MEYERSON ON TAP

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August 25, 2026 (Prospect.org)

MEYERSON ON TAP
Will the Republican justices OK Trump’s efforts to winnow the midterm electorate?Yesterday’s ruling doesn’t foretell where they’ll go, but their Republican bias is an established fact.Yesterday, the six Republican justices on the Supreme Court—those mischievous scamps!—opened the door just a crack to President Trump’s efforts to winnow the electorate so it’s more to his liking. That opening is far from wide enough to enable Trump to wallow through so he can begin hacking Democrats from the voter rolls, but it does enable Trump’s underlings to move his winnowing project a few steps forward.
The justices’ ruling stayed an injunction from a lower court that had forbidden the administration from compiling “state citizenship lists” that could be used to bounce those omitted from the lists from receiving mail ballots—assuming that the administration’s plan went on to clear other constitutional and procedural hurdles that yesterday’s decision did not address. Indeed, yesterday’s ruling merely said that the 23 states and the District of Columbia that had sought the injunction lacked standing to do so, because the list compilation project had yet to be rolled out and, accordingly, the states could not yet claim any harm from the project. Rather, the Six ruled, it was the administration that was “likely to suffer irreparable harm” if the injunction wasn’t lifted.
There’s no doubt that Trump fears suffering irreparable harm if his lieutenants can’t winnow the rolls. That harm would not be administered by a mere injunction, however. His fear is that it will be administered by the American people if they are permitted to vote in a free and fair election when this year’s midterms roll around.
It may be, of course, that when the Court considers the larger issues that Trump’s winnowing project raises, it will slam that door shut. After all, the Constitution’s Tenth Amendment forbids the federal government from the right to undertake projects not specifically enumerated in the Constitution, reserving those rights to the states. As election administration (which certainly includes deciding on voter eligibility) is not therein enumerated, it has been the project of the individual states since the Constitution was first ratified—actually, before the Constitution was ratified, and even before it was drafted.
Of course, that the Constitution is perfectly clear on a question that may come before the Court is no guarantee that that will mean anything to those mischievous scamps on the bench. Despite the 14th Amendment’s affirmation of birthright citizenship, four of the six Republicans somehow failed to recognize it.
Still, the Republican Six will have to fail to recognize even more than that if they are to rule in the next few weeks that Trump’s plan can move forward. They will have to ignore the inconvenient fact that the basis for the administration’s intervention—that masses of noncitizens vote illegally in American elections—is devoid of any factual substantiation, despite repeated Republican investigations in fruitless search of voter fraud that have been ongoing for decades.

They will have to dismiss the equally inconvenient fact that the project’s first step—the Department of Homeland Security and the post office amassing a state citizen list of every current American citizen age 18 or older—depends on entrusting that rather large task to one department that has erroneously deported citizens and two departments with no experience at all in gathering the kind of census data aggregated decennially, after years of preparation, by a bureau of different department (Commerce).
As they did in their ruling granting President Trump immunity for any misdeeds committed in an official capacity, they would doubtless declare that a ruling enabling the administration to decide who can vote and who cannot applies to any current and future administration. But it wouldn’t be just any federal administration to which they would be entrusting the winnowing of election rolls, of course. It would be the administration of Donald Trump, who still falsely claims that he actually won the 2020 presidential election, who still falsely claims that illegal voting by millions of immigrant noncitizens is the only reason why Democrats can ever claim electoral victory, who summoned several thousand goons to the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to help his efforts to violently overturn and steal a presidential election, and who pardoned and still hails as heroes those goons who were tried and sentenced to prison for their violent disruptions.
There are, in short, a whole lot of hurdles the Six would have to jump were they to go beyond yesterday’s narrow ruling to one that would enable Trump to take over the upcoming election. What we know, unfortunately, is that when it comes to questions of party politics, the Court, very much led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has a long if undistinguished history of favoring Republicans. It has permitted partisan gerrymandering in a way and context that chiefly helped Republicans. It has effectively revoked the Voting Rights Act in a way that helps only the Republicans, culminating a personal crusade that Roberts embarked upon 45 years ago. It has obliterated the limits on the political contributions of corporations, which has provided the Republicans with a massive cash advantage even when the larger electorate has turned against them.
It is no exaggeration to say that the most effective Republican political operatives, by far, are those who sit on the nation’s highest court.
That still doesn’t mean that they will allow Trump to run amok in reshaping the electorate between now and November. Roberts in particular has a valid concern for the Court’s reputation, which these days is roughly at the same level as some particularly viral bacteria. If he doesn’t want to go down in history as the 21st-century Roger Taney—author of the Dred Scott ruling, with its unmistakable assault on the legitimacy and existence of American democracy—he’d do well not to author or support a Dred Scott ruling for our time.
Harold Meyerson
Editor at Large
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