This is "What I'm Hearing" — a somewhat daily guide to the stories that matter, drawn from the best pro-democracy political writers working right now, with my analysis on top.
The Mail Ballot Rule Is Blocked Again
On Tuesday, I wrote that the Supreme Court had not approved Trump’s mail ballot order, and that a nationwide injunction still blocked it. Here’s what’s happened since.
Wednesday, under pressure from Monday’s Supreme Court ruling, Judge Indira Talwani lifted her own nationwide injunction — the last thing standing between the Postal Service and Trump’s executive order. Democratic states and the League of Women Voters immediately filed new challenges aimed at the final USPS rule, which the agency had quietly released the previous Friday night. And late Thursday, Talwani blocked it again with a 14-day temporary restraining order.
In her eleven-page order, she found the plaintiffs likely to win on three separate claims: that USPS had no statutory authority to issue the rule, that it unconstitutionally imposes requirements on states, and that it unconstitutionally bars non-compliant election officials from using the mail to send ballots at all. On the evidence: “the record continues to lack any evidence regarding fraudulent absentee or mail-in voting.” And in summary: “The USPS’s interest in correcting an unsubstantiated problem through likely unconstitutional means is dwarfed by the overwhelming risk of pervasive disenfranchisement of citizens who need access to mail ballots in order to vote.”
As she noted in her order, most plaintiff states have already ordered their ballots, and some are required by state law to start mailing them as early as next week. The restraining order runs 14 days. Talwani holds a hearing on September 3 to decide whether to extend the block. Whatever she decides is headed straight back to the Supreme Court, and this time on the merits, which the justices have carefully avoided touching.
Robert Hubbell is the person to read on this. This week he flagged Chris Hayes’s on-air claim that the rule “hands the USPS veto power over every voter in America” as unsupported by the actual text. His read on the real danger ahead is narrower and more plausible than the panic version — that the Supreme Court stays Talwani’s order under a stretched reading of the Purcell principle, letting the rule operate through November without ever ruling it lawful.
For now the rule is blocked, and ballots are going out.
Read more: CNN, NBC News, NPR, Reuters, Robert Hubbell
Did RFK Jr. Lie to Congress?
In 2018, two infants in Samoa died after two nurses mixed the dry MMR vaccine powder with an expired muscle relaxant instead of sterile water. Both nurses were sentenced to five years for manslaughter. It was human error, established and prosecuted. Samoa halted all vaccinations for ten months.
In January 2019, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — then running an anti-vaccine nonprofit — wrote to Samoa’s prime minister asking to study the country’s MMR vaccines, arguing the deaths came from a defective batch rather than the malpractice Samoan authorities had already identified. In that letter he used the words “vaccine” or “vaccination” eight times. He visited that summer and met with anti-vaccine activists. Samoa’s health chief later described it to the Guardian as a “significant disinformation campaign.”
Four months after the visit, measles swept the country. It sickened more than 5,700 people and killed 83, mostly children under five, in three and a half months.
In January 2025, during his confirmation hearings, senators repeatedly asked him about that trip. Ed Markey: “Did the trip have nothing to do with vaccines as you told my colleagues in Senate Finance yesterday?” Kennedy: “Nothing to do with vaccines.” He told the Senate the trip was to introduce a medical records digitization system.
The Associated Press and the Guardian obtained the letter this week, along with emails from U.S. Embassy and U.N. staffers giving contemporaneous accounts that vaccine safety concerns drove the visit.
HHS’s defense has been to call these claims defamatory, and claim he wasn’t under oath. As the AP points out, knowingly giving material false testimony to Congress is a crime that carries prison time whether or not you were sworn. It’s just rarely prosecuted, and it will not be prosecuted by this Justice Department against this administration’s own health secretary.
Now the American chapter. This week Pennsylvania announced that two unvaccinated people in Lancaster County died of measles, one a newborn too young to be vaccinated, who depended entirely on the herd immunity around her. In 2021, Kennedy spoke at a fair in that same Lancaster County, where he praised the area’s low childhood vaccination rates and downplayed how dangerous measles is.
Kennedy’s response to the deaths was to suggest Governor Shapiro’s announcement might “have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.” CMS Administrator Mehmet Oz went on Fox Business and said, “We don’t know if the children died from measles or had another condition that was already attacking them and they just happened to get measles at the same time.”
Ron Wyden has called for a criminal investigation. American Oversight has asked the Justice Department to open one. Markey, Angela Alsobrooks, and Hawaii Governor Josh Green have renewed calls for his removal. None of that goes anywhere with this DOJ and this Senate.
Which makes this a midterm argument rather than a legal one. A documented letter, a documented denial, 83 dead in Samoa and two dead in Lancaster County. Congressional subpoena power is the only path to hearings and accountability. Another argument for Democrats to take the House in November.
Read more: AP, CNN, The Guardian, Popular Information, Letters from an American
Lake America
Welcome to America’s parody era.
Trump signed an executive order Thursday directing Interior Secretary Doug Burgum to rename Lake Ontario "Lake America" in U.S. government documents and the federal geographic names database. His explanation, per the Wall Street Journal: "We took something called the Gulf of Mexico, we changed it. So if you think about it, we have a gulf and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean. So maybe we'll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific."
Not that we need to take this seriously, but I will point out that Lake Ontario derives from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which predates both Canadian Confederation and the Declaration of Independence. The province of Ontario is named after the lake, which is named after a Native American word. This is all just so unserious.
Semafor’s Nicholas Wu reports from Michigan that Trump’s 50% tariffs have handed Democrats there a unifying issue — in a state whose top export destination is Canada, and one that conveniently changes the subject from the party’s internal fight over Israel. Aaron Parnas has the numbers: Michiganders pay roughly $3,200 a year in tariff costs, about 142% more than the rest of the country, and a June poll found state residents oppose the Canada tariffs 63–31, with more than a third of Republicans opposed.
Abdul El-Sayed is running straight at it against Mike Rogers — the Florida resident I wrote about three weeks ago who wouldn’t say what he thought about tariffs, the war, or anything else.
And the coalition is cracking in public. The United Auto Workers rejected the latest escalation. The Detroit chamber of commerce warned that escalating tariffs “will only cause economic pain on both sides of the border.” Even Tom Tiffany — Wisconsin’s Republican nominee for governor, the man who signed the lawsuit to throw out his own state’s presidential votes — said publicly he disagreed with the Lake America order. Still silent on the tariffs, though.
Meanwhile, Canada announced retaliatory tariffs of up to 50% on roughly $20 billion of American imports — while removing U.S. seafood from the list, which the Maine lobster industry noticed. And Canada’s economy grew at an annualized 3.3% last quarter, its fastest since 2023.
Not only is Donald Trump embarrassing us on the international stage, but he is also destroying our economy and driving our closest ally into the hands of Europe and China. The dumb name is temporary; the economic pain isn’t.
Read more: Semafor, Letters from an American, The Parnas Perspective, Robert Hubbell
That's your Friday. A judge blocked the mail ballot rule again and found zero evidence of fraud in the record. RFK Jr. may have lied to Congress. Trump renamed a lake while Michigan pays $3,200 a year in tariffs.
The midterms are 67 days away.