A federal judge has temporarily blocked Trump's attempt to derail the midterm election by restricting mail-in voting.
Judge blocks rule implementing Trump plan to restrict mail-in voting:
A federal judge on Thursday blocked the U.S. Postal Service from implementing core parts of a new rule it adopted at President Donald Trump's direction that would tighten mail-in voting requirements ahead of the November congressional elections.
U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston issued a temporary restraining order at the behest of Democratic-led states and voting rights groups after the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday issued a ruling that led to the lifting of earlier injunctions blocking Trump's plans to restrict mail-in voting.
That decision led to a frantic effort by dozens of Democratic state attorneys general and voting rights groups including the League of Women Voters to renew their legal fight and secure an order that would prevent the USPS from enforcing a rule that was allowed to take effect on Wednesday.
The restraining order Talwani issued will remain in place while she considers whether to issue a longer-term preliminary injunction blocking the rule. The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, plans to consider whether to do so during a Sept. 3 hearing.
MSNOW's Lawrence O'Donnell discussed the ruling as the news broke this Thursday and asked Rep. Jamie Raskin what we should expect next.
O'DONNELL: But we have one now that has the restraining order. That applies to all of these states that are in this situation. What is left for Donald Trump to try?
RASKIN: Well, I mean, they will keep appealing, no doubt. Every day that passes, every week that passes makes it even more difficult, even for the most extreme MAGA justices, to actually throw this terrible monkey wrench into the elections, because, I mean, it's a totally convoluted process, where the states have to get their election materials approved by the Postal Service.
Then they have to put a special barcode on every envelope going out to every voter who's approved by their process, the states have nothing to do with, so the states are not even going be able to check to see that their voters are not being disenfranchised on a partisan basis by Trump's post office.
Then they've got to go and educate all of their state election officials, and then educate the public on how this thing works. And so they're going have to tell people, no, you might be expecting an election ballot, but somehow you're not passing some test that the Postal Service is imposing on you, so you've got to go and vote now, then they've got to prepare for a lot more people at the polls.
I mean, it's just chaos. It's precisely what the Supreme Court has, at least occasionally said under the Purcell Principle, cannot be done against state election processes and against the voters.
O'DONNELL: So, Donald Trump ordered the Post Office to not deliver mail. Don't deliver mail if we don't like the envelopes. Federal law makes it a requirement of the post office to deliver mail. The lawsuit that the state attorneys generals filed cites the specific federal law that says the postal service is under a legal obligation to deliver all of these envelopes and the president simply cannot order them not to deliver these envelopes.
RASKIN: Well, that's absolutely right. And, you know, what's comical about this is Donald Trump really thinks he's a king who can issue a royal edict in the form of an executive order.
An executive order is essentially an interdepartmental memorandum saying, well, it's the policy of the executive branch to do X, Y or Z.
It doesn't overturn a federal regulation. It doesn't overturn or override a federal law. Much less can it overturn or override the Constitution of the United States, which makes the states the primary administrators of congressional elections with only supplementary override authority given to Congress. And of course, Congress has not passed any of the nonsense they're talking about doing.
As they also discussed, it won't stop them from appealing.
