President Donald Trump attacked the Supreme Court over its decision to block his mail-in ballot plan on Tuesday, sharply targeting his three nominees on the bench and saying “these are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court.”
In the ruling Monday night, none of Trump’s three picks for the court from his first term — Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch or Amy Coney Barrett — indicated support for his attempt to implement mail-in voting limits during the midterms.
“[The justices] are merely a shell of their original selves, a court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings,” Trump said in a Truth Social post, also citing other recent high-profile losses on tariffs and birthright citizenship.
He added, “It is not easy for me to write this criticism of the United States Supreme Court – it will likely cost me dearly for years to come.”
Monday night’s mail ballot order preserves lower court rulings that block the U.S. Postal Service from implementing the new requirements in the weeks before the election, but the ruling may not necessarily be the final word on the directive should the Trump administration pursue implementation in future elections.
Election officials said in the weeks before the decision that the proposed changes threatened to disenfranchise millions of voters by not having their ballots delivered and were “not feasible.”
Trump signed the executive order to control mail-in voting in March, claiming the need to combat widespread election fraud, without evidence. In August, USPS released a final rule which would require states to provide lists of eligible voters and adhere to approved envelope styles.
In a brief concurring opinion, Kavanaugh said in his view that “state and local election officials do not have sufficient time to reasonably implement the rule before the election.”
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
“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,’” Trump said in the post.
Last week, the Supreme Court handed Democrats another victory in Missouri’s gerrymandering battle. The decision blocked a GOP push to use a map likely to give Republicans another House seat.
But despite the high-profile losses — and Trump’s anger about it — the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has remained a fairly reliable ally in expanding presidential powers elsewhere, including the ability to hire and fire federal agency staff.
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