SCOTUS ruling on mail-in voting
In a 6-3 ruling, the high court granted a request for emergency relief sought by the Trump administration late last month in a case involving 23 Democratic-led states. The Justice Department had asked the Supreme Court to lift a lower court’s injunction that stopped agencies from carrying out parts of Mr. Trump’s directive, which involves the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Postal Service, in those states and the District of Columbia.
The high court said in its unsigned decision that the states filed their lawsuit too soon.
“The Court’s disposition of this application does not mean that any measure taken by the Government to implement the Order will necessarily be lawful,” the Supreme Court said in an unsigned decision. “On that score, time will tell. But the Order itself does not harm the States, so the District Court lacked jurisdiction to bar the Government from trying to implement it.”
The move from the high court clears the way for the Department of Homeland Security to move forward with a proposal to create lists of residents in each state who are eligible to vote.
But it’s getting awfully close to election time. For Democrats, that’s a feature and not a bug.
It’s simultaneously close to the election and still far away.
It’s an old cliche that the public doesn’t start paying attention to an election until Labor Day. It’s cliche because it’s true. It’s not quite as true as it once was, between political polarization and the Internet, but there is still a very large swath of the voters who are barely paying attention to any of this stuff right now.
A lot is going to happen between Labor Day and Election Day, some of it external and beyond the control of any campaign, some of it move and countermove by the parties. If this was a baseball game, we’d only be at the equivalent of the bottom of the fourth inning in terms of impact. Five innings to go, packed into two months.