The Supreme Court has finally had it with Trump’s plan to steal the midterms

President Donald Trump walks by Chief Justice John Roberts in February 2026 at the State of the Union address. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images On Monday evening, the Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in United States Postal Service v.

California — the case involving President Donald Trump’s attempt to sabotage voting by mail in the United States .

If Trump’s attack on mailed ballots had succeeded, it would have given a significant advantage to Republicans in the upcoming midterms because Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans in the last several US election cycles.

The decision is a rout.

Trump didn’t just lose; the Court’s brief order slips in a line indicating that Trump exceeded his authority and cannot implement such an attack on voting by mail under any circumstances.

Not one member of the Court, including the dissenting justices , argues that Trump had the power to shut down voting by mail in the way he attempted to.

Trump, in other words, found a line that even this Supreme Court would not let him cross.

The decision in USPS is also the second Supreme Court decision in less than a week that shuts down a Republican Party effort to skew the 2026 midterms in its favor.

Last week, the Court ruled that the state of Missouri must use the same congressional maps it used in 2024 (which elected two Democrats), instead of new maps that were expected to elect seven Republicans and only one Democrat.

All of this, from a Court where Republicans hold six of nine seats, and where that Republican majority is often unafraid to go out on a limb to benefit the GOP and its leaders.

This is, after all, the same Court that held that Trump is allowed to use the powers of the presidency to commit crimes .

So what’s going on? The short answer is that, as the Court moves rightward, the mix of cases that reaches the Supreme Court also changes .

Liberals and Democrats — or, at least, savvy liberals and Democrats — stop bringing lawsuits that rest on legal theories that right-leaning judges are unlikely to accept.

Republicans, meanwhile, grow more brazen and start bringing cases that would be summarily rejected by a less friendly bench.