Former GOP lawmakers join Democrats to challenge Trump’s mail-in voting crackdown

A group of Democratic lawmakers — and some former GOP members of Congress — is asking the Supreme Court to block President Donald Trump’s attempt to restrict mail-in voting, arguing that the president has unlawfully seized federal election powers that belong to Congress and the states.

In a new amicus brief, details of which were shared first with MS NOW, more than 250 sitting and former lawmakers argue the president’s March 2026 executive order and a subsequent regulation announced by the U.S. Postal Service are both unconstitutional. 

The changes, the lawmakers argue in the 30-page brief, “unlawfully usurp for the Executive Branch the authority over federal elections that the Framers granted exclusively to the States and to Congress.”

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The friend of the court brief, filed Tuesday, is led by Rep. Joe Morelle, D-N.Y., Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., Rep. Joe Neguse, D-Col., Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., and Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md.

Nearly all sitting House Democrats and all 47 members of the Senate Democratic coalition signed on. Other notable signatories include: Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, plus Rep. Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Rep. Pete Aguilar of California.

The 15 Republican cosigners are all former members of Congress, including former Reps. Charles Boustany of Louisiana, Barbara Comstock of Virginia, Mickey Edwards of Oklahoma, Jim Walsh of New York, Deborah Pryce of Ohio, David Trott of Michigan, Jim Greenwood of Pennsylvania, and Christopher Shays of Connecticut.

A source familiar with the preparations of the amicus brief tells MS NOW that the organizers did targeted outreach to sitting members of the GOP conference on Capitol Hill to invite them to sign on — none did.

The amicus filing comes as the Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow it to move ahead with implementing proposed mail-in ballot regulations ahead of November’s midterm elections. 

On Friday, a federal judge in Boston blocked U.S. Postal Service from implementing its new rules to enforce the president’s executive order. In her ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Indira Talwani wrote in part that the final USPS rule “clashes with Congress’s statutory scheme, and is unconstitutional.”

In the White House’s appeal to the Supreme Court filed over the weekend, Solicitor General John Sauer argued the USPS has the authority to adopt such regulations and asserted that the postal service’s proposed changes “does not seize control of States’ administration of elections — it simply imposes reasonable preparation requirements for certain election-related mail.”

Trump first signed an executive order in March to limit mail-in voting — a voting method he has long derided without evidence as ripe with fraud, despite frequently using the method himself to cast his ballot. 

Last month, the Postal Service issued a final rule to implement the president’s executive order, requiring states to provide USPS with lists of mail voters so the agency can determine who receives a ballot. It also requires states to use federally approved envelopes.

A coalition of two dozen states plus the District of Columbia sued to block the rule from going forward. A federal judge in Massachusetts heard arguments in the case on Thursday morning.

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A whistleblower recently warned the Postal Service’s process to implement the president’s mail-in ballot restrictions has been “rushed” and “risky and haphazard.”

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Time is of the essence. Some states including North Carolina are already mailing out their ballots, others will follow suit in the coming days.

In their amicus brief, the bipartisan cohort of past and present lawmakers note that the U.S. Constitution explicitly gives the states the power to set the “Times, Places, and Manner” of congressional elections, subject to Congress’ authority to “make or alter such Regulations.”

They cite arguments from the Constitutional Convention in 1787, the Federalist Papers, and past Supreme Court rulings plus a series of bills passed by Congress — such as the Voting Rights Act and the Help America Vote Act — to assert the executive branch lacks any authority to unilaterally alter how elections are administered.  

“The Executive Branch cannot justify the Order or Final Rule under any delegation of authority from Congress,” they write, “because none exists.”

They also argue that the new mail-in ballot rules introduced by the U.S. Postal Service to comply with the president’s executive order likely violate the Postal Clause of the Constitution — which they say is “a grant of legislative power that nowhere mentions the Executive.”

In a statement to MS NOW, Rep. Neguse warned that if the language is implemented, Trump’s order is likely to “disenfranchise millions of Americans, silencing an untold number of citizens that rely on mail ballots to make their voices heard.”

Neguse is the leader of the House Democrats’ Litigation Task Force, which began at the beginning of Trump’s second term, in part, to push back on the Trump administration’s actions.

In a statement, Rep. Raskin called the president’s attempt to rein in mail-in voting a “naked power grab by a historically unpopular President — who himself regularly votes by mail — to inject confusion and chaos into our elections in a last-ditch effort to keep his party in power.” 

“It will not work,” Raskin said.

Kevin Frey

Kevin Frey is a congressional reporter for MS NOW.