Trump Criticizes Supreme Court for Rejecting Mail-In Ballot Rule

President Donald Trump on Sept. 15 said the Supreme Court ruled badly when it rejected this week the U.S. Postal Service’s rule that would update how the service handles ballots cast by mail.

“Republicans just got another bad decision from the United States Supreme Court, one that the Court System took forever to give, and then blamed it, in part, on no time left to implement a solution to our totally CORRUPT and out of control Mail-In voting ‘disaster,’ which is a laughing stock all over the World, and where we are the only country that has to endure such a Nation Destroying SCAM,” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.

The rule—which would have imposed requirements for state and local election officials to update the design of envelopes for mail ballots and put unique barcodes for tracking on the envelopes, as well as force officials to upload voter data to a new federal portal—has been blocked since August by courts, which have ruled that the Postal Service does not have the authority to enforce the requirements.

A majority of justices late Monday declined to pause an injunction against the rule, which leaves the service unable to move forward as the midterm elections near. Justices said in an unsigned order that the government is unlikely to succeed in its challenge to the injunction and that other factors do not favor staying it.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, whom Trump appointed to the court in his first term, said in a concurring opinion that applying the rule for the upcoming elections would violate federal law because officials “do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule.”

Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s two other appointees on the court, also voted against the government.

Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas were the only two of the nine justices to express support for the government’s position. Alito said in a dissent that the government had shown it was likely to succeed in its case, in part because organizations that sued over the rule do not have a legitimate stance to challenge it.

Trump on Tuesday called Alito and Thomas “legends.” He said that the nation’s top court “is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”

He added, “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.”

The court did not respond to a request for comment by the time of publication.