This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.

For months, President Donald Trump has been coping with his myriad failures and plummeting approval ratings by trying to make it harder for people to vote his party out of power in the 2026 midterms. To that end, in March, he issued an executive order that would require the U.S. Postal Service to draft a rule that would upend vote-by-mail procedures in dozens of states, and effectively block the agency from processing ballots that do not comply with the rule’s exacting requirements. Trump did not attempt to hide his motives for doing so: Legal restrictions on mail-in voting, he told Republican lawmakers, would “guarantee the midterms” for a party that is otherwise in danger of losing them badly.

A series of lawsuits ensued, given that the Constitution (1) divides the power to administer federal elections between Congress and the states and (2) very much does not allow elderly conspiracy theorists to arrogate that power on account of their fixation with the results of a presidential election they lost more than a half-decade ago. And fortunately for anyone who cares about maintaining some semblance of representative democracy in this country, in a three-sentence order on Monday, the Supreme Court left in place a federal district court order that blocks the Postal Service’s rule from taking effect in time........

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