Supreme Court 'held prisoner' by Trump’s power as it fumbles major ruling

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, left, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, center, and retired Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy listen as US President Donald Trump addresses a joint session of Congress (REUTERS)

On Monday, September 14, President Donald Trump suffered a major disappointment when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his push to impose new restrictions on voting by mail. Many Democrats, including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York), were quick to applaud the ruling. But according to Claire Finkelstein, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the September 14 decision in USPS v. California left important questions unanswered. And the battle over voting rights, she emphasizes in an op-ed for The Guardian, will continue.

"Last week's Supreme Court decision upholding the district court's restraining order on USPS' (the United States' Postal Service) mail-in ballot restrictions is being hailed as a victory for electoral integrity by politicians, political commentators and voting rights advocates alike," Finkelstein writes in The Guardian. "The senator Chuck Schumer, for example, called the decision 'one of the most important cases to protect voting rights before the Supreme Court.' But the unsigned, three-sentence opinion, with only a brief concurrence and a lengthy dissent, is no such thing. The Court based its brief opinion entirely on the timing of the rollout of the new rules, which became effective on 21 August, just weeks away from the midterm elections and only days before several states were scheduled to begin mailing out their ballots."

Finkelstein continues, "California's submission to the Court, joined by 22 states and the District of Columbia, asking the Court to leave the injunction against the rule change in place, made clear that compliance with the rules in advance of the midterms would not only be difficult — it would be impossible without disenfranchising thousands of voters. And that, of course, is the point."

According to Finkelstein, the "court fight" over voting "does not address whether USPS has a right to burden mail-in voting to this degree in the first place." And the Penn law professor notes that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito "increasingly divide up the landscape as a struggle between presidential power on the one hand versus anything that might infringe on that power on the other."

Finkelstein writes, "Whether the issue is the president's right to regulate the mail; his right to remove heads of agencies, including supposedly independent agencies; his right to claim executive privilege over communications with advisers; or even his right to commit crimes with impunity through the vehicle of his official duties, Alito and Thomas, joined frequently by other members of the Court's conservative majority, have increasingly allowed their jurisprudence to be held prisoner by the drive to expand presidential authority … Defenders of voting rights must not relax. While USPS v. California is a temporary political setback for the president and his fellow Republicans, it is not yet a home run for democracy."

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