Trump, Election Theft, and the Courts

The Missouri Supreme Court has issued a ruling that will help Democrats gain a House seat in November, but more importantly will complicate President Trump’s attempt to use the U.S. Supreme Court to manipulate the election. The Missouri court, with five Republicans and two Democrats, unanimously approved a referendum challenge to a gerrymandered congressional map that Missouri’s Republican governor Mike Kehoe had pushed lawmakers to redraw last year after pressure from Trump, after it collected enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

Under the Missouri Constitution, the referendum makes the new maps null and void until approved by the voters in an election this November. The court ordered Missouri to revert to the previous districting map, which was created in 2022.

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The new map, however, was already used in Missouri’s August 4 primaries, creating the weird result of one set of congressional districts having been used in primaries and a different set for the general election. Under the old map that will now be used in November, the Democrats are very likely to win one more seat in Kansas City, currently held by Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO). That district was split up under the new map.

Not surprisingly, the ruling enraged Trump. And Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway immediately vowed to appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court. That throws a wrench into Trump’s effort to get the high court to approve his meddling with elections on a couple of counts.

The administration yesterday went to the Supreme Court with an emergency appeal of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, enjoining the U.S. Postal Service from proceeding with its far-from-finished plan to complicate its simple duty to deliver the mail by adding cumbersome requirements for mail-in ballots. As Talwani said yesterday at a hearing, the USPS scheme could cause so much chaos that states would experience “major disenfranchisement.”

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration asked the justices to freeze Talwani’s order, and to issue an administrative stay, which would suspend the order while they consider the government’s request. But this time, the high court did not play Trump’s game. Instead, the justices requested parties to the litigation to file responses by next Tuesday at 10 a.m. This suggests that the Supreme Court will address the substance of the issue, where both Trump’s constitutional claims of executive authority over voting and the Postal Service’s scheme are on very weak ground.

And since several states plan to send out mail-in ballots in the next couple of weeks, the justices know that they need to move fast. While the high court has disgracefully served as Trump’s enablers in several cases, on core issues like birthright citizenship the Court has defended the Constitution.

The Missouri case will force the Supreme Court to take up the question of whether states can make their own election rules, as the Constitution clearly holds. Such a ruling in turn could contradict Trump’s own efforts to take control of elections.

In addition, the one way that the high court could keep the new Missouri maps in place is by deploying the so-called Purcell principle, which essentially says that changing election rules too close to the election would cause too much confusion and shouldn’t be done. But a brand-new scheme for mail-in ballots would clearly cause mass confusion for states and millions of voters. The Court threading the needle by saying that Missouri’s new maps—which would help Republicans—fall under Purcell, but maintaining that the normal processing of mail-in ballots—which would hurt Republicans—does not, would be a contradiction that even these justices could find far too much to bear.

The election experts and democracy defenders whom I spoke with don’t think there are five votes on the Supreme Court to allow Trump and the Postal Service to rig elections. We will find out soon enough.