The Supreme Court has not been eager to tangle with President Trump. For much of his second term, the court seemed to have settled on a strategy of deference, ducking and delay.
But sometimes the court put its foot down. It did so on Monday night in rejecting Mr. Trump’s plan to make it harder to vote by mail by having the Postal Service screen mail ballots and determine which ones it would deliver.
Election administrators of both parties were mystified and alarmed by the plan, which they said would result in the disenfranchisement of millions of voters. Just three weeks ago, the court’s conservative majority deferred a decision on the matter, saying it was not yet ripe.
That punt, the court’s unsigned ruling said, did not mean it would approve the plan in the end. “On that score,” the majority wrote, “time will tell.”
That time arrived on Monday, and the message was clear. The majority blocked the plan, saying it was most likely unlawful.
“There aren’t five votes for abject chaos,” said Justin Levitt, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles.
Mr. Trump, for his part, reacted to the decision with fury, lashing out at his three appointees, none of whom noted a dissent.
“This Supreme Court is bullied and cajoled by the Radical Left into making decisions that have set America back at least a hundred years,” he wrote Tuesday morning on social media. “These are not the people I interviewed to serve on the United States Supreme Court, they are merely a shell of their original selves.”
The decision on mail- ballots is part of a pattern. The Trump administration met with overwhelming success in some 30 emergency applications to the Supreme Court since the president’s second term began, on what critics call its shadow docket. Those decisions were nominally provisional, but they often delivered lasting victories to the president.
In rushed proceedings that mostly yielded decisions with scant or no reasoning, the court divided along partisan lines much more often than in cases on the court’s so-called merits docket, which require full briefing, oral arguments and in-person deliberations.
The theme of those emergency rulings was deference to presidential power.
But the tide started to turn in December, when the court refused to allow the deployment of the National Guard in Illinois over the objection of local officials.
The rebukes continued in the term that ended in June.
The court rejected the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s beloved tariffs program, leading to refunds of many billions of dollars in illegal levies. It also thwarted Mr. Trump’s attempt to fire a Fed governor and disagreed with his interpretation of a law that he said barred counting some ballots received after Election Day.
After a preliminary ruling last year limiting the power of lower courts to order sweeping relief in a case that arose in the context of birthright citizenship — at the time perceived as a major victory for Mr. Trump — the court this summer returned to address the citizenship question directly. This time, it dealt Mr. Trump a stinging loss, ruling that his executive order seeking to curtail automatic citizenship for babies born in the United States violated the Constitution.
The majority opinion about mail-in balloting on Monday was just three sentences long, but it went further than it might have. Instead of ruling merely that the administration’s plan had been rolled out too close to the November election, a conclusion that might have suggested Mr. Trump might still win in the end, the majority signaled that the government was likely to lose on the merits.
That move was at odds with one of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.’s judicial touchstones. “If it is not necessary to decide more to dispose of a case,” he wrote in 2022, “then it is necessary not to decide more.”
All the court had to do to block the postal regulation was to say it they would cause more harm than good in the current election cycle, Josh Blackman, a law professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, wrote in a blog post Monday night.
“But the chief justice didn’t want this case to come back, so he reached the merits,” Professor Blackman wrote. “If there is no need to decide more, the court should not decide more. Except when Trump is involved.”
That approach may be a response to the fire hose of executive orders, programs, initiatives, dodges and feints from the Trump administration that have threatened to overwhelm and outpace the courts. However significant Mr. Trump’s losses in the Supreme Court may have been, he remains hard to constrain by a judicial system used to moving at a stately pace.
The vote count in Monday’s ruling was not disclosed, but only Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., appointed by President George W. Bush, and Justice Clarence Thomas, appointed by President George H.W. Bush, publicly dissented.
Those two justices are the most reliable votes for Mr. Trump’s agenda, while the court’s three Democratic appointees seldom vote for the president. That leaves the three Trump appointees and the chief justice, who was appointed by the second President Bush, at the court’s center.
If the court is to check Mr. Trump in the typical case, then, at least one of his appointees must vote against him. And that has now happened in a series of major clashes.
“This is not a MAGA court,” Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who served as solicitor general in the Obama administration, said at a briefing for reporters on Tuesday at Georgetown University Law Center.
The practical consequences of the court’s ruling are a mixed bag, election administrators said.
“The feeling of relief here is palpable,” Marybeth Kuznik, the director of elections in Fayette County, Pa., said on an email forum for election law specialists. Still, she added, “with all the hullabaloo in the media, voters have become alarmed and many are afraid their mail-in votes may not be counted no matter what the ruling may be.”
There was another election-related ruling last week, about an attempt to redraw Missouri’s voting map to give Republicans an advantage in the midterm elections. It also took two trips to the Supreme Court to resolve. Over the administration’s objections and without public dissent, the court rejected the map.
Yet another election-related application from the administration is pending at the court. It asks the justices to allow the use of a government database that includes Social Security information to help verify whether potential voters are citizens. It is another example of the administration’s everything-all-at-once approach.
Still, the combination of the Missouri ruling and the one on Monday on the postal regulations sent a message for the coming election, Professor Levitt said.
“The court is effectively done with actors making sizable last-minute changes,” he said. “The rules are now what they are, and the election is going to be — as it should be — up to the voters.”
Ann E. Marimow contributed reporting.
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