The Morning Briefing: SCOTUS Helps Preserve a Modicum of Sanity in Mail-In Ballot Madness

Top O' the Briefing

Happy Tuesday, dear Kruiser Morning Briefing friends. The Sine Qua Non Sequitur is spending the day helping traveling Cesar Romero impersonators with some embroidery.

I want to thank Sarah for filling in for me on short notice while I dealt with some family stuff (my unscheduled days off are rarely for anything fun). It's good to be back even though I feel like I could nap for a fortnight.

President Trump hasn't been getting any help from Republicans in the Senate in his efforts to make our elections a little more transparent and less susceptible to fraud. Senate Majority Leader John Thune isn't really leading anyone, preferring the invertebrate hand-wringing that was the hallmark of pre-Trump Republicans to anything that might help his party to win.

The president likes results, and if he isn't getting them from Congress, he is willing to do what needs to be done via executive orders. That route, of course, often runs into problems with activist liberal judges and/or courts. Fortunately, the highest court in the land is still mostly conservative and will occasionally give Trump a helpful hand, which it did again yesterday.

This is from Matt:

The Supreme Court just handed President Trump a massive victory in the fight to secure America's elections. The justices cleared the way for his executive order restricting mail-in voting to move forward, and after months of Democrat officials trying to bury the policy in court, the administration finally has room to breathe.
This is a big deal.
The SAVE America Act is still stalled in the Senate, blocked by Democrats who aren’t even hiding the fact they have zero interest in verifying that voters are who they say they are. Trump's executive order just got a green light from the nation's highest court anyway. Election integrity doesn't have to die in the legislative graveyard to make progress.
Trump signed the executive order, called "Ensuring Citizenship Verification And Integrity In Federal Elections," in March 2026. It directs his administration to build lists of eligible voters and orders the U.S. Postal Service to deliver mail ballots only to people on those lists.

Anything to combat the fraud potential of vote-by-mail is helpful, and this is a good start. I'm a tough sell on this issue because I would prefer that the pool of people who are eligible to vote via the mail be drastically reduced. None of the measures discussed or proposed in recent years go far enough in my opinion. My baseline starts with state laws that allow all-mail elections being struck down.

Because the Democrats won't be happy until all of our elections practically lawless free-for-alls that have myriad options for fraud to be introduced into the process, they lie about anything that pushes back on that agenda. I wrote last week that it is illegal to punch Dems who don't tell the truth about this stuff. As of this writing, it still is.

My Twitchy colleague Doug P. collected some Dems' reactions to the ruling. Here's Granny Boxwine's hot take:

The right to vote is the foundation of our Democracy, and the Supreme Court’s decision allowing the President to move forward with this assault on that right is an insult to the vision of our founders.

Trump’s attempt to seize control over Americans’ ability to vote by mail… https://t.co/rOvZQKwQ2p
— Nancy Pelosi (@SpeakerPelosi) August 24, 2026

Ensuring that mail-in ballots are sent only to those who are eligible to vote isn't an "attempt to seize control" of, well, anything. In most cases, this could be written off as merely another example of Pelosi being nonsensical — she was tossing up word salads long before Kamala Harris — but her remarks are a variation on the theme of the responses from most Dem officials.

Vote-by-mail features the least amount of election transparency and therefore offers the greatest potential for fraud, especially in states like California where every voter gets sent a ballot whether it was requested or not. When I lived in California, I was put on a permanent vote-by-mail list even though I'd never voted absentee or asked to be put on a list. Every election, I would fill out a provisional ballot and check a box requesting that I be removed from the list but I never was. Three years after I had moved back to Arizona, I was still on that list.

The messier and more out of date that the voter rolls in a state are, the more ripe they are for election "anomalies," as they've become known by those who want to insist that election fraud is no big deal. The Democrats have no coherent reason to be opposed to clean voter rolls. Their levels of hysteria when responding to common sense measures like this only make them seem even more guilty of all the things that we accuse them of.

Again, this is helpful, but there is a long way to go in order to fix the problems in our elections. The identification requirements in the SAVE Act would be a huge step in the right direction, but John Thune and the Mitch McConnell-esque GOP jellyfish might kill that because of reasons and feelings and stuff.

President Trump will just have to keep firing up that executive order pen of his and seeing what survives the lefty courts gauntlet. Then maybe, just maybe, we can one day get some Republicans in Congress who won't be afraid to act like they've won an election after they've, you know, won an election.

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POTUS Press Today

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
08/24/26

DAILY GUIDANCE AND PRESS SCHEDULE FOR
TUESDAY, AUGUST 25, 2026

In-Town Pool
TV Corr & Crew: ABC
Secondary TV Corr: CBN
Photos: AP, AFP, NYT, Reuters, Getty
Print: Boston Globe
Secondary Print: The Telegraph
Radio: FOX
New Media: Daily Signal

EDT:
9:00 AM In-Town Pool Call Time

8:00 AM THE PRESIDENT participates in Executive Time
The White House
Closed Press

12:30 PM THE PRESIDENT participates in a Policy Meeting
Oval Office
Closed Press

2:00 PM THE PRESIDENT participates in a Pre-Tape Interview
The White House
Closed Press

3:00 PM THE PRESIDENT participates in a Policy Meeting
Oval Office
Closed Press

4:00 PM THE PRESIDENT participates in Signing Time
Oval Office
Closed Press

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