Marble Falls       Call me Joe Sausagehead!  There was no way that I thought Trump could get away with his assault on mail ballots and taking control of state generated voting lists, but damned if the rightwing US Supreme Court majority in a 6-3 decision just pulled an okey-doke to let him take a shot at messing with the midterms, believe it or not.  Maybe I’m in denial still, but let’s look at just how bad this is.

First, it’s impossible to say this is not a hyper-partisan, Trump-subservient decision, because they went out of their way to not rule on whether his executive order was unconstitutional.  Even the friendly Trump red state briefs were not willing to say that his order was legal.  The majority took several whacks at putting blinders over their eyes by saying in this decision that Trump could go forward now on the emergency petition primarily because there were no harms yet, since the rules that would implement his order had not yet been finalized.  Justice Jackson, in a minority position, lays into this hard, saying as the Scotus blog reports,

…that the majority had “not foreclosed States from challenging this blatantly unconstitutional Order.” But she characterized the majority’s order as another chapter “in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.” Although the court has for two decades made clear “that even valid election-related legal claims can come too late,” she argued, the majority now indicates “that such claims can also come too early.” This is particularly problematic, she suggested, when “the Government (which controls the timing of proposed and final rules) can easily game the system.”

Hard to miss her point or the fact that the “certain plaintiffs” that she is referring to are Trump and his administration.

The other parts of the Supremes’ decision, denying the injunction that more than 20 states were seeking, was that Trump’s order directed work by the Department of Homeland Security and the US Postal Service and not the states per se, so letting this proceed didn’t burden them.  If we just stopped here and looked at the impact of this part of the decision, one can imagine unbelievable chaos since some states might move to deny mail ballots, while others didn’t, wreaking havoc with the midterms.  Yes, that’s what Trump wants, and that might be the only thing that would allow the Republicans to maintain control of Congress.

It won’t help anyone sleep better at night, but the best news is that this isn’t over yet, by a long shot.  The Postal Service did put out a final rule – 90 pages long – which is contingent on a decision of its constitutionality.  The rule is horrific and would put the post office in charge of deciding who gets a ballot or not.  Trump wanted no mail ballots to be delivered in any state that hadn’t turned the voter list over to him, but following the Supreme Court majority, that would be a state harm.  In short, states are now suing on the basis of the rule being out and establishing the harms.

The Rebeccas of Sunnybrook Farm are arguing that there is no way that Homeland Security can get the list together in time for the midterms.  They also argue that there’s no way the US Postal Service can put together the pieces sufficiently to implement this order.  Small comfort.

Here’s where we are left with this clearly unconstitutional abrogation of powers by the president with the assistance of the Supreme Court and its diddling around on the margins of the law.  We can hope the refiling of this issue and the other cases still pending make their way to the Supreme Court or other courts able to enjoin the president and his people.  We can also hope that DHS and the USPS can’t get their act together in time regardless.

The real problem is that hope is neither a plan, nor a solution.