One First:

At least for now, though, the dispute in front of the Supreme Court involves who can challenge Trump’s order and when—not whether the order is legally valid on its face. Thus, even if the Supreme Court grants either or both of the applications filed this week, all it will be doing is putting off resolution of the merits (and, depending upon what the government does, perhaps only for a matter of weeks).

For reasons I explain below the fold, my own view is that such a move would still be problematic in its own right. Either the Trump administration is going to take meaningful steps to implement this executive order before the election (at which point, the standing and ripeness issues necessarily go away) or it isn’t (in which case, it’s impossible to see how the federal government is suffering the kind of irreparable harm that is supposed to be necessary to obtain emergency relief from the Supreme Court). The key point for present purposes is that, whatever headlines it may generate, even a full grant of relief in Trump v. California would almost certainly leave the federal government’s authority to interfere with mail-in voting unresolved—not settled in Trump’s favor….