Judges keep blocking Trump's illegal election power grabs | Opinion
President Donald Trump is expected to lunch on June 24 with Republicans in the U.S. Senate. Don't expect intraparty camaraderie. Another Trump tantrum is on the menu.
Trump's fury is building because his multipronged attempts to illegally federalize November's midterm elections have been stymied, including in a pair of recent federal court rulings. And he fears that Democrats in Congress will apply serious scrutiny to his actions and agenda if they win control of the House or Senate in November.
The specter lingering over Trump's Senate lunch will be the would-be autocrat's least favorite subject ‒ the separation of governmental powers through three coequal branches: the presidency, Congress and the courts. He can't just seize control of our elections, because the U.S. Constitution gives that authority to the states, even if he keeps trying.
U.S. Sen. John Thune, the Republican majority leader from South Dakota, acknowledged the intraparty friction a day before Trump's visit for lunch, and specifically cited "differences of opinion" when asked about his frustrations with the president.
Judges keep telling Trump to leave voting alone
The Republicans who control Congress tried to give Trump what he wants, but the so-called SAVE America Act he is so desperate to pass just doesn't have the votes in the Senate.
This has set Trump on a collision course with his own party, just as Republicans in Congress want to focus on attacking Democrats.
Trump has found an even less accommodating audience in federal courts, where judge after judge after judge has rejected his attempts to grab control of how the midterms are conducted. That string continued this week with a pair of defeats for Trump.
First, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Gallagher on June 22 rejected a U.S. Department of Justice lawsuit that demanded that Maryland turn over its voter rolls.
The Maryland Attorney General's Office hailed that, saying the "court has added its voice to the unanimous chorus of judges who have said states do not have to follow the Trump Administration's demand to turn over their unredacted voter registration databases."
The Elias Law Group, which has intervened on behalf of voters in Maryland and in lawsuits in other states, noted the DOJ has not recorded a victory after taking 30 states to court in "nearly identical lawsuits."
Trump wants private, sensitive information about voters because he signed a March 31 executive order, calling for the U.S. Postal Service and other federal agencies to seize control of how people vote by mail. It's not the first time Trump has issued an executive order in an attempt to make it harder for Americans to cast ballots.
Trump 'threatens the sacred right to vote'
Trump's cover story here has always been the same disinformation he has spouted for a decade about "rigged elections" in a nonstop attempt to delegitimize any result he dislikes while demonizing the people who run our elections. Judges have been rejecting those claims as unproven for years.
He's now feverishly trying to stoke doubts about November's elections because he fears the outcome. He wants to pick the voters, rather than having the voters pick their representatives in Congress.
But Trump's attempt to create a list of voters he approves of suffered a legal blow on the same day the Maryland ruling landed. U.S. District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan in Washington, DC, ruled in favor of a group of voting rights organizations that a voter list drawn up by the Trump administration using Social Security numbers and citizenship information had supplied inaccurate information to states in an attempt to purge voter rolls.
"The federal government has knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote," Sooknanan wrote in a 75-page opinion. "This Court cannot stand idly by while that happens."
Still, the White House just keeps coming after voters' right to cast ballots. CNN, on the same day that those rulings were issued in Maryland and Washington, DC, reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is threatening to withhold millions of dollars in grants to states unless they comply with Trump's demands about elections, including his approved list of voters.
These developments are often technical and legal, and in some ways still theoretical. Voters might not know their rights to cast ballots have been eliminated until the day they try to cast ballots.
And this all can be easy to miss in the constant churn of Trump chaos. Every day, we get a cavalcade of conflicting claims about the state of the war in Iran. And then there's the folly of Trump's focus and fury on his botched attempts to renovate the National Mall's Reflecting Pool and laughable claims of sabotage.
Still, it matters because Trump keeps pushing to make it harder to vote. The president knows November's results could open him up to the kind of oversight that Republicans now shield him from. And he'll do anything to avoid that, including stripping you of your right to vote.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on Bluesky, @bychrisbrennan.bsky.social, and on X, @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Judges keep blocking Trump's illegal election power grabs | Opinion
Reporting by Chris Brennan, USA TODAY / USA TODAY
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This story was originally published June 24, 2026 at 5:08 AM.