By Nathaniel "Beltway" Steele
The Supreme Court on Tuesday left in place a lower court ruling that blocks the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing new regulations on mail-in ballots, a setback for a policy President Trump had pushed ahead of the 2026 midterms.
The president did not take it quietly. He called the decision a "big loss" for Republicans and for the country, and argued — without citing evidence in the ruling itself — that it would open the door to cheating.
Attorney General Todd Blanche was asked directly whether the White House would abide by the ruling anyway. "Of course," he told CBS News' Ed O'Keefe Tuesday. Blanche also defended the president's public criticism of the Court, even as he confirmed the administration has no plan to resist the order.
The numbers complicate the president's fraud argument. A Brookings Institution analysis cited by CBS News found just four confirmed cases of mail-voter fraud for every 10 million ballots cast across the 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections combined — a rate that undercuts claims of widespread abuse.
CBS News legal contributor Jessica Levinson, breaking down the ruling, noted it keeps the legal status quo intact heading into next year's midterms rather than settling the broader question of how much authority the executive branch has over Postal Service voting procedures.
The episode fits a pattern: a White House publicly blasting a judicial setback while privately — and now on the record — promising to follow it. Whether that promise holds once ballots are actually being counted next fall is the question worth watching.
Read the footnotes. The story's always in the footnotes.
— Compiled from reporting by CBS News.
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