Democrats sued Wednesday to block Donald Trump’s latest executive order restricting mail voting, arguing that the U.S. Constitution empowers states and Congress, not the president, to determine who is eligible to vote by mail.
The lawsuit marks the second round of battles over the president’s power to control elections. Trump’s opponents handily won the first round last year, blocking his initial executive order intended to reshape election procedures by convincing multiple federal judges that it was likely unconstitutional.
Trump on Tuesday announced that his administration would compile lists of who is eligible to vote in states and that the U.S. Postal Service would only mail ballots to those who met that criteria. Critics note that there’s little time to comb through voter rolls before ballots start going out for this fall’s elections, in some places as soon as September, and question whether the administration’s list would be reliable.
They dropped this late on the 31st. I feel like they were hoping april fools day would obscure the reporting.
The pedophile trying to use is executive powers to be legislative and sometimes judicial is getting very tiresome. I can’t believe it’s only been a year of this circus act… holy shit.
If Republicans weren’t spineless bootlickers we wouldn’t have a king running ramshod over our freedoms
Does sue have a different meaning in the U.S.? To me, sue means harm was done and recompence is sought.
You can sue to stop future harm from happening too.
This is a proactive suit to keep the illegal actions from going into effect and causing irreperable harm.
The post office is a joke, and I’m the only one angry about it it seems. Nevermind for a minute their hacks are helping to steal elections, priority mail parcels, that for lifetimes were delivered anywhere in the country in 2-3 days with few exceptions, now take 7 days, same prices that are still rising, and no one has said a fucking word about it.
Biden didn’t do shit, you all defended his refusing to fix it, as if he couldn’t. Maybe this can’t do attitude is why you fucking lose with your (our) shit candidates? Fucking wake up.
Trump has been gutting funding for the USPS since his first term.
The USPS has been sabotaged since long before president dipshit. Jesus christ.
im angry but I don’t displace the blame onto the administration that did no surprise billing and went after high financial fees but that is just me.
You’re right, but you have to consider what USPS has to contend with. Its not the fault of USPS as a government provided service.
They need to fully fund their employees retirement health benefits 75 years into the future unlike any other company. This destroyed any sort of year-year operation funding they had in the oughts. So when they would have been able to reinvest into keeping services timely and efficient, instead they were forced to kick the can down the road to focus on retiree benefits for every single postal worker in the branch.
Package volume increased from roughly 3 billion in 2006 to 7.3 billion in 2025. Package volume in USPS essentially doubled while national package volume increased somewhere in the range of 10x. Which shows that companies like UPS, FedEx, DHL, and Amazon captured a majority of the market growth due to their liquidity and better margins. USPS is forced to deliver to every domestic address so they’re stuck with tougher delivery routes that cost more while the other private delivery companies hoover up lower cost/simpler deliveries. All while the primary revenue driver of first-class mail dropped like a rock due to the rise in email traffic.
This is all ignoring the fact that congress won’t allow them to upgrade their delivery fleet. They’ve been forced to manage their fleet of Grumman LLVs from 1986 as though its the ship of Theseus. They want and everyone else wants them to upgrade but they’ve been hamstrung time and time again by lawsuits and Oshkosh’s own inability to build an electric truck. Instead their deliveries still rely on trucks last built in 1994, making them at least 32 years old at this point, with no airbags, no A/C, and getting 8mpg.
Preaching to the choir, I am intimately familiar with a lot of this. It’s sabotage, the reagan method of making a public service fail to justify privatizing it. But the post office is written, mandated, in the constitution. It’s not an option, it’s mandatory.
These fucking fascist clowns, they don’t care about laws, the only question that matters, is What are you going to do about it? Unless we unite there is little we can do.
Small correction: the creation of post offices is authorized by the postal clause, not mandated.
Congress shall have Power…To establish Post Offices and post Roads
That gives it the authority to do so, but doesn’t require that it must do so
They need to fully fund their employees retirement health benefits 75 years into the future
This should have been done away with in the 2022 Postal Services Reform Act, signed by President Biden.
The specific part of that reform addressing this was the USPS Fairness Act, which since there is a bunch of news about it failing to be passed so many times, because looking up something called a Fairness Act is so generic a term, and because the US diverged from a path of sanity, I can’t find out if this is being enforced currently or what the heck the deal is, but that requirement is at least not supposed to exist anymore.
Fair enough. Good catch but at the least, what should/could have been a period of substantial growth in USPS revenue from 2006-2022 ended up being a period of time which has substantially crippled their operations.
It is far from the end of the USPS’s problems. I did not intend to sound like I was discounting anything else you said. IIRC, they’re still the only entity required to fund themselves, and with declining volume, they can’t reduce service, but also have no power of their own to raise the price of mail. Right wingers have been trying to crush them for a long time, and it’s impressive they do what they do despite those efforts.
The postal workers union also seems to be struggling a lot, which can’t help things if all the workers are unhappy as well. I really feel bad for the USPS as it’s one of the few gov institutions that no normal person really seems to have anything against and they provide a valuable service for every American.
No worries. I understood and upvoted. This isn’t reddit so I tend to give everyone the benefit of doubt when it comes to connotation unless they prove otherwise. I took it as a point of information rather than an attempt to disprove or invalidate.
Perfect. I appreciate it!
you aren’t the only one angry, just i feel like i’m yelling at the clouds. two of my grandpas were postal workers (one in the grampolycule, one not. on gods i have too many grampas)
Normally I hate gifs, but this is good.
Playing the devils advocate here:
Why is this still news? The Trump admin gets sued left and right and loses many cases… but unless there’s someone willing to enforce the rulings (which there obviously isn’t, neither in the judiciary nor in Parliament… why should the admin be bothered? They can keep ignoring the defeats and continue and that’s what they’ll be doing.
At a time when the separation of powers has clearly failed, it is no longer a question of who is right, but of who has the power to get their way—or to simply take it. And as long as American civil society doesn’t get its act together (which seems to be a long way off), that power appears to lie with Trump and his oligarchic government.
Why is this still news?
…
People: “Democrats don’t do anything!”
Democrats: Do something
People: “WHY ARE WE WASTING TIME TALKING ABOUT THIS???”
It is news because it is a thing happening, and an informed public is a good thing. Perhaps also because corporate news agencies make money off advertising toward outrage. Malaise and burying one’s head in the sand won’t move the needle either.
Malaise and burying one’s head in the sand won’t move the needle either.
And as long as American civil society doesn’t get its act together (which seems to be a long way off)
Well I didn’t say that, did I?
What bothers me about reports like these is that, while we do have an “informed public”—strictly speaking, for the past year or so, or even longer for those who go through life with their eyes wide open—it has no real consequences. There are no general strikes, just one-day protests announced well in advance. The activism of many, even here in our bubble, seems to be limited to liking such articles.
How often did we read articles during Trump’s first term along the lines of “Things are really getting tight for him now!”? That didn’t change a thing except to lull parts of the moderate spectrum into a false sense of security that “everything will somehow work out.” In my opinion, these articles therefore do not currently promote activism (anymore) but, on the contrary, lull people into complacency, which is why I’ve criticized this one here in my sarcastic way.
Do you remember the first few months of Trump II? The homogenization of the state apparatus and the filling of vacant positions with loyalists (for example, at the Post Office, to draw the connection) were aimed precisely at the current situation: MAGA supporters are not deterred by even the most numerous lost court cases; they will do what the leader commands, regardless of the legal situation.
From the very beginning, the goal was to continue exercising power even when it is obviously wrong.I’m not saying you said that. I’m saying to cease telling the news would be giving in to malaise and burying one’s head in the sand. That’s why this is news. Because what the news does is report things that happen. This happened.
I’m saying to cease telling the news would be giving in to malaise and burying one’s head in the sand.
Okay, that makes sense.
Then let me put it another way: Personally, I’m tired of reading articles that fuel hope that an obviously corrupt system will actually work.
Personally, I don’t believe that the oligarchy surrounding Trump—and least of all Trump himself—will accept defeat, even in the midterms. Personally, I believe it will take significantly more activism than relying on “court rulings to restore the rule of law” when the other side has obviously long since started playing dirty.
Lawsuit here will confirm that voting is a states issue, not a federal one. You don’t need the judiciary to enforce, just confirm. The states already do the enforcement. So, unlike other cases where the judge is basically powerless to enforce, that’s definitely not going to be the case here.
The problem is that this “makes it ok” for some states to actually enforce it. So it’s not just about confirming it’s a states issue, but to prove that it’s entirely unconstitutional so that no state is allowed to do this.
Okay I get that.
Honest question: Could the states prevent Trump from interfering in the local election process through the U.S. Postal Service? That seems to be exactly what’s behind all the current commotion.
No, unfortunately USPS is entirely federal. So yeah, the change to post dates becoming useless for their function can’t be changed, but the feds can’t make rules to override state election authority either (unless it was legislation, which won’t happen)
