On August 26, the day Talwani lifted her own nationwide block to comply with the Supreme Court’s August 24 order, the Postal Service published its implementation rule: a 95-page document requiring new ballot-envelope designs, tracking barcodes, and delivery only to voters on a state-submitted, USPS-approved list. Talwani blocked it again the next day, this time on a different legal theory than her earlier rulings: Congress, she wrote, never delegated USPS the authority to regulate election mail at all.

A hearing on a permanent injunction was held September 3. That same day, the Trump administration filed its first emergency application at the Supreme Court, asking Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson — the same justice who wrote the sharpest dissent against the administration’s position two weeks earlier — to pause Talwani’s order while the case proceeded.

One day later, on September 4, Talwani converted that order into a preliminary injunction: a longer block, with a sharper finding. Implementation this close to the election, she wrote, would make disenfranchisement “practically inevitable,” and, she noted, “the record includes no evidence relating to fraudulent mail voting.”

The preliminary injunction made the administration’s first application moot. It withdrew that application September 6 and immediately filed a new one, USPS v. California, No. 26A305, again addressed to Justice Jackson, this time targeting the preliminary injunction directly. The states’ response is due 4 p.m. ET Wednesday, September 9; a ruling could follow within days.

The executive order, signed March 31, directs three things: the Department of Homeland Security builds a federal citizenship-verification list; USPS delivers mail ballots only to voters who appear on a state-submitted, list-checked roll, marked with a tracking barcode; and the Attorney General prioritizes prosecuting election officials who issue ballots to voters who aren’t on it.

Twenty-four states and D.C. sued within days. Talwani blocked the order for the plaintiff states June 25; the 1st Circuit upheld her in July; she widened the block nationwide August 11. The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority lifted that injunction August 24, on ripeness grounds, not the merits of the case. Justices Sotomayor and Kagan dissented; Jackson wrote separately, arguing the majority had missed “the Government’s actual objective: to secure our imprimatur for its effort to foment chaos ahead of the November elections.”

Solicitor General Sauer’s filings argue the rule addresses “the risk that the federal mails will be used to perpetrate voter fraud,” and that requiring an approved envelope design and addressee information is a modest, ordinary exercise of USPS’s existing authority to regulate what it delivers, not a novel power grab. Missouri’s attorney general, backing the rule, argues USPS is entitled to set delivery standards that preempt conflicting state election procedures. The administration has also argued the irreparable harm runs the other way: North Carolina and Alabama, it says, need to begin mailing ballots on schedule, and further delay does its own damage.

Talwani’s own findings track the states’ argument closely: that USPS, an executive-branch agency, has no congressional authorization to set rules for who receives an election ballot, a power the Constitution and the Elections Clause leave to states and Congress. The 24-state coalition, led by New York Attorney General Letitia James, argues no emergency justifies the timing — rewriting mail-ballot delivery rules ten weeks before a federal election is itself the harm, regardless of the rule’s merits. Voting-rights groups joined as plaintiffs, including the League of Women Voters of Massachusetts and the Center for Election Innovation & Research, point to the same fact Talwani highlighted: no fraud evidence in the record the rule is meant to address.

1. Whether the Supreme Court rules this week, and on what grounds. A second procedural punt keeps the fight alive without resolving it; a ruling on the merits would be the first real answer either side has gotten since June.

2. What Justice Jackson does with a case that has already come to her twice. The administration’s first application to her was withdrawn and replaced this week; she’s also the author of the administration’s sharpest critic on this exact question, from two weeks ago.

3. The permanent-injunction case itself. Whatever the Supreme Court decides about pausing Talwani’s order, the underlying suit over whether the rule is lawful at all keeps moving in her courtroom, on its own timeline.