CNN host Kaitlan Collins sounded the alarm after the Supreme Court handed Donald Trump a victory in his campaign to restrict mail-in ballots at November’s midterm elections.
On Monday, the conservative-dominated Supreme Court raised eyebrows by ruling that 23 Democrat-led states that sued the president over a March executive order lacked the legal basis to challenge it.
The ruling allows Trump, 80, to proceed with parts of a controversial executive order that grants federal authorities the power to decide who is allowed to vote by mail, and who will have their ballots withheld.
Trump can now move ahead with plans to restrict the use of mail-in ballots, even while a lower court debates the legality of the executive order.
However, it is unclear whether the new rules will take effect by November’s midterms, where control of both chambers is at play, and more legal action is guaranteed.
The decision comes despite the Constitution granting states explicit authority over elections, with oversight from Congress. It also follows Trump voting by mail himself in Florida’s primary elections last week, despite calling mail-in ballots “inherently corrupt” in July.
“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 began on The Source on Monday.
Collins said the decision is 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, citing Trump’s mail-in vote for a Republican primary in Florida’s 19th District.
Collins highlighted Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was quick to slam the court’s emergency order as a “nightmare” in her dissent.
Jackson, 55, wrote that the ruling “needlessly injects chaos and uncertainty” into the midterms, saying it “lets another shoe drop in the Kafkaesque nightmare that our precedents have been steadily creating for certain plaintiffs who seek to bring election-related challenges.”
Playing a supercut of Trump labeling mail-in ballots “corrupt” and a “disaster,” Collins then brought in a panel of legal experts to discuss the case.
Speaking on The Source, Republican lawyer Ben Ginsberg pointed out that Trump “under the Constitution, doesn’t have the authority to do this.”
He added, “Congress never delegated the authority to say who can vote, not vote, to the United States Postal Service.”
CNN’s Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig pointed out that the court had not resolved the “ultimate Constitutional issue” with its ruling.
“What the court did do today is issue an important temporary procedural ruling,” Honig said.
“They said the states who were suing to block this...cannot yet show enough concrete specific harm that we can rule on this case as a court,” he added. “Essentially, the court said there’s a bunch of hypotheticals here that could lead to some harm, but we’re not there yet.”
Tom Dupree, a former deputy assistant attorney general under President George W. Bush, said the issue was pressing, given the midterms were 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.
“That’s a huge task, and I don’t know if it’s possible at this late date.”
Ginsberg added, “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.”
“So this is kind of a flawed political strategy wrapped up in a rather vocally charged policy from the president.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
