News Analysis In Fits and Starts, the Supreme Court Stands Up to Trump The justices take their time and pick their spots, but they have rejected presidential initiatives on tariffs, citizenship, the National Guard — and now the coming election. The Supreme Court rejected the Trump administration’s latest attempt to change mail-in voting rules on Monday. Credit...Tierney L. Cross for The New York Times Sept. 15, 2026 Updated 1:04 p.m. ET The Supreme Court has not been eager to tangle with President Trump. For much of his second term, the court seemed to have settled on a strategy of deference, ducking and delay. But sometimes the court put its foot down. It did so on Monday night in rejecting Mr. Trump’s plan to make it harder to vote by mail by having the Postal Service screen mail ballots and determine which ones it would deliver. Election administrators of both parties were mystified and alarmed by the plan, which they said would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters. Just three weeks ago, the court’s conservative majority deferred a decision on the matter, saying it was not yet ripe. That punt, the court’s unsigned ruling said, did not mean it would approve the plan in the end. “On that score,” the majority wrote, “time will tell.”That time arrived on Monday, and the message was clear. The majority blocked the plan, saying it was most likely unlawful.

“There aren’t five votes for abject chaos,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Mr. Trump, for his part, reacted to the decision with fury, lashing out at his three appointees, none of whom noted a dissent.

“This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years,” he wrote Tuesday morning on social media. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves.”

The decision on mail ballots is part of a pattern. The Trump administration met with overwhelming success in some 30 emergency applications to the Supreme Court since the president’s second term began, on what critics call its shadow docket. Those decisions were nominally provisional, but they often delivered lasting victories to the president. Image A ballot processing center in City of Industry, Calif., last November. In rushed proceedings that mostly yielded decisions with scant or no reasoning, the court divided along partisan lines much more often than in cases on the court’s so-called merits docket, which require full briefing, oral arguments and in-person deliberations. The theme of those emergency rulings was deference to presidential power. But the tide started to turn in December, when the court refused to allow the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois over the objection of local officials. The rebukes continued in the term that ended in June. The court rejected the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s beloved tariffs program, leading to refunds of many billions of dollars in illegal levies. It also thwarted Mr. Trump’s attempt to fire a Fed governor and disagreed with his interpretation of a law that he said barred counting some ballots received after Election Day. After a preliminary ruling last year limiting the power of lower courts to order sweeping relief in a case that arose in the context of birthright citizenship — at the time perceived as a major victory for Mr. Trump — the court this summer returned to address the citizenship question directly. This time, it dealt Mr. Trump a stinging loss, ruling that his executive order seeking to curtail automatic citizenship for babies born in the United States violated the Constitution. The majority opinion about mail-in balloting on Monday was just three sentences long, but it went further than it might have. Instead of ruling merely that the administration’s plan had been rolled out too close to the November election, a conclusion that might ha...