The Supreme Court Has Gone Postal
By Joel D. Joseph, author of Black Mondays:
Worst Decisions of the Supreme Court, 6th Edition
The United States Supreme Court, via its far-right wing, has allowed President Trump to proceed with his pet project of getting rid of voting by mail. Mr. Trump votes by mail himself, but doesn't want anyone else to do so. President Trump issued an Executive Order authorizing the Post Office to block voting by mail by those not registered to vote. Trump and his Justice Department, are seeking to gain access to voter rolls across the country and require the Postal Service to block voters who the Trump Administration believes are not lawful citizens.
This opens a Pandora's Box where the Administration could block millions of Democrats from voting because they don't have a driver's license or their passport does not match their voter registration. Millions of female voters who use their married names would have difficulty voting with a birth certificate under their maiden names and could be stricken from the voter rolls. Keep in mind that females tend to vote for Democrats.
The lower court found the Executive Order to be illegal and blocked Trump's executive order on mail-in ballots. The Court of Appeals affirmed the lower court's decision. The Supreme Court ruled that the twenty-four states and the District of Columbia that brought the lawsuit did not have standing to bring the case. The court claimed that the states were not injured by Trump's Executive Order. However, even though the Supreme Court could have dismissed the case for a lack of standing, it granted an injunction to the Trump Administration giving the Executive Order renewed life that threatens to upend the midterm elections in November.
Russia and China use the same technique, a lack of standing, to deny protestors and others the right to judicial review. The Supreme Court, apparently, is in Trump's back pocket similar to the judiciaries in Russia and China that are controlled by Vladmir Putin and Xi Jinping.
States' Rights
The Constitution plainly assigns the power to conduct federal elections exclusively to the States. Article I, Section 4. The President has no power whatsoever in the Constitution to interfere with how the states run their elections.
History of Voting by Mail
Voting by mail has been taking place in the United States for more than two-hundred years. Pennsylvania was the first state to allow voting by mail by soldiers during the War of 1812. The election of 1864, during the Civil War, experienced widespread voting by mail. The logistics of a wartime election were daunting: "We cannot have free government without elections," President Abraham Lincoln told a crowd outside the White House in 1864, "and if the rebellion could force us to forgo, or postpone a national election, it might fairly claim to have already conquered and ruined us."
"Lincoln was concerned about the outcome of the midterm elections," says Bob Stein, Director of the Center for Civic Leadership at Rice University. "Lincoln's Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, pointed out that there were a lot of Union soldiers who couldn't vote in person, so the president encouraged states to permit them to cast their ballots from the field."
The Dissenters
Three justices dissented: Justices Jackson, Sotomayor and Kagan. Justice Sotomayor wrote, " A commonsense reading of the Executive Order, corroborated by the Government's own representations, makes clear that the respondent States face a sufficiently concrete and imminent injury" to confer standing to sue.
Justice Jackson filed a separate dissent railing against the conservative majority. She argued, "the Government has not even bothered to assert, much less demonstrate, that the President has the constitutional authority to issue an order that directs the manner in which the mail-in ballot aspect of federal elections is to be administered."
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