OPINION:
It is impossible to take Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas seriously after Monday’s order (“Supreme Court won’t let Trump use post office to block mailed ballots,” Web, Sept. 14)
The court left in place a block on a U.S. Postal Service rule requiring states, with midterm ballots already moving, to upload voter lists into a federal portal and use only envelopes approved by the agency.
The unsigned majority said the administration was “unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to … [the] injunction.”
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, no critic of President Trump, called imposing the rule now “arbitrary and capricious” because election officials lacked sufficient time to implement it.
Justice Alito, joined by Justice Thomas, dissented. He called the challenge a “Hail Mary pass.” Congress may regulate federal elections, he argued, and may authorize the Postal Service to issue related rules. The government’s interest in detecting possible fraud outweighed the disruption. The timing problems, he wrote, were “not enough.”
Those were the two predictable votes. They were prepared to let a federal agency rewrite how millions of ballots enter the mail after election machinery was already moving — and dismiss the statutory and practical objections as a stunt.
The night before, Trump appointee U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols blocked the same rule. Judge Nichols found that Congress had not authorized the Postal Service to impose these requirements, create a voter-verification system or refuse to transmit otherwise lawful mail.
The government demonstrated no significant fraud that would occur if the rule waited. The risk of valid ballots going uncounted was real.
Mr. Alito’s football metaphor was backward. The administration threw the Hail Mary: a rule rushed into place weeks before Election Day, followed by an emergency request that the court approve it while election officials were already preparing ballots.
The Elections Clause gives Congress authority to make or alter federal election regulations. It does not make the Postal Service a substitute legislature or an emergency order a substitute statute.
The majority declined the experiment. Messrs. Alito and Thomas would have run it anyway.
The dissent was not surprising. That is precisely the problem. We know how they will vote every time.
RAY WATFORD
Hilliard Ohio
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