On Tuesday, August 25th, Obama-appointed U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani ruled that the Trump administration's U.S. Postal Service is in "complete noncompliance" with her earlier order blocking federal mail-in ballot security measures. She gave the government until 8 a.m. the next morning to respond.

The Supreme Court already weighed in on this. Judge Talwani apparently didn't get the memo — or didn't care.

Here's the timeline. The USPS finalized a rule on August 21st titled "Ballot Mail for Federal Elections," designed to improve ballot tracking, reduce fraud risks, and help ensure that the right ballots are transmitted to the right eligible voters ahead of the November 3, 2026 election. The rule was set for publication in the Federal Register on August 26th. It included a Federal Ballot Mail Portal — a centralized tracking system for election mail.

Judge Talwani had already issued a nationwide injunction in League of Women Voters of Massachusetts v. Trump on August 11th, blocking implementation of the ballot security measures tied to Executive Order No. 14399, Section 3. The USPS responded by stating it "will not take actions to implement the rule specifically for the 2026 election unless and until the government obtains relief from those injunctions."

That wasn't good enough for Judge Talwani. She accused the administration of "feigned complete compliance" and claimed the USPS violated her injunction by completing the rulemaking process at all — even though the agency explicitly said it wouldn't enforce the rule during the election. Her ruling stated that "Defendants violated the preliminary injunction in this case" by ignoring her "explicit directive not to 'initiat[e] or complet[e]' rulemaking."

Meanwhile, in a parallel case — Trump v. California, No. 26A124 — the Supreme Court already stayed a similar injunction in California v. Trump. The highest court in the country signaled that these ballot security measures could move forward. Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, but they lost. That's how the system works.

Unless you're Judge Talwani. The Supreme Court clears the path in one case, and a district judge in another case declares the administration in "complete noncompliance" for doing exactly what the Supreme Court said it could do. The legal theory appears to be that her injunction controls, even when the Supreme Court has ruled on the same underlying policy in a companion case. That's not judicial independence. That's a district court judge running her own foreign policy on election law.

The Gateway Pundit reported on the ruling, noting the pattern of Obama-era judicial appointees using nationwide injunctions to stall Trump administration policy — a tactic that forces the government to litigate the same issue in dozens of courts simultaneously, hoping one judge will say no.

The USPS rule was about ballot tracking and fraud prevention. The administration said it wouldn't enforce it before the election. The Supreme Court already cleared a parallel challenge. And one district judge declared all of that irrelevant because the government had the audacity to finish writing a rule.

Three liberal justices dissented at the Supreme Court and lost. One district judge issued the same dissent from her own bench — and called it an order.