Source report & NRT opinion
Second judge freezes Trump mail ballot order, Supreme Court to weigh
Based on reporting by St. Paul Pioneer Press.
Source preview
A federal judge in D.C. has issued a new order freezing President Donald Trump's attempt to limit mail voting for the midterm elections.
This archive entry has not yet been converted into a full NRT brief. Read the original report for its complete context and responses.
NRT commentary
How We See It
Two different judges now have stopped President Trump from tightening up mail ballot rules. That’s not careful judging. That’s a pattern. Each one decided they know better than the President and the voters who put him back in the White House. This is what judicial overreach looks like. And with the Supreme Court stepping in, we may finally get an honest answer about whether judges can just wave off election integrity.
Remember what this order actually did. Trump didn’t ban mail voting. He didn’t disenfranchise anyone. He moved to impose consistent safeguards on a process that has been a shambles since 2020. States want flexibility, fine. But there’s nothing radical about asking for signatures to match, deadlines to be real, and ballots to arrive on time. Democrats treated it like a crisis because they know fewer mail ballots usually hurts them. So they ran to court, and two separate judges gave them a free pass.
The Supreme Court taking this up is overdue. Lower courts have spent the last few years blocking anything Trump does on elections, and they’ve done it with thin reasoning and fast injunctions. If the justices let the freeze stand, they’re saying judges get to rewrite election law out of thin air whenever they don’t like the policy. That’s a dangerous message. The Supreme Court should do what the lower courts won't. That means respecting the President’s authority and the states’ right to run secure elections without sabotage from the bench. We’ll see if they mean it.
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