Good morning, it's Wednesday, July 29. The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to let it restrict mail-in voting — 97 days before November's midterms.
Also in today's issue: Blanche vote hangs on one senator, $30 million primary in Michigan, Asylum interviews quietly ended.
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Your Ballot, Their Rules
If you or someone in your household voted by mail in 2024, you were one of roughly 48 million Americans who did. Right now, the question of whether that option will work the same way this November is sitting on the desks of nine Supreme Court justices — and they have until August 3 to decide if they'll even take the case.
On Monday, the administration asked the Court to lift a lower-court order blocking key parts of a March executive order on mail voting. That order directs the U.S. Postal Service to build lists of eligible voters and refuse to deliver ballots to anyone not on those lists. It also tells the Department of Homeland Security to develop new rules for mail voting ahead of the midterms. Twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. — mostly led by Democrats — sued to stop it, arguing the Constitution gives states, not the White House, the power to run elections.
A federal judge in Massachusetts blocked the order in June. A Boston-based appeals court upheld that block last Saturday, finding it would risk cutting eligible voters off from their ballots. Then on Tuesday, in a separate case, a unanimous three-judge D.C. Circuit panel declined to block the same order on procedural grounds — ruling the challenge was premature because agencies hadn't written formal rules yet. Two rulings in different courts, two different legal theories, 48 hours apart.
Now here's a detail worth noticing. The administration's lawyers are telling the Supreme Court the executive order is just "general policy guidance" — nothing to act on because no final rules exist. But the Postal Service has already published a proposed rule requiring states to submit voter lists and use serialized barcodes before it will deliver any federal ballots. You can't call something hypothetical when you've already posted the blueprint.
And this is where it gets personal. The federal database the administration wants to use to check citizenship — a DHS system called SAVE — is known to produce false positives. Eligible citizens can be flagged as non-citizens and wrongly dropped from voter rolls. For voters over 65, who used mail voting at the highest rate of any age group in 2024 — nearly 40 percent — that's not an abstract risk. It's the kind of problem that shows up three weeks before Election Day as a letter saying your ballot was never sent.
The political math is also worth stating plainly. In 2024, more than one in three Democrats voted by mail, compared to roughly one in four Republicans. An executive order that makes mail voting harder does not fall evenly across party lines — and the administration knows that.
If the justices side with the administration, the order could take effect across those 23 states with barely three months before voters start casting ballots. If they decline, it stays frozen through November and the fight moves to a full hearing later. Either way, the constitutional question lingers: does a president have the power to tell the Postal Service which ballots to deliver and which to hold back?
Here's the thing — the Constitution is quite clear that Congress and state legislatures set the rules for federal elections. A president can propose, pressure, and advocate. But directing a federal agency to screen ballots isn't guidance. It's intervention. And when that intervention lands 97 days before an election, using a database that flags eligible voters by mistake, the word for it isn't "integrity." It's confusion with a deadline.
In other news that matters
Blanche vote hits a wall. The Senate Judiciary Committee votes Thursday on Todd Blanche — President Trump's former personal defense lawyer and current acting attorney general — to permanently lead the Justice Department. But Senator John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, said Tuesday there's no deal that would earn his yes. His sticking point: the $1.8 billion "anti-weaponization fund" created through Trump's lawsuit against the IRS — a case a federal judge voided this month as filed in "bad faith," with Blanche's role referred for possible bar discipline. Senator Thom Tillis, a Republican from North Carolina, is also holding out, and Republicans hold just a one-vote edge on the committee — meaning a single defection ties the vote and could stall the nomination. Neither senator is running for reelection, which makes them harder for the White House to pressure. When a president's own party members won't confirm his attorney general because they can't get a clear answer on whether taxpayer money will reward the president's allies, that's not partisanship — that's a governance red flag.
$30 million question in Michigan. Rep. Haley Stevens and progressive former county health officer Abdul El-Sayed held their final debate Monday night before the August 4 Democratic primary for Michigan's open Senate seat — a race expected to help decide which party controls the chamber. The dominant issue wasn't policy — it was AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group, which has reportedly spent more than $30 million backing Stevens, its largest outlay in any single race. Stevens repeatedly declined to say whether that spending would influence her votes, while El-Sayed cited her vote against a House amendment to strip $3.3 billion in Israel aid — a measure 103 Democrats supported. The winner faces Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in November. When a candidate won't answer whether the biggest outside investment in their race will shape their decisions, voters are right to notice.
Asylum interviews quietly ended. A Department of Homeland Security rule taking effect Tuesday lets immigration officers send asylum seekers directly to court without interviewing them — ending a decades-old practice that gave applicants a chance to explain their case before facing a judge. The timing matters: more than 300,000 Haitians lost Temporary Protected Status on Monday after the Supreme Court cleared the administration to end the program, and many may now turn to asylum as their only remaining path. Meanwhile, the administration has hired over 150 new immigration judges this year — heavily drawn from prosecutorial backgrounds — while firing more than 100 sitting judges, many with higher-than-average asylum approval rates. Public comment on the rule is open for 60 days. Removing the interview step, reshaping the bench, and then funneling hundreds of thousands of people through the system isn't streamlining — it's architecture.
P.S. Should courts block voting changes this close to an election? Hit Reply — one word is enough.
