Trump Loses It as Courts Block His Election Plan

0:00Ben Meiselas:This podcast is sponsored by Talkspace. Last year, I went through many different life changes. I needed to take a pause and examine how I was feeling in the inside to better show up for the ones who need me to be my best version of myself. When you're navigating life's changes, Talkspace can help. Talkspace is the number one rated online therapy, bringing you professional support from licensed therapists and psychiatry providers that you can access anytime, anywhere. Living a busy life, navigating a long-distance relationship, becoming a first stepfather, Talkspace made all of those journeys possible.

0:35Ben Meiselas:I could speak with my therapist in the office. I could speak with my therapist in the comfort of my home. I was never alone. Talkspace works with most major insurers, and most insured members have a$0 copay. No insurance, no problem. Now get$80 off your first month with promo code SPACE80 when you go to Talkspace.com. Match with a licensed therapist today at Talkspace.com. Save$80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. This is summer at its peak. Whole Foods Market Summer Fruit Fest is your invitation to eat the season. Fresh, organic, and bursting with flavor. Start your day with peaches and organic blueberries and yogurt.

1:13Ben Meiselas:Build a grazing board with fresh fruit, prosciutto, and artisanal cheese. Then fire up the grill with no antibiotics ever proteins and fresh produce. Savor the season. Shop Summer Fruit Fest at Whole Foods Market. Hey, Chicagoland, the Wayfair store is in your neighborhood at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Finally, you can feel the fabric, sit on the sectionals, and even open the refrigerators. Plus, our in-store designers will help you bring it all together with free one-on-one design support for any project on any budget. Yep, we said free. Oh, and did we mention the cafe? So what are you waiting for?

1:48Ben Meiselas:Come see all that's in store. Visit the Wayfair store today at Edens Plaza and Wilmette. Wayfair, every style, every home. A burst pipe, a dead water heater, the AC calling it quits. Who do you call? HomeServe is an easy way to handle unexpected home repairs. With plans covering stuff, basic homeowners insurance usually won't. Instead of scrambling for a contractor, you make one call to get the repair process started. Join the millions of customers who trust HomeServe right now. Go to homeserve.com slash podcast for 50 % less your first year. That's homeserve.com slash podcast. Savings compared to renewal price.

2:26Ben Meiselas:Void in Florida. You've made an AI investment for your team. You rolled it out, and a handful of people use it every day. Everyone else, they tried it, but nothing clicked. They went back to what they knew. That's not a people problem. It's a product problem. Superhuman fixes that. From the makers of Grammarly, Superhuman brings AI into every tool your team already works in. So they get instant help with drafting, summarizing, and finding information. With most AI tools, you need to know what to ask. how to ask it, and how to connect it to your work. Most people don't have the time or patience to get there, so the gap between the best people on your team and everyone else gets bigger.

3:05Ben Meiselas:With Superhuman, your team doesn't need to build new habits or spend hours on training. Superhuman is already there, with the right context, and ready before they even have to ask. When every person on your team works at their best, that's when your AI investments start to compound. See what Superhuman can do at Superhuman.com. That's superhuman.com. The United States Post Office suffered a major loss in federal court after trying to execute on Donald Trump's voter suppression executive orders, saying that they will not deliver mail from any states with people's mail-in ballots unless the state provides its voter rolls to Donald Trump.

3:48Ben Meiselas:And so that the United States Postal Service will just not deliver your mail. Now a federal judge rejected that. And now what the Trump regime is saying is that they will suffer irreparable harm if a court of appeals does not stay a district court order blocking the United States Postal Law Service from refusing to deliver mail. How do you know you're in a fascist regime? When your postal service refuses to deliver your votes And when the Postal Service becomes a literal tool of the regime, that's how you know that you're becoming a fascist. By the way, I also said, how do you know? Even in North Korea, Kim Jong-un doesn't sign their currency.

4:33Ben Meiselas:But yet Donald Trump's now forcing his signature upon our$100 bills. But I digress. You take a look right here at this notice of appeal from the United States Postal Service. defendants hereby appeal to the D.C. Circuit from the district court's order and accompanying memorandum of opinion, blocking them from not delivering your mail. So the U.S. Postal Service is now asking a circuit court to pause the lower court's order, and they're asking the district court to also stay its order, pause it, because it doesn't want to deliver your mail. In the filing that just took place this week, the Postal Service argued that unless the court grants a stay, the injunction will severely disrupt the Postal Service efforts to promulgate a final rule fulfilling Trump's March 2026 order ahead of the November midterm elections.

5:34Ben Meiselas:Our irreparable harm as the Postal Service is that we can implement Donald Trump's unlawful executive order. That's our irreparable harm. What about the irreparable harm of people who participate in a democracy who want to vote, who want to vote by mail because they're allowed to vote by mail? I just want you to think about the audacity, the sheer WTF of what the federal government's doing. And I'm not sure if this was even covered on any corporate news, maybe briefly, maybe a footnote in some coverage, but like this is a big deal. So you have the postal service posting its proposed rulemaking that it won't deliver your ballots.

6:23Ben Meiselas:Then it was sued by the NAACP and others saying, yeah, this shouldn't be taking place. And then the NAACP and others won in the district court. And now the USPS, the postal services say, we don't want to deliver people's mail. And it goes on to contend that the NAACP is improperly splitting claims because it filed a separate lawsuit. They don't have standing. We need citizenship lips from each state. And then they said that they suffer these irreparable harms before the election. And so I just want you to see like what efforts are actually being taken place behind the scenes to suppress your vote.

7:09Ben Meiselas:Also, bring in Harry Littman and just mentioned this too. Not sure if you saw Trump has made a post that he wants his so-called Save America Act, which is his voter suppression law attached to the military budget. Then he goes back to war with Iran, knowing that we'll need a military budget, which, by the way, he shouldn't get any of it. Attaches the Save America Act to that as well. And then says, well, you don't support our troops now unless you pass the Save America Act, which is the Voter Suppression Act. And then refuses to sign a housing affordability law, Harry. And so, you know, there's so much that this Trump regime throws in our faces every day.

7:53Ben Meiselas:Weapon of mass distraction, Donald Trump's personal fraud covering up child pedo rings, you know, the daily border patrol and ICE Gestapo still killing people. And then you got something like this, Harry, which it's like rulemaking of the U.S. Postal Service. So it feels in the weeds. But, Harry, this means they don't want to deliver your ballot. That's what the U.S. Postal Service is arguing. They shouldn't deliver your mail. 100%. Look, it is ruthless and indefatigable, their efforts to mess with the election. And what's happening here, Ben, is there have been a number of courts that you can't do that.

8:31You can't do that. So they're fastening on to the second and third level efforts to try to do the same thing with different legal strategies. First, thank you, thank you, thank you for zeroing in on a reparable injury. We've talked about this, you and I have, when it's come to the so-called emergency docket, how really slapdash and inconsistent up to the U.S. Supreme Court, the higher courts have been about applying these four different factors that are supposed to be indispensable before you grant a stay or here dissolve a stay? And one of them, yes, irreparable injury. And again, what is the irreparable injury here if the post office has to deliver the mail like it does every single day?

9:27And it's a version of the same argument they make again and again. It's a bankrupt argument, but it's been accepted up to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is basically this, we're not going to be able to execute on this order that the president has made. That goes without saying. That's what actually it means to shut something down because it's probably illegal. And the bootstrapping involved there of, oh, terrible, irreparable injury. We can't do the maximum leader's edict here. That's what it is. Okay, next point. The post office by charter is completely nonpartisan politically. And think if it were otherwise you compared to authoritarian regimes where you control the mail and you look at it or decide who gets what.

10:23It's just a fundamental sort of ancillary point about freedom of speech and freedom of information that they can't apply a political filter and that executive order by Trump absolutely violates it. And it's going to go down for that reason. We're just at the temporary provisional point. But they are now the U.S. Post Office. They must have the same sense of shame that many of the DOJ do. Now they've got to go in in support of this plainly, not just unconstitutional, as if that isn't enough, but order that completely pulls the rug out from what they know they're about. You might as well just say we'll deliver, but only Republican mail and the like.

11:15Third, it's not simply that you have to be apolitical as the post office. the federal government has no fucking authority here. They've tried it again and again. This would be up to the states. It's not, there's no, and if it did, we can go into this longer and you and I have. There's a modicum of authority in the Congress and there's all kinds of authority in the states. There's nothing, there's no hook he can hang this unconstitutional order on in terms of legitimate executive branch authority. They don't have the role to play here, but they can't handle that. So they're trying to go at it in many different ways.

11:57I just, you know, there's two or three every day. Another thing we just found out about today, the head of the civil rights division sends a letter to all the states saying that officials could be charged with a crime if there there are people who are not eligible to vote who do. It's sort of empty saber rattling. I guess you could if you somehow purposely tried to subvert the law, but it's just a way of trying to push and pull and cow and frighten the political officials because they haven't been able to make their will be law because they have no legal basis. So it's just ways of trying to slap people around and scare them.

12:43We also found out today they say they're sending observers to the polls in Michigan. God knows why. Maybe we'll next see. I just want to point out that they're not allowed a separate federal law to use any kind of be armed at all there. But this is just what happens when Trump, including the very good point you made about the SAVE Act, just wants this in any way he can, but they're on second, third, fourth level efforts now because the basic stratagem happens not to comply with the constitutional scheme.

13:23Ben Meiselas:Everybody, make sure you subscribe to Harry Lipman's YouTube channel. It's called Talking Feds. He also has a sub stack by the same name called Talking Feds. Subscribe now, subscribe often, and tell Harry in the comments that we say hello. Go to the YouTube bar, search Talking Feds. Thanks, Harry. We appreciate you. Thank you. Hi to all you Midas Mighty. New Midas merch. Head to store.midastouch.com today and get yourself the best pro-democracy gear and show your support. That's store.midastouch.com.