Legal Assault on the Post Office Changes

Scott Peterson's death sentence. This week, New York and New Jersey became the latest states to sue President Trump and his Postmaster General Lewis to joy over major changes to postal service operations that resulted in mail delays across the country. It's the third multi state lawsuit file this month over the changes at the Post Office that the Democratic Attorneys

General claim were meant to sabotage the election. In congressional testimony, to Joyce said he'll pause the operational changes, but he told Democratic Congressman Roe Kanna that he will not restore the mail sorting machines. Even if the machines, in your perspective, don't do anything. What is a harm to do it to election day in Washington? And it makes plenty of sense to me, it makes none. You haven't explained why

and then final questions and not needed. That's why. But if it will restore people's faith in a democracy and avoid a polarized election, a billion, Get me the billion, and I'll put the machines in joining me. Is election law expert in Nate Personally, a professor at Stanford Law School.

What are the grounds for these lawsuits? The States are suing the Post Office and the federal government because the decisions that were made with respect to changes in the postal system were allegedly not done in compliance with the applicable law that regulates the post Office. So they have a series of claims under the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act to post the Reorganization Act, and other measures. And the basic idea is that you can't make these abrupt

changes in the way that you did. You have to do in a more considered way. When the Postmaster General testified, he said that he would suspend any aditional changes until after the election, but he wouldn't reverse changes that have already taken place. Does that make any of the lawsuit moot? I don't think it moots the lawsuit. I think that it is still the case that the states are trying to get the post office to speed up the mail, and they're trying to use every arrow in their quiver

to do that. You know, it remains to be seen if the court is going to throw this out on standing grounds, because these are sort of coherent legal theories. But I don't think the cases mooted just because he's rolling back some of the changes, because he said he's not going to roll back all of them. There's some like the removal of sorting machines that are not going to be reinstated. This is the third lawsuit filed this month, covering about twenty three states. Now why three different lawsuits?

Are there any substantive differences among them, or is it just to take advantage of different courts. Well, I think the changes and the differences between the lawsuits come in part because of the different visions of the attorneys general who are filing these cases. But I think also it

has to do with different legal theories. Some of the other cases are grounded on a right to vote theory that basically what the Post Office is doing is violating the voting rights of people who want to vote by mail, whereas some of these lawsuits are more on the procedures that were used in the determinations that were made by

the Post Office to make these changes. In the Pennsylvania lawsuits, the United States responded that the states don't have standing to sue the federal government, which you mentioned before, on behalf of citizens, because any future injuries would be speculative. Is that likely a winning argument? Well, that's a typical argument that you get in cases like this. There are only certain situations in which the states are allowed to sue the federal government. And the question is are they

suing in their sovereign capacity sort of as states? Are they suing on behalf of their citizens? And there is a famous case dealing with ep A regulations Massachusetts versus E. P A a while ago that weighed in on that topic.

And you know, this is one of these ongoing questions, especially in these highly charged political cases, which is whether the states have sort of independent cause of action, whether they have been injured in a concrete way that's not speculative in your legal opinion, To the states have standing here, Well, I think it really does depend on how close the link is from what the Post Office is doing to the effects on individual people who are receiving and sending mail.

So that's sort of an advidentiary question. We still don't really know the effect of the individual policy changes, although it looks like from the graphs that were submitted as part of the litigation that there was a significant drop off and delay in mail starting in June when a lot of these changes happened. I think that someone will have standing to litigate these cases, and the question is

whether it could be resolved before the election. I'm skeptical that that will happen, but you know, as in many political cases, the main force here is to just expose what the Post Office is doing and to try to get them to reverse course. That was my next question. Can they move these cases fast enough to get them resolved and any changes put into place before the election.

I think the primary solution here is a political one, to make sure that there's enough pressure that's put on officials so that they deliver the mail on time, especially with respect to the election mail. And I would be surprised if you had a court order that sort of reversed some of these policies, because you know, as frustrating as it is, it's not like you have a legal right to have a letter sent and delivered to you. Within three days or something like that. And so you know,

we've had late mail for for many years. The question is when does it become so late and the process by which they've made these decisions become so arbitrary that you have a legal claim. And we're seeing similar kinds of lawsuits in the immigration realm and other settings. Given the fact that the administration has made serious changes to the administrative state, I have to ask you if there's any truth to President Trump's repeated claims that widespread mail

and voting leads to ballot fraud. The debate over mail in voting is over whether you're a Republican secretary of state Democratic secretary of state. There is broad consensus once you get away from the national debate, there's broad consensus that male voting can be done in a way that

is not leading to fraud. We don't have a significant history of fraud in the states that have male voting, and for that matter, these states, almost all the battleground states are moving to absentee balloting um, which is the kind of balloting that and voting that the president and his family do. So I think that it's become a distraction really to start talking about all vote by mail, since the most important states are gonna be just doing

absentee voting. Well, President Trump is at times the master of distraction. Will it lead though too inevitable lawsuits if he loses about mail and balloting and fraud? If the election is close, you can be sure that there will be many lawsuits challenging many aspects of the election infrastructure.

And given that you'll have roughly half of the American population upwards of you know, sixty to seventy million people voting by mail or through mail ballots, then you should expect that that will be one of the real foci of of litigation. That's what people are going to be

concentrating on. When I read the complaint in the New York suit, it made allegations that Secretary of the Treasury Minution had been directly interfering with the Post Office in the month prior to the resignation of David Williams from the Board of Governors. Why wasn't he brought in as a main party on the lawsuit? In general, you don't sue different cabinet officials who may have exerted pressure on agencies. Um. The question is whether the government behaved in a way

contrary to law. However, that's incredibly important evidence if you're trying to say that the articulated reason for changing policy was not actually the one that they they said, but

was pretext for political motives. And so it's very similar to what happened in the case dealing with the census, where the allegation was that this was being done, that that the addition of a citizenship question on the census was being done for political reasons, not for um, the reasons that the Secretary of Commerce said or that the others in the administration said. And so if you have evidence of political interference, that could undermine the case that

it was done for neutral reasons. There's a Trump campaign lawsuit over ballot drop boxes in Pennsylvania and a federal judge put it on hold so that the state courts could decide the matter or rule on the matter further. What is the import of that? Is that very important or is it just a procedural thing. I think it

is an important case. It's an important case for Pennsylvania, but it's an important case uh nationally to signaling about the different ways that people can deposit their mail ballot because at the same time that we're complaining about the postal service and that President Trump is complaining about vote by mail. Um. The use of ballot drop boxes is a in somebody's a more secure, less male intensive way of getting these mail ballots into the hands of election officials.

And so if they are ruled to be illegal in under Pennsylvania law, that will remove one other way that um of people would be able to drop off their ballot um. And and it just creates greater reliance either on in person voting or on the mail itself. Uh. And then where they've been used, um, In the vote by mail states, they are used, you know, quite frequently.

And so Colorado, for example, which is all vote by mail. Um, it's sort of a misnomer because of the voters in Colorado actually drop off the ballot in a ballot drop box, not in the with the postal service. That's Nate Personally of Stanford Law School. And that's it for this edition of Bloomberg Law. I'm June Grosso. Thanks so much for listening, and remember to tune into The Bloomberg Law Show every weeknight at ten pm Eastern. I'm Bloomberg Radio