As we’ve noted before, we read a lot of legal news each week while preparing this newsletter. Here’s the most memorable headline we’ve seen recently: Netflix sued by band Demon Hunter over ‘KPop Demon Hunters’
At the Court
On Friday, Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary order, known as an administrative stay, allowing construction on the new White House ballroom to continue for now. For more on the order, see the On Site section below.
On July 27, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on its emergency docket to clear the way for the full implementation of President Donald Trump’s executive order on mail-in voting. That request has been fully briefed since Aug. 4, and the court’s decision could come at any time.
Morning Reads
Postal Service Publishes Finalized Plan to Restrict Mail Ballots
Adam Sella, The New York Times
On Friday, the U.S. Postal Service “published regulations that would restrict mail voting, its latest effort to comply with President Trump’s” executive order on the practice, which seeks “to restrict mail ballots and to create state-by-state lists of citizens to help determine voting eligibility,” according to The New York Times. “If the regulations are enacted, the Postal Service said that it would not deliver mail ballots in states that do not share voter data with the federal agency.” Enactment depends on the outcome of an interim docket case on Trump’s order. “[T]he Postal Service said in its rule published on Friday that it would ‘not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election’ unless the Supreme Court rules in the administration’s favor. … The Supreme Court is reviewing the issue and could rule at any time.”
DOJ maneuver on unconfirmed US attorneys inches closer to Supreme Court
Sophie Brams, The Hill
The Supreme Court may soon to be asked to review a “legal maneuver repeatedly used by the Department of Justice (DOJ) to install acting U.S. attorneys without Senate approval,” which involves appointing someone as an interim U.S. attorney but then moving them into a different role and allowing them to keep doing the work of a U.S. attorney after the interim appointment ends, according to The Hill. “Two appeals court panels ruled last week the DOJ cannot sidestep the confirmation process by changing someone’s title or handing them the duties of the top prosecutor. ... Those rulings affirmed that Sigal Chattah and John Sarcone III were properly disqualified from serving as acting heads of the U.S. attorney’s offices in Nevada and the Northern District of New York, respectively.” “A spokesperson for the Justice Department told The Hill that it disagreed with the courts’ decisions in both cases and planned to appeal to the Supreme Court.”
The Kidney Stones that Made John Marshall Chief Justice
Ed Whelan, Confirmation Tales
In a post for his Substack, Ed Whelan highlighted the “serendipities” that led some of the most famous members of the Supreme Court to be appointed to the court. For example, John Marshall became chief justice after Oliver Ellsworth became too ill with kidney stones to continue in the role and then former Chief Justice John Jay cited his health in turning down an opportunity to replace him. “It’s easy in hindsight to think that some individuals were destined to become Supreme Court justices,” Whelan wrote. “But there is no such thing as an inevitable justice. Every justice’s path to the Supreme Court involves happenstance.”
On Site
Supreme Court allows White House ballroom construction to continue for now
By Amy Howe
The court on Friday allowed construction on a new 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom to continue – at least for now. Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Leon had issued an order, slated to go into effect at the end of the day, that would have stopped above-ground work on the project. But Chief Justice John Roberts issued a temporary order, known as an administrative stay, that kept Leon’s order on hold.
The tenth justice’s strategy
By Stephen Wermiel
In his Nuts and Bolts column, Stephen Wermiel explored the role of the so-called “tenth justice” – the U.S. solicitor general – at the Supreme Court, and how strategic decisions made by the current SG, D. John Sauer, have potentially shaped the court’s rulings in several high-profile cases.
Realizing Scalia’s vision: state originalism centers as legal civics education
By Brian Fitzpatrick
In his AV Ristorante column, Brian Fitzpatrick highlighted the rise of originalism and one area where originalist scholarship has fallen short: the analysis of state constitutions. “If [Justice Antonin] Scalia’s vision is to be completed, it’s our state judiciaries that need the most help,” Fitzpatrick wrote.
Six justices, five techniques: writing lessons from the 2025-26 term
By Ross Guberman
In a column for SCOTUSblog, Ross Guberman pointed to writing techniques from Supreme Court opinions that he encourages advocates to try. The justices, he explained, “model how to navigate the toughest problems in legal reasoning: how to make the complex come to life, how to fight line-drawing, how to narrow the issue and still win everything, how to answer a demand for more protection by counting the protections already in place, and how to concede unfavorable facts.”
Cases Heard Over Time
Asked about the court’s caseload by Rep. Mark Amodei while appearing before the House Appropriations subcommittee in July, Justice Elena Kagan responded that the Supreme Court has a “more than ordinary emergency caseload” and “about an ordinary regular docket.” However, she continued, the “ordinary regular docket” has significantly decreased since the late 1980s when she was a clerk – from around 140 regularly argued cases a year to about 70 today.“There’s a cottage industry in explanations for why that decrease took place over time,” Kagan said. “But for all the time that I have been on the court, we have been relatively stable, so the last 15 years or so.”
That general decline continued during the 2025-26 term as the court held only 58 arguments. The term before that, the number was 62, and in the 2023-24 term it was 61. In comparison, the court heard 197 arguments in 1976 and 186 in 1972. As SCOTUSblog contributor Adam Feldman has noted, the last time that the court heard more than 100 arguments per term was back in 1997, at 102 cases.
According to Steve Vladeck, the decrease in the court’s merits docket can at least partly be attributed to the Supreme Court Case Selections Act of 1988, which allowed the justices to have almost full control over what cases they heard. According to one 2012 law review article, this led to the court “decid[ing] anywhere between 37 and 72 fewer cases per Term.”
In 2009 Adam Liptak noted the same decline, writing about another possible cause for the reduction in merits cases heard per term: the changing composition of the court. Per SCOTUSblog contributor Erwin Chemerinsky, the docket began to shrink under Chief Justice William Rehnquist, and this then accelerated under Roberts.
As Chemerinsky alluded to, however, the number of cases heard each term by the court on its merits docket does not include interim docket filings. In OT2024, the court received 130 emergency applications, the highest since at least 2005. So while the number of cases the court hears on its merits docket has decreased dramatically, the interim docket can be said to have “helped” pick up some of the slack.
SCOTUS Quote
GENERAL VERRILLI: “… First, I would make the point, Mr. Chief Justice, that it seems unimaginable that a convention of that kind would be ratified by two-thirds of the Senate, which it would have to be –”
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: “Why?”
JUSTICE KENNEDY: “It also seems unimaginable that you would bring this prosecution. But let's leave that.”
— Bond v. United States (2013)
Kelsey Dallas is SCOTUSblog's managing editor and the primary author of the SCOTUStoday newsletter.
Nora is an editorial assistant at SCOTUSblog, based in Washington, D.C.
Recommended Citation: Kelsey Dallas & Nora Collins, The latest on the mail-in voting and ballroom battles, SCOTUSblog (Aug. 24, 2026, 9:00 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/08/the-latest-on-the-mail-in-voting-and-ballroom-battles/
Facts Only
* Chief Justice John Roberts issued an administrative stay allowing construction of a 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom to continue.
* Senior U.S. District Judge Richard Leon had previously ordered a stop to above-ground work on the ballroom.
* The Trump administration requested the Supreme Court clear the implementation of an executive order on mail-in voting on July 27.
* The U.S. Postal Service published regulations to restrict mail voting and create state-by-state citizen lists for eligibility.
* The Postal Service will not deliver mail ballots in states that do not share voter data with the federal agency if regulations are enacted.
* Implementation of the Postal Service rule for the 2026 election depends on a Supreme Court ruling.
* The Department of Justice plans to appeal to the Supreme Court after two appeals courts ruled against the appointment of acting U.S. attorneys in Nevada and the Northern District of New York.
* The Supreme Court held 58 arguments in the 2025-26 term.
* The Supreme Court received 130 emergency applications in OT2024.
* The Supreme Court Case Selections Act of 1988 gave justices more control over their docket.
Executive Summary
The U.S. legal landscape is currently defined by significant tension between executive actions and judicial oversight. The Trump administration is seeking Supreme Court approval for an executive order on mail-in voting, which has led the U.S. Postal Service to draft regulations that would withhold ballot delivery from states refusing to share voter data with the federal government. Simultaneously, the Department of Justice is challenging lower court rulings that restrict the appointment of interim U.S. attorneys without Senate confirmation.
In other matters, Chief Justice John Roberts has temporarily paused a district court order that would have halted construction on a new White House ballroom. Beyond specific cases, there is an observable shift in the Supreme Court's operational patterns: the number of regularly argued merits cases has declined significantly since the late 1980s, falling to 58 in the 2025-26 term. However, this decline is offset by a surge in the interim emergency docket, which reached a high of 130 applications in OT2024. This transition suggests a shift in how the Court exercises its power and manages its caseload.
Full Take
The strongest version of this narrative highlights a judicial system attempting to maintain stability while navigating an era of aggressive executive experimentation. It portrays a Court that is becoming more selective about its formal merits docket while increasingly acting as a real-time arbiter of emergency government actions.
The pattern here is a structural migration of judicial power. By shifting from a traditional merits-based docket to an "emergency" or "interim" docket, the Court moves from being a deliberative body that settles long-term legal precedents to a rapid-response unit that manages immediate political and administrative conflicts. This creates a environment where significant policy outcomes—such as the legality of mail-in voting or the appointment of federal prosecutors—are decided via emergency applications rather than fully briefed, argued cases.
This shift is driven by a paradigm where the executive branch increasingly utilizes emergency orders to bypass legislative or standard administrative hurdles, forcing the judiciary to either block or enable these moves in real-time. The second-order consequence is a potential erosion of transparency; emergency dockets often lack the public scrutiny and comprehensive reasoning found in regular opinions.
Patterns detected: none
If this were a coordinated influence campaign, the playbook would involve cherry-picking specific "emergency" rulings to create a sense of inevitable judicial capture or systemic chaos to demoralize the public. The actual content does not match this; it remains a clinical aggregation of diverse legal updates.
Bridge Questions:
1. Does the rise of the interim docket fundamentally change the nature of constitutional law if "emergency" stays become the primary vehicle for policy change?
2. To what extent does the shift toward a smaller merits docket limit the Court's ability to provide clear, long-term legal guidance to the public?
3. How does the requirement for states to share voter data with a federal agency alter the traditional balance of power between state and federal election administration?
Sentinel — Human
The text functions as an aggregation of recent, complex legal and political news, demonstrating strong journalistic coherence rather than pure generative synthesis.