by Jordan Rubin | Sep 15, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, elections, Supreme Court, White House
The Supreme Court on Monday denied the Trump administration’s bid to halt a Boston judge’s order that blocked the federal government from implementing mail-in ballot restrictions for the midterms.
Over dissent from Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, the court issued a brief order that said the government “is unlikely to succeed on the merits of its challenge to the District Court’s preliminary injunction. And the equitable factors applicable for obtaining emergency relief from this Court do not favor a stay.”
It is the latest action from the high court ahead of the November elections, as the justices have weighed in on an array of election-related issues, including congressional redistricting, campaign advertising and ballot measures.
The administration argued that the restrictions, contained in a new rule from the U.S. Postal Service, impose “only modest envelope-design and addressee-information requirements for federal-election ballots sent via U.S. Mail.” It insisted that the rule regulates the mail, not elections.
A coalition of Democratic-led states maintained that the rule is unlawful and that complying with it “would be impossible” for some states and would lead to millions of voters being unable to vote by mail and others being unable to vote at all. In other states, the coalition said, it would produce “chaos” and “a significant risk that millions more voters would be denied the ability to vote.”
The League of Women Voters and other groups who also challenged the rule said that it “would disrupt the administration of mail voting mid-election and disenfranchise eligible voters nationwide, including voters in all-mail states like Colorado and Utah and elderly, rural, and disabled voters who must vote by mail.”
In a brief concurring
by Jordan Rubin | Aug 18, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog, Supreme Court
The Supreme Court has issued a series of rulings in recent years expanding the role of religion in public life, including in public schools. Now, a religiously diverse group of Texas families is asking the justices to draw a line when it comes to a state law mandating the display of a state-selected Protestant version of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom.
Or, rather, the families are asking the justices to reaffirm a line the high court already drew in 1980, when it rejected a similar Kentucky law to the Texas law the families are challenging.
“Nearly fifty years ago, Stone v. Graham … held that permanently posting the Ten Commandments in public-school classrooms violates the Establishment Clause,” the families said in their petition to the justices, referring to that 1980 precedent and the First Amendment clause that says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”
They also pointed to a more recent ruling, last year’s Mahmoud v. Taylor, in which the high court sided with Maryland parents who wanted to opt their children out of instruction that the parents said violated their religious beliefs on gender and sexuality. The Texas families said the Maryland ruling reaffirmed the court’s recognition of the importance of free-exercise rights under the First Amendment.
The petition in the Ten Commandments case therefore presents the justices with legal questions under both religion clauses: whether the establishment clause “forbids a state from mandating the permanent, conspicuous display of a government-selected version of the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom” and whether “permanently displaying the Ten Commandments in every public-school classroom interferes with parents’ Free Exercise Clause
by Jordan Rubin | Aug 15, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
“Re: Trump’s appeal of the $83 million judgment in the second E. Jean Carroll case: Please get into the specifics of ‘presidential immunity’ as it stands with the most recent Supreme Court ruling. I thought presidential immunity was only for ‘official’ acts as president — things that are part of his JOB. How can his defamation of Ms. Carroll be part of his ‘official acts’ as president? I am sincerely confused by this.” – LG
Hi LG,
The immunity issue certainly can be confusing, as can the litigation between E. Jean Carroll and Donald Trump. The president argues that those two issues intersect to his benefit. I’ll explain his argument and where this is all headed next.
As a quick refresher, Carroll brought two civil cases against Trump. In one of them, a jury awarded her $5 million after finding him liable for sexually abusing her in 1996 and defaming her about it in 2022, when he was between his two presidential terms. The Supreme Court in June denied his petition to review the case, but he is pressing a long-shot bid to persuade the justices to reconsider. They could reject that request as soon as Monday morning.
The other case involves the $83.3 million judgment that you’re asking about. In that one, a separate jury awarded Carroll those damages for statements Trump made in 2019, during his first term. In his recently filed petition to the justices, his lawyers argue that the judgment in that case runs afoul of the Supreme Court’s 2024 presidential immunity ruling “in at least two ways.”
First, they say, Trump can’t be held liable for statements he made “to
by Jordan Rubin | Aug 13, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
The Supreme Court could act at any moment on President Donald Trump’s emergency request to clear the way for his administration to implement an executive order on mail voting — an order that blue states warn carries “extreme” risks for the midterm elections.
Trump’s bid to lift a Massachusetts judge’s injunction against his order has been pending at the high court with no word yet from the justices. Meanwhile, the same Obama-appointed judge issued another injunction Tuesday in a separate but overlapping case, which led the administration to alert the justices to that development while re-upping its existing request for urgent relief.
In a supplemental high court filing Wednesday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer noted that both injunctions bar the government from implementing part of Trump’s executive order — Section 3 — that directs the U.S. Postal Service to “initiate a proposed rulemaking” to “protect the integrity of the mail” in federal elections.
That section of Trump’s order says the proposed rulemaking must include certain requirements for the design of envelopes used by state and local officials to enable voting by mail, including specific markings and unique barcodes for all such envelopes. Also per the order, “all outbound ballot mail” sent by states and localities to voters “must be mailed” in such envelopes, and USPS “shall not transmit mail-in or absentee ballots from any individual” voter unless their name appears on a state-specific list.
Blocking the implementation of that section of Trump’s order in her latest injunction ruling, U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani said the government “made little effort to defend” the merits of the president’s order. The judge therefore deemed lacking “any support
by Jordan Rubin | Aug 11, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
A Christian-run Korean spa in Washington state is petitioning the Supreme Court to approve its women-only entrance policy, after intensely divided appeals court judges rejected the spa’s First Amendment claim.
Calling the appellate rejection a “constitutionally intolerable outcome,” Olympus Spa wants the justices to intervene in the contentious case.
Represented by conservative Christian legal groups, the spa says its policy is based on its patrons’ anatomy, not their identity. Therefore, the business argues, it didn’t violate state law that bars discrimination based on gender identity.
In support of its appeal, the spa’s petition cites recent high court rulings such as the Skrmetti case, which approved Tennessee’s ban on gender-affirming care for minors last year, as well as the justices’ more recent ruling in June that approved state bans on transgender women and girls playing on their preferred sports teams.
The dispute stemmed from a complaint received by Washington’s Human Rights Commission in 2020, in which a transgender woman alleged that Olympus Spa denied her services and said transgender women who hadn’t had gender-conforming surgery weren’t welcome because it could make other customers and staff uncomfortable.
The commission said the spa’s policy violated state law against public facilities discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation, which includes gender expression and identity. The spa argued that enforcing the law against it violated its First Amendment rights.
A divided appellate panel with two Clinton appointees in the majority upheld a district judge’s ruling against the spa. The panel majority said the business discriminated based on gender identity and that the state law didn’t unduly burden its constitutional rights to free speech, exercise of religion or association.
Trump appointee
by Jordan Rubin | Aug 11, 2026 | Deadline: Legal Blog
President Donald Trump just won permission to file a new, narrower complaint against the BBC in his defamation lawsuit against the British broadcaster. But whether his procedural win leads to a successful suit in the end remains to be seen.
U.S. District Judge Roy Altman granted Trump’s motion to file an amended complaint, despite the BBC’s opposition argument that doing so would reward the president’s “gamesmanship” in this litigation.
The Trump-appointed judge’s order followed another one he issued in the president’s favor last week, which let Trump put off handing over sensitive financial information to the broadcaster in discovery.
The president filed the suit in December over what he called a “false, defamatory, deceptive, disparaging, inflammatory, and malicious depiction” of him in a documentary. Among his claims was that the BBC “intentionally and maliciously sought to fully mislead its viewers around the world by splicing together two entirely separate parts of President Trump’s speech on January 6, 2021.”
In his initial complaint, the president said the value of his personal brand alone “is reasonably estimated to be worth tens of billions of dollars,” that business ventures bearing his name “generate hundreds of millions of dollars of annual revenue” and that the injury to his personal and professional brand allegedly inflicted by the BBC casting him as a “violent insurrectionist” has caused “massive economic damage to his brand value and significant damage and injury to his future financial prospects, in addition to continuing to harm his reputation as President of the United States of America.”
The BBC moved to dismiss the case, disputing the substance of Trump’s claims while also arguing that the U.S. court doesn’t have jurisdiction in
