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Supreme Court Keeps Trump’s Mail-In Ballot Restrictions Blocked Ahead of Midterms
Late on Monday, the Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s emergency request to enforce new U.S. Postal Service restrictions on mail-in ballots, leaving in place a lower-court injunction blocking the rule ahead of the midterm elections. In an unsigned order, the Court said the government was “unlikely to succeed on the merits” and had not justified emergency relief.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred, writing that election officials did not have enough time to implement the rule before November.
Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented. The underlying legal challenge will continue, but the restrictions will remain blocked for the 2026 elections.
Legal analyst and professor Steve Vladeck called the ruling “heartening” since it means “a majority of the Court was unwilling to abide President Trump’s transparent effort to make it harder for a large number of lawfully registered voters to actually cast their ballots in the 2026 general election. But it continues to be deeply sobering that it came to all of this in the first place.”
Election officials and voting rights experts, like Voto Latino executive director Beatriz Lopez, have this advice and takeaway for voters: “To every voter wondering if your vote by mail is safe: It is. Make sure you’re registered, request your ballot, fill it out, and return it early.”
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‘Furious’ Is a Cathartic Feminist Fable After Years of Epstein Stonewalling
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Trump’s EPA Is Turning Drinking Water Into an Antiabortion Battleground
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‘Survivors Have Answered Enough’: The Epstein Reading Room Takes Survivors’ Fight on the Road
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Trump and DOJ’s Epstein Cover-Up Is Front of Mind for Voters Going into Midterms
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Fifth Circuit Judges Seem Skeptical of Louisiana’s Challenge to Telehealth Abortion
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Justices Sotomayor and Jackson Sound the Alarm on SCOTUS’ Dangerous Deference to Trump on Mail-In Voting
In this episode, Dr. Goodwin breaks down what the latest Supreme Court ruling on voting rights actually says and what it doesn’t. (Of course, it means everyone’s hair is on fire.) Given that this Supreme Court has tried in every way possible to make it more difficult for people to vote, dismantling the Voting Rights Act—an act that had been supported over the years by both Republicans and also Democrats—what hot mess is next?
The 1965 Voting Rights Act was one that had been embraced over the years strongly by Republicans and Democrats. As Dr. Goodwin discusses, this Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, has unraveled it, knowingly pulling the thread in order to disintegrate of one of the most essential pieces of legislation in American history, which protected all Americans. She reminds us that the very first suffragists in the United States were white men who had been dispossessed from the right to vote because they were not wealthy. Sit back and take a listen.
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- The Trump-Epstein Reading Room Hits The Road
- Labor Day and the Fight for Women’s Freedom
- Women’s Fight for the Vote: From Suffrage to Today
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Fall 2026 Cover Reveal: Gloria Steinem Changed the Story, and Taught Us to Keep Telling It
In our Fall 2026 issue, we remember Gloria not only for the words she wrote, the organizations she helped build or the barriers she broke, but for the connections she made.
Perhaps her greatest gift was her ability to listen, to make people feel capable of changing the world, and to build relationships across generations and movements. She knew that the work would outlast any one of us. The responsibility was to keep telling the story—and to make room for those who would tell it next.
Join today to get our newest issue delivered straight to your mailbox—and help sustain the independent feminist journalism Gloria worked to make possible.
Photo by Jenny Warburg
Rest in Power: Gloria Steinem, Ms. Cofounder and Feminist Visionary
Gloria Steinem, the journalist, organizer and cofounder of Ms. whose name became inseparable from the modern movement for women’s equality, died Wednesday, Sept. 2, at her home in New York City. She was 92.
In 2001, Gloria came to Ellie Smeal and me to discuss the possibility of the Feminist Majority Foundation taking on the publication of Ms. She had rescued the magazine from a series of commercial publishers that had nearly killed it, and it was now facing the headwinds of a rapidly changing media landscape.
We understood, we were being entrusted with far more than a publication—we were being asked to preserve an independent feminist institution, and to keep it alive, questioning and relevant for generations.
That responsibility is more urgent today than at any time in recent memory.
Gloria understood from the beginning that feminism needed its own media—not because feminists should withdraw from the larger public conversation, but because independent media can introduce truths the mainstream has not yet learned to recognize.
Gloria Steinem changed the story women were permitted to tell about themselves. Now it is our responsibility to keep telling the truth.
