The administration files a third Supreme Court application in under six weeks over mail-in voting restrictions
The Trump administration withdrew its 3 September emergency application to the Supreme Court and filed a new one the same day, asking the justices to put on hold US District Judge Indira Talwani's 4 September preliminary injunction barring the administration from requiring states to comply with parts of the Postal Service's mail-ballot rule.
What happened
Solicitor General D. John Sauer submitted a letter to Scott Harris, the clerk of the Supreme Court, withdrawing the 3 September application in light of Talwani's new order, then filed a fresh application against the preliminary injunction itself, which had replaced her 27 August temporary restraining order and barred the administration from requiring states to comply with provisions of the rule indefinitely while the states' challenge continues. Sauer wrote that the injunction is materially identical to the temporary restraining order, both in its substantive scope and its minimal, conclusory reasoning, and that Talwani's continuing prejudgment of the rule is baseless. SCOTUSblog counts the Sunday filing as the third time in less than six weeks, and the second since Thursday, that the administration has come to the Supreme Court seeking to clear the way to implement restrictions on mail-in voting; the first of the three, on 27 July, followed the First Circuit's refusal to pause Talwani's earlier order and concerned the March executive order rather than the Postal Service rule. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has initial responsibility for emergency appeals from Massachusetts, directed the challengers to file their response by 4 p.m. EDT on Wednesday 9 September. Sauer told the court that North Carolina has already started to mail out ballots and that Alabama will do so on 9 September, with at least five more states to follow the week after, all without being required to comply with the new rule.
Why it matters
The mechanism here is repetition against a clock. Each application is an ordinary use of the emergency docket, but the third one in less than six weeks, filed while - on the government's own account - ballots are already moving through the mail, converts the question from whether the rule is lawful into whether it operates before that is settled. A rule that takes effect during the mailing period has had its effect on that election regardless of how the litigation later resolves, which is why the timing rather than the filing is what this row records.