With the midterms only weeks away, we are watching in real time how far a president will reach for power—and whether the country will enforce the constitutional limits he is defying. September 17 is Constitution Day. There will be no fireworks or national parades.
Most Americans probably won’t know it’s happening. That’s remarkable, because Americans don’t have to search very hard right now for a real-world constitutional lesson. We’ve watched fights over executive orders, presidential power, federal judges and the Supreme Court.
Now, one of the most consequential constitutional tests has been unfolding as we approach the midterm elections in November. President Donald Trump has been trying to get Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would impose major new federal requirements involving proof of citizenship and mail-in voting. The votes aren’t there in the Senate, so he has pursued other routes, whether the Constitution gives him that power or not.
He has directed federal agencies to assemble citizenship information that could be used to determine voter eligibility state by state. His Justice Department has demanded voter-roll information from states. And he has pushed the U.S.
Postal Service toward new requirements governing mail ballots, including refusing ballot delivery if states don’t comply with federal demands. Democratic voters are also more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, giving those changes an obvious partisan significance. These are extraordinary steps for a president to take in an election system administered primarily by the states and where the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the principal federal role in regulating them.
This effort to transform the U.S. Postal Service into essentially an election administrator has been appealed to the Supreme Court twice just in the last few weeks and has been blocked twice with the most recent ruling occurring this week. We can take solace that the courts have so far protected the right to vote.
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