DOMINANT ANGLE
London takes from this judicial setback a confirmation of the American institutional checks, seven weeks before a tense election.
Dominant angle identified — does not reflect unanimity of this country’s media
KEY POINTS
- 01
The Supreme Court left in place a federal judge's order blocking Trump's new postal rules for the November 3 election.
- 02
Judge Brett Kavanaugh ruled that applying the rule in 2026 would be "arbitrary and capricious", without excluding its validity for the future.
- 03
About 30% of voters, mostly Democrats, had voted by mail in the previous general election, according to the BBC.
ANALYSIS
London, 16 September 2026. The US Supreme Court rejected on Monday evening the Trump administration's emergency request to impose new rules on the postal service for mail-in voting, in the case of United States Postal Service against California. For the British press, this setback, which occurred seven weeks before the November 3 midterm elections, illustrates the resistance of judicial counter-powers to an executive seeking to centralize control over the organization of the election.
The judges left in place the order of a federal judge blocking, for this election, a plan that required states to transmit to the postal service the list of their registered voters for mail-in voting, to acquire specific printers and to apply a new barcode system. Trump justified this reform by the fight against electoral fraud, claiming that mail-in voting would be prone to abuse and would allow non-citizens to vote; the appeals filed estimated, on the contrary, that the measure encroached on the constitutional right of states to organize their own elections. Conservative Judge Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by Trump, joined the majority while leaving the door open for the future: he estimates that there is "at least one reasonable perspective that the final rule falls within the legal authority of the postal service", but that "applying the rule in the 2026 elections would be arbitrary and capricious".
Judges Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, also conservatives, expressed their disagreement, describing the appeal as a "Hail Mary pass" unlikely to succeed on the merits and recalling that "the postal service has broad authority to regulate mail".
The White House did not immediately react to the decision itself, but the President exploded on his Truth Social network: "This Supreme Court is intimidated and manipulated by the radical left in decisions that have set America back by at least a century", he wrote, describing the judges he himself appointed as "a hollow shell of what they originally were".
London notes that around 30% of voters, mostly Democrats, had voted by mail in the previous general election, and that the battle over these rules is far from over: the administration has already announced that it may present new provisions for the 2028 election.
