One of the Supreme Court’s worst ideas could save the midterms from Trump

It is unclear whether this Supreme Court will allow President Donald Trump to make sweeping and unilateral changes to how the country runs its elections so close to the midterms. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/ AFP via Getty Images Well, that was quick.

On Thursday evening, federal district Judge Indira Talwani issued a new order that temporarily blocks an effort by the Trump administration that appears designed to sabotage voting by mail in the upcoming midterm election.

Talwani previously blocked an executive order that President Donald Trump issued in March, which ordered the US Postal Service (USPS) to impose a byzantine array of new regulations on voting by mail, but the Supreme Court reinstated the order on Monday .

Talwani’s new order sets up a new legal fight that is almost certain to return to the justices, and it is unclear whether this Court, with its 6-3 Republican majority, will allow Trump to make sweeping and unilateral changes to how the United States conducts its elections so close to an actual Election Day.

That said, while Talwani’s new order in League of Women Voters v.

Trump is brief, it is well-crafted to persuade at least some members of the Court’s Republican majority to break with the leader of their political party.

Talwani relies on a fairly new legal concept known as the “ major questions doctrine ,” that the Court’s Republican majority invented in the later part of the Obama administration, and that the Court has only actually used against one president: Joe Biden.

Briefly, the doctrine claims that the executive branch may not make policy changes that are too sweeping or too aggressive, often even if a federal statute appears to give it the power to do so.

As the Court summarized this idea in Utility Air Regulatory Group v.

EPA (2014), the first Supreme Court decision to articulate the major questions doctrine, “we expect Congress to speak clearly if it wishes to assign to an agency decisions of vast ‘economic and political significance.’” This doctrine, as Talwani indicated in her recent order, cuts sharply against Trump’s rules governing voting by mail.

The Trump administration’s new rules impose so many layers of bureaucracy on mail ballots that it likely would be impossible for many states to comply with these regulations .

Trump’s new rules, in other words, would effectively shut down voting by mail in much of the United States.

And there are several states who conduct their elections almost entirely by mail, which means that Trump’s rules could effectively cancel the 2026 midterms in those states .

If that’s not a decision of “vast economic and political significance,” nothing is.