On Tuesday, the US Supreme Court issued an opinion upholding a state law that permits the counting of mail-in ballots that arrive after election day.
Mississippi law permits ballots that arrive after election day to be counted as long as they were post-marked on or before election day. Several parties, including the Republican National Committee and the Mississippi Republican Party, challenged the law as violating federal law, which sets the date for federal elections as the first Tuesday in November.
Essentially, these parties argued that by counting ballots that arrive after the specific day selected by Congress for the election, Mississippi had more or less changed when the election was held (stretching it past the specified date) in contravention of federal law.
Based on some very fine reading of several federal laws, a slim majority of the Supreme Court held that Mississippi's law (and by extension, other states' similar laws) does not violate or contradict federal law.
As always, the President acted calmly, respectfully, and rationally in response to the Court's decision.
For at least seven years, President Trump has denigrated mail-in voting, ostensibly because it is used to commit fraud and undermine or improperly flip election results. In reality, because mail-in voting is generally used more by Democratic voters than Republicans, Trump believes it is bad.
Based on his track record, it is hard to believe that Trump's reaction is based on good-faith disagreement over the interpretation of federal law or legitimate concern over fraud and not simply that Democrat votes won't be tossed out.
Trump has floated and even tried to take very suspect actions related to federal elections, including trying to make states turn over their voter rolls, ordering the postal service to refuse to deliver mail ballots to people in states that will not turn over voter rolls to the federal government, and withholding money from states with voting processes he does not like.
Again, Trump claims that all of this is meant to prevent voter fraud. To this day, without evidence, he regularly asserts that the 2020 presidential election was "stolen from him." He regularly undercuts the legitimacy of US elections by claiming they are rigged. Yet, despite years of whining, many garbage lawsuits, and having his cronies direct federal resources toward trying to prove and prosecute voter fraud, Trump has been unable to show the type of fraud he regularly claims is prevalent and clear.
And when pressed on his baseless and harmful allegations, he acts like a petulant baby. As always, he is happy to dish out baseless allegations, offensive insults, and other nasty nonsense, but he immediately becomes a whiny, pitiful victim crying about the liberal agenda any time he is questioned in a way he does not like.
If Democrats continue to look good in polling for November's elections, expect Trump to continue to undermine the credibility of our system. And do not be shocked if he directs the federal government to take dubious actions in states in which results are going against his Republican sycophants. It will get worse before it gets better. Authoritarians do not have a history of honoring and respecting election results that do not go their way.