Judge Blocks Trump Mail-Ballot Order, Calls Out DOJ’s “Cynical” Attempt to Misread Supreme Court Ruling

Jurisprudence The danger remains. Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Joe Raedle/Getty Images and Andrew Harnik/Getty Images. Sign up for Executive Dysfunction, a weekly newsletter that highlights one under-the-radar story about how Trump is changing the law—or how the law is pushing back—and keeps you posted on the latest from Slate’s Jurisprudence team. The Trump administration won a victory at the Supreme Court last Monday in its campaign to overhaul mail voting before the midterms. By Thursday, though, much of the plan was blocked again. The speed of that reversal makes it tempting to see the latest ruling as a district judge thumbing her nose at the high court. But Judge Indira Talwani took the justices at their word. The legal dispute began with President Donald Trump’s March executive order mandating the U.S. Postal Service to impose new requirements on mail ballots in federal elections. Among other things, Trump instructed the agency to develop rules requiring specially designed ballot envelopes with unique barcodes and state-specific lists identifying voters participating by mail, and to refuse to transmit ballots for voters absent from those lists. Twenty-three states and the District of Columbia sued, arguing that the president had seized authority the Constitution assigns to the states and Congress. Talwani agreed and issued an injunction, a court order barring the administration from implementing key provisions of Trump’s directive for the 2026 elections. On Aug. 24, the Supreme Court put that injunction on hold, allowing the administration to move forward while the case continued. The six-justice majority left the legality of Trump’s plan for another day, concluding instead that the states had sued too soon. At the time they filed their complaint, USPS had yet to complete its rulemaking. A final regulation would come only after the agency proposed a rule, received public comments, considered them, and settled on a final policy. Until then, the court reasoned, the states’ claimed injuries depended on speculation about what USPS might eventually do. The court was careful about the limits of its ruling, though. Its decision, it said, did not mean that whatever the government eventually did to implement Trump’s order “will necessarily be lawful.” Having finalized its rule the Friday before SCOTUS offered its opinion, USPS ultimately turned what the court had viewed as a still-developing policy into concrete requirements for the states. According to the new rule, if election officials fail to meet certain requirements, USPS can refuse to mail their ballots. And the states were expected to put all of this in place with the November election barely two months away. So the states returned to court, this time with a new lawsuit challenging the finished product. Voting-rights groups supplemented a parallel suit to challenge the rule as well. On Thursday, Talwani blocked key provisions of the new USPS rule for 14 days. The problem the Supreme Court had identified just three days earlier had now disappeared. USPS had issued a final rule, and the states were challenging the policy actually in front of them. “Now that the USPS has published the Final Rule,” she wrote, “plaintiffs’ challenges are ripe.” For support, she cited the decision that had overturned her three days earlier: Trump v. California. With jurisdiction established, Talwani reached the issue SCOTUS had avoided. She found that the challengers were likely to succeed in showing that USPS lacked authority from Congress to regulate election mail in this fashion and that the rule unconstitutionally imposed federal requirements on states administering their own elections. She also confronted the practical consequences of putting a new federal voting regime into place weeks before an election. States told the court they had already ordered ballots, with some preparing to send them within days. Compliance would require new ballot designs, USPS approval, changes to election systems, staff training, and the transfer of voter information to the federal portal. USPS supplied no deadline for approving the ballot envelopes it now demanded that states submit. For many states, Talwani concluded, compliance before the midterms was practically impossible. Voters who rely on mail ballots would bear the consequences. The administration also had to contend with its own words. Before the final rule existed, its lawyers told Talwani that voters affected by a final rule could challenge it then, and that federal courts could move quickly enough to issue a temporary restraining order or preliminary injunction. When the plaintiffs did precisely that, the administration changed course, arguing that challengers had now come too late because appellate review could run past the midterms. Talwani, correctly, quoted the government’s earlier assurances back to it, recognizing the timing games for what they were, an effort to maneuver the rule into effect by insisting that one challenge came too soon and the next too late. Talwani doubled down on that point on Monday when she denied the administration’s request to put her order on hold while it appeals. She rejected what she called the government’s “cynical interpretation” of the Supreme Court’s ruling, writing that the justices had “not endorsed the view that any challenge to the final rule is now too late.” She also concluded that her 14-day temporary restraining order is not appealable. The administration had already appealed Friday, and its effort to revive the rule now moves to the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit against that procedural backdrop. Another trip to SCOTUS could quickly follow. Meanwhile, Talwani’s 14-day order remains in place, barring USPS from enforcing the specified provisions for the upcoming election while the plaintiffs’ requests for preliminary injunctions remain before her. The 1st Circuit could reject Talwani’s analysis, and the Supreme Court could also intervene again on the government’s behalf. But the administration will have to win a different argument this time. Its first trip to SCOTUS succeeded because the states were challenging something USPS had yet to do. The justices explicitly left the legality of the eventual policy for another day. That day arrived quickly. USPS issued the rule. The plaintiffs challenged it. And the administration is heading back up the appellate ladder. This time, there is no ducking the merits. Squarely presented now is the question at the heart of the case all along, whether Trump has the lawful authority to remake the rules governing how Americans cast their ballots. Donald Trump Jurisprudence Supreme Court Voting Voting Rights Judiciary 2026 Midterms