Attorney General Todd Blanche pledged the Trump administration would comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling Monday that effectively blocked the U.S. Postal Service from enforcing new regulations for mail voting ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The high court rejected the administration’s efforts to move forward with the new rules, which were finalized last month, while multiple legal challenges proceed. The new rules would mandate that mail ballot envelopes meet certain design requirements, including unique barcodes, and would require state and local election officials to submit to a government-operated portal certain information about voters receiving mail ballots.
Several states have already begun sending mail ballots, and election officials at the state and local levels have said it would be difficult to comply with the rules in time for the upcoming elections. Many have warned of mass voter disenfranchisement if the new Postal Service rules were implemented before the November elections.
“Of course, we’re going to comply with the Supreme Court’s decision, as we always do,” Blanche said in response to a question from CBS News while briefing reporters at the White House on Tuesday. “That doesn’t mean that we’re not going to do everything in this administration that we can to make sure that there are free and fair elections.”
Blanche continued, saying “there’s this constant pressure, and this effort by the media and by mostly by Democrats that somehow doing that is a bad thing. Everybody should want that.”
The attorney general was also asked by CBS News about a Truth Social post from President Trump early Tuesday that referred to the ruling as “another bad decision” against his administration and blamed the high court for doing “incalculable” damage to the country in recent court decisions against him.
In a brief unsigned order, the Supreme Court said the government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits” in one of the cases challenging the U.S. Postal Service rules.
Two of the court’s conservatives, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, dissented from the court’s ruling, arguing the states that sued over the Postal Service’s new rules are unlikely to show the policy is unlawful. A third conservative, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, sided with the majority.
“The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History. This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years,” President Trump wrote, after praising Alito and Thomas.
“These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves, a Court that is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal,” Mr. Trump continued, adding the court has “rendered some of the most destructive, hurtful, and damaging decisions in our Country’s history.”
“He is very frustrated,” Blanche said of Mr. Trump and the Supreme Court, adding Mr. Trump “has every right and indeed, he should communicate his concerns with the Supreme Court whenever he has them.”
In response to another question on Mr. Trump’s criticism of the high court, Blanche replied, “We do think that this decision is not the right decision. That is okay. That’s the way democracy works.”
