It’s the end of June, and that means we hear a lot from SCOTUS. Today we have the following:

Barrett and Roberts join the leftist justices in ruling that states can accept ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as those ballots are postmarked before Election Day. That wouldn’t be a bad idea if in fact the postmark rule was enforced and the postmarks could be validated, but the problem is that there is plenty of evidence that in some states this is not done, and non-postmarked ballots are even accepted. This makes it ripe for fraud occurring after the polls are closed, when the authorities counting the ballots know exactly what they need to put a candidate over the top.

For example:

At least 10 states (California, Illinois, Maryland, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington and West Virginia) accept ballots with missing or illegible postmarks that arrive after Election Day. …

… election officials can even rely on the date a voter writes on their envelope as evidence a ballot was cast on time.

I have looked, but have so far been unable to determine, whether SCOTUS has stated there must be a postmark of some sort. But my hunch is that they did not, and that they just have deferred to the states and the rules each state has set for that.

From the decision:

…[A] related federal statute, the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA), confirms that while federal law dictates when ballots must be cast, state law dictates when they must be received….

The electorate’s choice is made when voting is complete, not when ballots are received. The most recent amendment to the Presidential election-day statute bears this out. …

In sum, the election-day statutes require the electorate’s choice to be made on election day. That occurs so long as election day is the deadline for individuals to vote—as it is in Mississippi. But the election-day statutes do not set a deadline for ballot receipt, so they do not prevent Mississippi from counting ballots postmarked before election day yet received afterward.

This result is unsurprising. Roberts was almost certainly going to be averse to challenging the status quo on this issue, and Barrett often follows Roberts. My initial reaction on hearing the ruling was that Trump would renew calls for the SAVE Act. And sure enough, that’s the case.

Another SCOTUS decision announced today is that a president, as head of the executive branch, can fire employees of the executive branch. This would seem obvious, but it had to be made clear. This time, Roberts and his sidekick Barrett ruled with the conservatives to make a 6-3 result. The Federal Reserve is declared an exception, however.

SCOTUS has yet to announce the result of the birthright citizenship case, although it’s supposedly coming soon. I predict they will keep the present policy, and that it will also be 6-3 with Roberts and Barrett being the determining votes going with the liberals. I say this because Roberts tends to preserve the status quo, although of course not always.

But that would be my prediction: that it will take an act of Congress to redefine the policy to exclude tourist birthright citizenship, for example (the current case involves not an act of Congress to do this but an executive order from Trump). If such a statute were to be passed by Congress, would it be ruled constitutional? I think it would probably pass muster, but that depends on the Court’s ruling in the present case in terms of the definition in the 14th Amendment. However, if the right loses Congress in the 2026 midterms, or even if it keeps Congress but fails to end the filibuster for the vote on the subject, such a statute won’t be passed.