Appeals Court Again Blocks Trump's Mail-Voting Order
A federal appeals panel upheld lower-court injunctions Saturday, teeing up a likely Supreme Court fight over presidential power to set election rules.
By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
The ruling came down on a Saturday, the kind of quiet news dump that tends to signal a fight is far from over. A federal appeals court on Saturday upheld lower-court blocks on President Trump's order restricting mail-in voting, according to The New York Times, marking the latest judicial rebuke of the administration's push to curtail the practice.
The details of the underlying order — what specifically it sought to restrict, and on what legal authority — were not spelled out in the available reporting, a gap worth flagging rather than papering over. What is clear: multiple courts have now declined to let the policy take effect while litigation proceeds, and the government has signaled it may appeal to the Supreme Court, per the Times.
Election law scholars have long debated how much authority a president holds to unilaterally reshape voting procedures that are, under the Constitution, largely the province of states. That question is now squarely before the courts, and the answer will matter well beyond this particular order — it goes to the boundary between executive power and the machinery of American elections.
No timeline for a Supreme Court decision on whether to take the case has been reported. The American Times will follow the docket.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by The New York Times.
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