Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson lost patience with her colleagues who moved on Monday to lift restrictions on President Donald Trump's executive order to restrict mail-in voting.
The order directs the U.S. Postal Service to create new rules that would prevent the delivery of mail-in ballots in states that don't turn over invasive information about their voter rolls to the federal government. Experts have warned that a system like this, implemented just weeks before early voting begins in the midterm elections, could trigger widespread chaos.
Lawyers for the Justice Department successfully argued to the Supreme Court that the states suing to block the order don't have standing because, technically, no rule has been issued yet, just an order for the Postal Service to make a rule. The Supreme Court's decision still leaves open a window for states to sue once such a rule has been finalized.
But all of this completely misses the point, warned Jackson in her dissent, because the Trump administration's goal was not simply to be given the time to write a rule — it was to send a message to the states that they need to comply and hand over their election powers.
"In the end ... what makes today's ruling so off-base is the Court's lack of situational awareness regarding this equitable judgment," wrote Jackson. "It treats the Government's stay application as if the whole point is merely to demonstrate that the Plaintiff States' claims are not justiciable. Taking its eye off the ball, the majority misses the Government's actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections."
The Supreme Court ruled earlier in the year against a separate challenge to mail-in voting brought by the Republican National Committee, which had sought to overturn state laws that allow ballots arriving past Election Day to be counted as long as they are postmarked within the deadline.