Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Clear-Eyed Solo Dissent Explains the Supreme Court’s Voting Assault
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On Monday, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to begin implementing Donald Trump’s mail-ballot executive order, which seeks to nationalize an election procedure that the Constitution has assigned to the states by ordering the United States Postal Service to refuse to mail certain ballots. Even though nearly all midterm primaries have already happened and the general election is only months away, the court bought the government’s argument that it’s simply too early to consider a lawsuit about the order’s legality. As Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pointed out in her dissent, this decision is another piece in this court’s deteriorating democratic docket, letting the president sow chaos over voting rights across an electorate increasingly dissatisfied with his governance.
In March, Trump issued an executive order, “Ensuring Citizenship Verification and Integrity in Federal Elections,” that sought to give the White House and the executive branch control over mail ballots. The order creates a three-part behemoth of new voting measures. First, it directs the Department of Homeland Security to create citizenship lists of people in every state who the federal government believes are eligible to vote. Second, the order directs the attorney general to “prioritize” prosecutions against local election officials who violate election law by allowing people to vote who shouldn’t. Finally, the order launches a process for the USPS to issue a rule about new special barcodes on mail ballots; through that rule, the Postal Service is directed to refuse to mail ballots that don’t contain this brand-new barcode.
Given that the Constitution gives the president no........
