Maddow: Supreme Court’s ‘big blow’ to Trump is a ‘big win’ for American people

Rachel Maddow said the Supreme Court on Monday evening dealt a “big blow” to President Donald Trump’s efforts to sow “chaos and confusion” into the midterm elections, after a majority of justices, including three he himself appointed, ruled to reject his mail-in voting restrictions.

While the 7-2 decision did not rule on the merits, it halts the president’s plan from taking effect before the midterms. The proposal, a group of Democratic attorneys general warned, could have left millions disenfranchised. Maddow called the proposal essentially “a federal takeover of America’s midterm elections.”

With less than two months until Election Day, the MS NOW host said many had been “anxiously” awaiting the decision, “checking the Supreme Court website like it’s the weather service after a tornado warning.”

Maddow called the ruling “a big win for the American electorate who will be casting their ballots in most cases as normal in this hugely important election in just a few weeks.”

She said the court’s decision was in line with the “very clear dictum in our Constitution” that says elections fall under the purview of the states. “This is not a contested thing in American constitutional governance,” she explained. “Our elections are run by the states, not by the federal government, and certainly not by the president.”

In addition to the legal problems with Trump’s plan, Maddow also made note of the logistical hurdles an overhaul of the country’s mail-in voting system would cause with just weeks before the election.

“Now, even putting the legality of Trump’s executive order aside for a moment, state election officials in red states and blue states all over the country said it would essentially be impossible to implement this new rule — this big new complication for mail-in ballots — before the election in November,” she said. “Just for starters, a handful of states have already sent out their mail ballots to voters. So what would they do if this rule went into effect?”

“It is not hyperbole to say that enacting this rule change just weeks before the midterms would wreak total havoc on the elections, which perhaps was the point,” Maddow said.

You can watch Maddow’s full comments in the clip at the top of the page.

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