Supreme Court Blocks the Post Office's Mail-Ballot Rules, and the President Calls the Court a 'Shell' of Its Selves

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Supreme Court on Monday left in place a lower-court order blocking the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing its new mail-ballot rules, a procedural reprieve the White House described as a “bad decision” and Republicans called a “big loss.” The rules, in the end, were not about banning mail ballots. They were about barcodes. But they became, quickly, about something considerably larger than a barcode.

The order was brief and unsigned, the kind of thing the Court issues when it wishes to say a sentence and then go to lunch. In it, the justices wrote that the government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge.” That is the legal way of saying, we looked at this and we are going to leave it where it is for now. The ruling kept the Post Office’s requirements on hold while the legal challenge moves forward.

Here is the detail that should give everyone pause. The Court did not block the rules on the merits. It blocked the rules on timing. Justice Kavanaugh, writing separately, found that applying the new requirements in November “would be arbitrary and capricious” because state and local election officials “do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule.” The administration had asked the Court to move fast. The Court, in essence, agreed — and then said the reason it could not be fast was that the government had been slow.

The White House did not find this amusing. On Tuesday, the President called the decision a “big loss for Republicans” and, in a statement that will be read many times in the years ahead, described the Court as “bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left,” adding that the justices “are merely a shell of their original selves.” That last phrase, in particular, will be filed under a new category. The justices have not yet commented on the condition of their own souls.

Now, to be fair to the government’s position, the rules were a genuine fraud-prevention measure, and the claim that mail-ballot fraud is “a particularly pernicious species of fraud” is one the administration made repeatedly. The Court did not dispute that fraud could be a problem. What the Court said, more or less, is that you cannot solve a problem in six weeks by redesigning the envelope. That is not an anti-government ruling. That is a ruling about what a government can do on a schedule.

There is a smaller detail that the press corps missed, and then immediately picked up, and then quietly put down. The President, in Florida, votes by mail. He has done so this year. The system he asked the Court to constrain is the very system he relies on to cast his own ballot. That is not hypocrisy, and anyone who says it is has not read the filing. That is a president who has tested the product and, having found it satisfactory, asked the Court to make sure nobody else abuses it.

What the decision does not do is end the fight. It leaves the underlying legal challenge alive, which means the same rules, with the same barcodes, can come back. The lower courts blocked the plan a second time this month, too. This is not a story with an ending. It is a story with a pause, and the pause is long enough for the ballots to go out.

At press time, the Postal Service was reportedly drafting a 14-page memo on whether a barcode constitutes a “design requirement” under federal law, and whether a ballot can, under any reading of the statute, be both rejected and returned at the same time. A source familiar with the memo said the answer, as of Monday, was “no,” and the answer, as of Tuesday, was “we are still looking.”