Trump attacks Supreme Court after mail-in voting setback

US President Donald Trump on Tuesday criticised the Supreme Court after it rejected his bid to restrict mail-in voting in this year’s midterm elections. In a social media post, Trump said the justices who opposed him were “not the people I interviewed”.

The court’s late Monday emergency order dealt a setback to a last-minute effort by the Trump administration to give the US Postal Service a central role in deciding who would be able to receive a mail ballot. State election officials had argued there was not enough time to make the changes before the November 3 midterms and said their systems were already secure and accurate.

The Supreme Court said the proposed restrictions would likely fail in court, at least for this year’s election. Three justices nominated by Trump during his first term — Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — were among those who ruled against him in Monday’s decision.

Reacting to the order, Trump wrote: “The Court’s inability and unwillingness to do the right thing for our Country will go down, in a very negative way, in the annals of History.” He added, “This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years.”

Trump also said: “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves,” and added that the court “is costing the United States Trillions of Dollars with shockingly bad rulings that are of such magnitude that it won’t be easily possible for our Country to recover or heal.” The ruling came after state officials said there was too little time to change election procedures and maintained that existing systems for mail ballots were secure.