CNN host Kaitlan Collins is sounding the alarm after the Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a significant procedural victory in his effort to reshape how Americans vote by mail ahead of November’s midterm elections.
The court’s conservative majority ruled Monday that 23 Democratic-led states challenging Trump’s March executive order had not shown enough concrete harm to keep the order blocked at this stage.
That gives Trump room to move forward with his plan to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, even while a lower court debates the legality of the executive order.
And that’s where things get complicated. Trump’s executive order grants federal authorities the power to decide who is allowed to vote by mail and who will have their ballots withheld. It also directs the U.S. Postal Service to adopt new requirements and creates federal lists that could be used in administering mail voting.
Whether those changes will actually be in place by November remains uncertain. More litigation is virtually guaranteed, and with the midterms only weeks away, election officials and voters are running out of time.
Collins opened Monday’s episode of The Source by highlighting exactly how significant the ruling could become.
“The Supreme Court handing President Trump a win on his mission to restrict mail-in voting with new rules for the U.S. Postal Service and who gets a mail-in ballot,” Collins said.
She said the ruling was already “prompting alarm bells” ahead of the midterms.
“This is the latest turn in what has been the president’s crusade against the very form of voting that he himself actually just used last week,” Collins said.
That last part is hard to ignore.
Trump recently voted by mail in a Florida Republican primary, despite repeatedly attacking mail-in voting. In July, he called mail-in ballots “inherently corrupt.”
Collins highlighted the apparent contradiction while discussing the Supreme Court’s decision.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was equally alarmed by what the ruling could mean for the election.
In her dissent, Jackson called the court’s emergency decision a “nightmare” and warned that it “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty” into the upcoming midterms.
Collins then played a compilation of Trump describing mail-in ballots as “corrupt” and a “disaster” before bringing in a panel of legal experts to dissect the ruling.
Republican election lawyer Ben Ginsberg didn’t mince words.
Ginsberg argued that Trump “under the Constitution, doesn’t have the authority to do this.”
He also questioned the idea that the president could effectively give the Postal Service a role in determining who can vote by mail.
“Congress never delegated the authority to say who can vote, not vote, to the United States Postal Service,” Ginsberg said.
But legal analyst Elie Honig offered an important distinction about what the Supreme Court actually decided.
“What the court did do today is issue an important temporary procedural ruling,” Honig said.
The court, he explained, wasn’t declaring Trump’s entire plan lawful. Instead, it found that the states challenging the order had not yet demonstrated enough specific harm to justify blocking it.
“Essentially, the court said there’s a bunch of hypotheticals here that could lead to some harm, but we’re not there yet,” Honig said.
That leaves the challengers with a difficult race against the clock.
Tom Dupree, a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, pointed out that the midterms are only 71 days away.
“We are in a universe where the challengers are gonna have to come back to another court, file an amended complaint, make new arguments, put in new evidence, get decisions, and then get back up to the Supreme Court, all within a very compressed amount of time,” Dupree said.
Then he delivered the uncomfortable bottom line:
“That’s a huge task, and I don’t know if it’s possible at this late date.”
There could also be a political backlash from Trump’s own party.
Ginsberg noted that Republicans have traditionally had a large base of older voters, many of whom rely on mail voting.
“I think you’re going to see some blowback from Republicans in the coming weeks because, after all, Republicans are the older party and older folks like to vote by mail,” Ginsberg said.
“So this is kind of a flawed political strategy wrapped up in a rather vocally charged policy from the president.”
For now, the Supreme Court has given Trump room to keep moving.
But it hasn’t settled the central question of whether the administration can legally impose the restrictions it wants.
That battle is still coming.
And with the midterms rapidly approaching, the courts, states and election officials are now racing against the calendar.
