Supreme Court Clears The President To Restrict The Mail Voting He Personally Uses, Adds That Time Will Tell

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the president to make mail voting harder for everyone except the president, who votes by mail.

The court’s Republican-appointed majority lifted a lower-court injunction that had blocked the administration from carrying out an executive order tightening mail voting before the November midterms, an order several states had warned carries extreme risks for an election now roughly two months away. The justices did not rule on whether the order is legal. They also did not rule on whether anything done under it will be legal. On that question, they wrote, “time will tell.”

It was a striking phrase to attach to an election with a fixed date. Time will, in fact, tell. November is coming whether or not the litigation keeps pace with it, and the order can be implemented first and adjudicated later, which for this particular midterm is the whole ballgame.

The majority stressed that its decision was not a judgment on the merits. It lifted the block, allowed the policy, and declined to say whether the policy is allowed, a sequence that reads less like a ruling than a shrug with a deadline.

The order arrives two weeks after Palm Beach County records confirmed the president had again voted by mail himself, making him both the author of the restriction and one of the few Americans it is guaranteed not to inconvenience. His ballot was received, verified, and counted. The rest of the country’s will be sorted out in real time.

At press time the justices had left for the summer, confident that time, given enough of it, would tell.