Supreme Court just handed Trump a huge loss in his election scheme: GOP impeachment lawyer

President Donald Trump suffered a major setback in his efforts to federalize voting in the upcoming midterm elections, according to a right-leaning legal scholar.

“I think this is a significant loss for Republicans who have wanted to try to rein in the way that we do our elections,” Jonathan Turley told Fox News’ Dana Perino on Monday. The George Washington University Law School professor was discussing the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling permitting states to count mail-in ballots after Election Day, even though Trump — who believes mail-in ballots are predominantly used by Democratic voters — tried to ban counting any of them after Election. “California, of course, is the nightmare where you can go for weeks without a decision.”

He added, regarding right-wing Justice Samuel Alito’s lashing out at the decision, “And just as Alito really lashes out and says this undermines the integrity of the process, the faith in the process of voters — and that is a sentiment that is shared by many — what the court is saying is that you can’t use this federal law to achieve that purpose, that there is room at the elbows here for states like Mississippi to count ballots that had been postmarked before Election Day.”

The Supreme Court’s decision breaks a recent pattern of the judges siding with Trump and Republicans, especially on cases involving race, a trend that has caused many critics to accuse the jurists of partisanship given that six of them are Republicans and three are Democrats. In the mail-in ballot case, two conservative judges — Chief Justice John Roberts and Judge Amy Coney Barrett — joined the three liberal judges to create the narrow majority.

“The ruling, authored by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is a setback for President Donald Trump, who has frequently criticized mail-in voting, claiming without offering evidence that it is rife with fraud,” NBC News explained. Journalist Jamie Dupree pointed out that, despite Trump’s hope to reduce Democratic votes by suppressing mail-in ballots, “that issue is now off the table for the 2026 midterms.”

This is not the only way that Trump has attempted to guarantee he retains control of the Senate and House of Representatives by federalizing the midterm elections. He also suggested he would purge voters from the rolls using DOGE and state-shared voter files, advocated strict voter ID laws, threatened to send ICE and radical groups to polling locations and implemented partisan gerrymandering. The last move was made possible when the Supreme Court overturned large portions of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Dan Vicuña, Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at the nonprofit good government group Common Cause, told AlterNet earlier this month. “We know, from the Big Lie of the 2020 election to spurring on a violent revolt to overthrow a free and fair election, that he has no respect for democratic norms, for the voice of the people. This is entirely about his own power and his own ego. He will even invest in protecting that ego and protecting his power at the expense of the needs of the public. People are suffering with high gas prices and affordability issues, and he does not care. All that matters is protecting his power, and he has no interest in whether he does that through democratic means.”

Regarding the attempts to federalize elections, such as by his recently-overturned attempt to impose deadlines on mail-in ballots, Vicuña suggested those efforts are illegal.

“I think some of these attempts to federalize, to nationalize elections are clearly illegal,” Vicuña argued. “You've seen some of that overreach already struck down — attempts to order independent agencies to force a strict voter ID requirement on people. That has been rejected. Common Cause is in court challenging the latest executive order to turn the United States Postal Service into some election administration agency and to create a further bureaucratic layer to make it more difficult to vote by mail. In terms of the president's authority to order around USPS, it's illegal. In terms of USPS's authority to become some sort of national election administration agency, it far exceeds the legal authority that Congress gave to the postal service. The statute describing what kind of work the postal service would do is about postal service work — processing mail and selling stamps. It has nothing to do with election administration.”