taking the offramp of a procedural issue it wouldn't be this late. I mean

Amito also blamed the Supreme Court for taking so long on the earlier case. I mean I think he was digging at his colleagues for taking until late August to dismissing the challenge by the states opposed to this. And so he basically says the court wasn't responsible for this if the states were responsible and it was a kind of that still doesn't get around the fact that it would have been impossible for this for the states to comply and millions of voters would have been unable to vote by mail. millions of registered lawful citizen voters would have been unable to vote.

So, it's really quite a kind of a shocking opinion.

And this isn't the end. This is going back to a lower court.

I think it's the end for 2026. Basically, I think there's no way that the new postal regulations can be in effect for 2026. It is not the end of a proposal. My guess is there will need to be a full-fledged trial now. I mean the all of these all of the action until now has been on an emergency basis. I think that there will need to be a full-fledged trial going forward. I mean on the assumption that now the postal service and the states would have until basically till 2028.

Although I mean it's not just for federal elections I think. So they're presumably there'll be elections in 2020 but it'll have some time and then presumably this may be back in the Supreme Court on the merits. Although the court signaled, it was very brief, but they seem to signal on the merits. Although without saying what about the merits they found troublesome, they seem to signal on the merits that that they were not likely to support this.

But you don't know, you know, there's at least three justices who signal they they are willing to support some kind of postal service regulation. And we don't know of the six who did not write, how many of them would be willing to go forward if there was more time. uh we just don't know that

you know the signaling support for the postal service. How did they get around the constitutional provisions about elections and allowing the postal service to impose these rules? I

mean there there are a bunch of questions and you know one question is are these election rules or or postal rules? I mean I think it's these are clearly going to impact how an election is run but one argument might be their postal service rules. A second question that was relevant to this and Alto spent some time on is you know what's the procedural vehicle for challenging this because the postal service is for the most part is not under the administrative procedure act.

The postal reorganization law provided special procedures for challenging new postal rules and going