ACCORDING TO LIZ - The Constitution gives the White House no power over elections, and Congress refused to pass the voter I.D. law Trump wanted.
Wah. What’s a president to do?
In March, he seized on his usual workaround and bypassed Congress, issuing an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to create lists of U.S. citizens to cull out noncitizens from voter rolls to direct to whom the Post Office should deliver ballots.
With the SAVE Act stalled in the Senate, Trump issued this order in an effort to curtail voting by mail which tends to favor Democratic candidates. Federal agencies and officials were told to create and send names of administration-determined citizens and noncitizens to state election officials to purge voter registration rolls and restrict anyone not on the approved list from receiving a ballot by mail.
In June, Federal District Court judge Indira Talwani found that not only did Trump’s executive order violate the Constitution – which gives Congress, not the president, power over elections – but, without official delegation of such power to the USPS by Congress, the Post Office had no right to self-select which voters should receive ballots.
In a separate broader ruling on a related case in August, Judge Talwani blocked enforcement of the order for the 2026 midterms, again emphasizing the Constitution does not grant authority over elections to the executive branch and, contrary to claims of widespread voter fraud, the administration had failed to document any pattern of fraudulent absentee voting.
A brief from the Democratic state attorneys-general underlined that the executive order “would allow the federal government to rush out an unprecedented, legally indefensible voter-verification and ballot-interception program that would, among other things, give the U.S. Postal Service far-reaching new powers and responsibilities.”
And that voters would be further disenfranchised, given the federal government’s rushed compilation of citizen lists would be fraught with errors with little time for legitimate voters to reclaim their right to vote.
When a federal appeals court upheld Talwani’s ruling, administration lawyers filed an expedited application to the Supreme Court.
In an emergency order on August 24, the Supreme Court granted Trump temporary relief to implement his nefarious plan.
The Court’s moribund majority mindlessly claimed that, since the election had not occurred, harm to voters could not be ascertained and foolishly found for Trump. That, if they didn’t lift the freeze on the president’s attempt to manipulate the election in his favor as imposed by lower courts, the administration was “likely to suffer irreparable harm.”
Huh? What about the people the Court is sworn to protect?
The three liberal justices found their colleagues reasoning egregiously limited the rights of Americans to vote as well as injecting needless chaos and confusion into the already contentious midterms.
However Monday’s order was preliminary, not a final determination about the lawfulness of Trump’s executive overreach.
And, with aspects of the issue still in contention in at least one lower court and little time left before early voting begins in many states, it remains unclear whether the White House’s rules can even be implemented.
This could mean the legal battle could boomerang back to the Supreme Court, even as the administration moves to enforce the president’s order before the midterms.
Then Talwani rescinded her own stay over the Post Office to not break its obligation not to discriminate in its duty to deliver the mail.
Almost immediately, Rob Bonta and his cohort of Democratic state Attorneys-General filed a new motion again challenging the USPS rule for its multiple violations of the Constitution and federal statutes.
Concurrently, the League of Women Voters and other voting rights groups attacked the rule for giving the Post Office additional powers not contained in the Constitution that would materially harm not a sitting president and a handful of his minions but potentially millions of Americans who deserve the ability to vote and express their views on how the country is currently being run.
Additionally, changing how elections are run has the potential to create a logistical nightmare that “imminently risks disenfranchisement” even further for American voters, imperiling the integrity of the electoral system.
The fact of the matter is that Trump has zero interest in integrity, his own or elections. He cares solely about his own power and, as Marc Elias wrote in The Docket, “gaining it, wielding it and maintaining it.”
Unstated through all this is who in this Trumpian world of purported integrity would make determinations defining a real citizen… Would they, could they be the same partisan hacks who so profoundly roiled recent elections?
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
